Sometime over a year ago, my parents and I decided that we wanted to do some additional travel when they came to visit me. Thus was born our plan to travel across Uzbekistan. Well, we actually had come up with the idea in 2013, but it wasn’t until now that we finally managed to get visas and hop on a plane into the capital, Tashkent to start our adventure.
Uzbekistan, in case you needed a primer, is one of only two doubly landlocked countries in the world. Another Central Asian republic that used to be a part of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan is now home to over 31 million people, by far the largest country in the region by population. With its wide swathes of irrigated land, Uzbekistan was for decades the heart of Soviet cotton production, but it also has considerable deposits of other natural resources. Its diverse people also have an enormous artistic tradition, including music, dance, silk weaving, clothing, embroidery, ceramics and other beautiful handmade goods. Combine this with their incredible collection of preserved and restored sites from the Safavid era to the present, and you’ve got a country with a LOT to see and experience from a tourist’s perspective (let alone someone like me who spent months studying Uzbekistani history in college). Uzbekistan’s current political situation is also interesting, but I’ll let you go research that on your own since I don’t enjoy discussing politics.
I’ve been fascinated by Uzbekistan ever since I first encountered Uzbek and Tajik culture in Tajikistan in 2013 (you can read my posts from that era here), and since I studied the history of Bukhara, Khiva, and Kokand as a part of my major in undergrad. And after 3 years of planning and cancelling trips, my parents and I finally nailed down our Uzbek visas and our plans and hopped on an Uzbekistan Airways flight in early September from Bishkek to Tashkent to go exploring.
Tashkent
Tashkent is the largest city in Post-Soviet Central Asia, a sprawling cosmopolitan metropolis of close to 2.5 million. Only Kabul exceeds it in population in the region. With wide open boulevards, vast public squares and parks, and the last of the great metros of the Soviet Union, Tashkent is not a city to miss.
Our visit to Tashkent focused both on ancient and modern. We spent the morning wandering through the oldest neighborhood in the city learning about Uzbek houses, the same kind that fill many parts of Osh, and exploring the Hazrati Imam complex in the north of the city.
In addition to a modern madrasa, the complex includes an old madrasa, several mosques, and a library that is home to the Samarkand Kufic Qur’an (also known as the Uthman Qur’an). This book is traditionally said to have been commissioned by the third caliph Uthman in 655, and has been radiocarbon dated to between 765 and 855, and is one of the oldest (if not the oldest, according to local tradition) Qur’an in the world. It’s so old that it is written in Kufic script without accent marks, meaning that the average Arabic speaker would have great difficulty reading it without memorization.
Of course no visit to Tashkent is complete without a spin through the pristinely well-organized Chorsu Bazaar (four-waters bazaar), followed by a ride across town on the ornate Tashkent Metro.
Our last stop in Tashkent, also worth a gander, was the Museum of Applied Arts, which occupies a converted private home and includes examples of a wide variety of traditional Uzbekistani handicrafts.
Domestic Flying
The next morning, we climbed onto Uzbekistan Airways again to fly to Urgench, the capital of Khorezm Province, en route to Khiva. As an aviation nerd, I was disappointed to only be on an Airbus A320 – the following flight that day was the maiden flight of the brand-new Uzbekistan Airways 787-8, and the third flight was operated by the domestically-produced Ilyushin Il-114 (yes, Uzbekistan actually makes their own planes!). No matter!
Uzbekistan Airways, in case you were wondering, is a very nice and comfortable airline, with nice seats, enormous seat pitch in economy, “meals,” and properly trained flight crews that strictly follow international aviation procedures. The only downside is that you must pay them in Uzbek som (which means that your credit card will get charged using the official exchange rate, which makes the flights effectively cost twice as much to foreigners as to Uzbekistani passengers), which is why you almost never see foreigners flying them except when absolutely necessary, which is a shame because I would gladly fly them from Bishkek to New York via Tashkent!
Khiva
Our wonderful guide met us at the airport in Khiva, and was immediately put into a state of shock when I greeted her in Uzbek and our driver in Farsi. I noticed throughout our trip that Uzbeks take great pride in their diverse society and languages, and so the small effort to learn a few words of Uzbek and Tajik (Tajik is the main street language of Bukhara and, to a lesser extent, Samarkand) goes a long way, especially since Russian is falling out of favor outside Tashkent.
Urgench is an easy 30-minute drive (or trolleybus) from Khiva, which to me was one of the absolute highlights of our trip. Khiva has a nearly perfectly preserved old town that dates back hundreds of years to when it was an important Khanate on the Silk Road. Its walls are made from sand formed into bricks and sculpted into magical sloping turrets, and inside the walls are literally hundreds of madrasas, which used to be Islamic schools where young boys would live in a small room, study, pray, and meditate. Their rough equivalent in Europe might be a monastery, convent, or seminary.
Only a few of them still function this way, while others have been converted into hotels, residences, and even a carpet and textile workshop that was featured in the book A Carpet Ride To Khiva, which is required reading for anyone planning a visit to this spectacular city, the entirety of which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (and is available for Kindle in case you’re already on the road!).
We took a day to explore, hitting up his carpet and suzani workshop, as well as several of the historical palaces, the harem, several madrasas, and the Friday Mosque.
Khiva has the incredible aura of living history. Everything is meticulously preserved and restored every year, which despite how touristy the city can feel, still allows one to freely imagine what it might have been like during its heyday 200 years ago. I wish we had spent more than just one day there.
Bukhara
Bukhara is an 8 hour drive from Khiva along the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border (“I can see Turkmenistan from my house!”), which is mainly desert, desert, checkpoints, and more desert. Luckily for tourists on a shorter itinerary, Bukhara is a short flight from Tashkent, and is now also connected to the Afrosiyab high speed train network.
