Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan on this site means three Silk Road cities: Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent. My week in Uzbekistan covers the whole route: three days in Bukhara, two in Samarkand and the rest of the week in Tashkent, with the bus and train legs between the cities and real prices.

I spent several days in Bukhara during the first Bukhara Biennial, and the city guide covers eight places, from the Ark Citadel and the Kalyan Minaret to the Chor-Bakr necropolis of the Juybar sheikhs on the edge of town, plus where to eat plov and buy ikat. A separate guide covers Sitorai Mokhi-Khosa, the summer residence of the last emir about 4 km from the center, with its White Hall, Hall of Mirrors and costume museum.

For Samarkand I wrote a two-day city guide with ticket prices, opening hours and GPS, which also includes the Hazrat Khizr Mosque and a craft center. The main sights have their own guides: the three madrasahs of Registan with their gold-leaf interiors and night lights, Tamerlane’s mausoleum Gur-e-Amir with its fluted blue dome and gilded interior, and Shah-i-Zinda, an avenue of tiled mausoleums where I arrived an hour before sunset and stayed until dark.

The Tashkent guide is a one-day walking route: the Museum of Applied Arts in the 1907 Polovtsev house, metro stations, Chorsu Bazaar, a shop of handmade ikat robes and plov for dinner. The museum also has its own room-by-room guide with the address, prices and opening hours.