Bukhara has a quite different feel from Khiva in that it’s also a wondrous historical open-air museum, but it also has elements of the modern thrown in, like streets with cars. Just about everywhere you turn across the entire old town is another historic building, mosque, madrasa, trading post, or something else entirely.
We spent two days in Bukhara, and fell in love not just with our converted home hotel (of which there are many), but also with the town’s energy. Far more tourists make it to Bukhara and Samarkand than Khiva, which does give it a more touristy feel, but the fact that you can wander in all directions and find history is remarkable. It is for this reason that the city’s old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
One favorite place we stopped at was a small crafts workshop in an old madrasa that faces the pond in the heart of the city that was actually started by a Peace Corps Volunteer back in 1997. Peace Corps Uzbekistan was closed in 2005, but it was cool to see that the craft coop there still operates. To the right of the entrance is a skilled silversmith who can make you anything from a photo you bring him (our tour guide took a photo of my friend’s ring and told him to make her a copy while we were there!), and to the left is a silk workshop who will show you exactly how the traditional ikat fabrics (locally known as atlas for silk and adras for silk/cotton blends and cotton) are made.
Some of our other favorite stops in Bukhara included the Minor-e Kalon (giant minaret), the Friday Mosque, the many different trading domes, and the Summer Palace. One of the most interesting pieces of Bukhara’s history is how its history includes Buddhism, Christianity, different sects of Islam, and Judaism all living alongside one another. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Summer Palace, where Jewish craftspeople built a palace for a Muslim ruler in a Russian style. It’s a model of peaceful and mutually beneficial co-existance that is an important lesson in this day and age.
Samarkand
Samarkand is the second-largest city in Uzbekistan, and also one of the most historically significant along the entire length of the Silk Road. Its history dates back over 3000 years, with stints under rule by Alexander the Great, the Iranians/Persians, the Turks, the Mongols, and beyond. It was the capital of the empire of Amir Timur (also known as Tamerlane). Like Khiva, the city’s incredible history and tangible cultural heritage have earned its place as, you guessed it, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Most of Samarkand’s historical sites were in ruins at the fall of the Soviet Union, but thanks to massive restoration programs, they’re pristine, apart from the interior of the Bibi Khanym Mosque, which was left unrestored to remind visitors and locals alike of the conditions of all the monuments prior to independence and the importance of their preservation.
Being a big city, Samarkand lacks some of the same charm of the historical open old town of Bukhara or the time capsule that is Khiva, but it does make up for this in the sheer number of stunning monuments. The highlight of most trips to Uzbekistan is Samarkand’s Registan Square, and understandably so. Just look at it.
Samarkand also has a spectacular archaeological museum that includes preserved wall paintings from the Sogdian-ish era, not to mention Safavid-like architecture that can give Esfahan, Iran a bit of a run for its money.
One of the other highlights is Shahi Zinda mausoleum complex, a collection of elaborate tombs perched on a hill above the city.
There’s also the Observatory of Ulug Beg, which was hidden and searched for for hundreds of years before being rediscovered not too long ago. It has a massive sextant hidden underground, but not much else has been excavated in the interest of preservation.
The other amazing part of Samarkand is the collection of handicraft workshops working on carpets, silks, and traditional suzanis. We spent a few hours learning about the silk process and watching young women working on a variety of different carpets. It’s definitely worth a stop to learn a bit about the handicrafts, because these are another equally awesome part of the heritage of Uzbekistan.
Heading Home
After making our way across the country to Samarkand, we had to get ourselves back to Tashkent for our respective flights home. So we hopped on the fancy new Afrosiyob high-speed train for the quick 2-hour trip to Tashkent. The week we were there, they opened the new extension of this train to Bukhara, so now you can get from Tashkent to Bukhara in just 3.5 hours as well, down from 8 hours before. It’s nicer and more comfortable than any train I’ve taken in the US, but not quite as fancy as Europe. But, as the pioneer of the technology in the region, its very impressive, and it’s made it easier and cheaper for citizens and visitors alike to get between the two largest cities of Uzbekistan.
After our quick dash, we met up with our Tashkent driver again, and headed out for one last dinner at a sidewalk cafe, celebrating our wonderful trip with friends and bidding farewell until May, when I’ll be finishing up my service and moving to an as-yet-undetermined location. It was a great way to end a spectacular month showing my parents this part of the world that is so near and dear to my heart.
How To Visit
Since I was traveling with my family, we decided to go with an established tour operator. We did some research and chose Advantour to organize everything thanks to their experience working in Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries. Everything was arranged for us, every airport transfer, every driver, every hotel, our visas… all we had to do was buy the plane ticket to Central Asia. They even booked our Bishkek-Tashkent flight for us. The best part about being with an established operator was that we had a guide to walk us through customs, and we never were stopped and searched by police (something that happens at least once daily to independent travelers, including searches of cameras and computers, so make sure you’ve cleared your hard drive of anything *ahem* controversial, especially photos). By the way – Advantour has no idea that this blog exists; I’m endorsing them because I was so happy with how well-organized our trip was and the value for money.
But if you DIY your trip, you’ll need to arrange a visa, get plane tickets (Turkish, Aeroflot, Air Astana, and others are all good options), hotel reservations, and a pretty good idea of what you want to see and how long you’ll be in the country. I compiled a list of travel tips for Uzbekistan that should be useful to anyone planning a similar trip.
Uzbekistan isn’t the easiest place to get to for the independent traveler. But the sites, the history, the handicrafts and the people make it a place that rewards those who do make the effort to visit. I’m already planning a return trip!
Got questions? Comments? Planning your own trip? Let me know in the comments section! And as always, thanks for reading!