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Tashkent

Sprawling Tashkent is Central Asia’s hub and the place where everything in Uzbekistan happens. It’s one part newly built national capital, thick with the institutions of power, and one part leafy Soviet city, and yet another part sleepy Uzbek town, where traditionally clad farmers cart their wares through a maze of mud-walled houses to the grinding crowds of the bazaar. Tashkent is a fascinating jumble of contradictions that’s well worth exploring over several days.

Like most places that travellers use mainly to get somewhere else, Tashkent always immediately charm visitors and it’s a surprisingly fun and interesting place, with the best restaurants, museums and nightlife in the country. There’s also plenty of opportunity to escape the metropolis for great hiking, rafting and skiing in Ugam-Chatkal National Park, just a 1½-hour drive away.

Nukus

The isolated Nukus is definitely one of Uzbekistan’s appealing cities and gets more visitors relative to its attractive Silk Road cousins. However, as the gateway to the fast-disappearing Aral Sea and home to the remarkable Savitsky Museum – one of the best collections of Soviet art in the world – there is actually a reason to come here, other than taking in the general sense of desolation.

Khiva

A visit to Khorezm will have you flying down the time tunnel to an age of desert caravans, slave-driving Khans and lost empires. Get out of the fairly utilitarian capital Urgench and wander among the series of forts that dot the sands north and east of town. When you tire of castles in the sand head for Khiva, where the World heritage listed walled inner town contains many monuments built when this was the notorious Khanate of Khiva.

Khiva’s name, redolent of slave caravans, barbaric cruelty, terrible desert journeys and steppes infested with wild tribesmen, struck fear into all but the boldest 19th-century hearts. Nowadays it’s a friendly and welcoming Silk Road old town that’s very well set up for tourism, and a mere 35km southwest of the major transport hub of Urgench.

The historic heart of Khiva has been so well preserved that it’s often criticised as lifeless – a ‘museum city’. Even if you subscribe to that theory, you’ll have to admit that it’s one helluva museum. To walk through the walls and catch that first glimpse of the fabled Ichon-Qala (inner walled city) in all its monotoned, mud-walled glory is like stepping into another era.

You can see it all in a daytrip from Urgench, but you’ll absorb it better by staying longer. Khiva is at its best at dawn, sunset and by night, when the moonlit silhouettes of the tilting columns and medressas, viewed from twisting alleyways, work their magic.

Bukhara

Central Asia’s holiest city, Bukhara has buildings spanning a thousand years of history, and a thoroughly lived-in old centre that hasn’t changed too much in two centuries. It is one of the best places in Central Asia for a glimpse of pre-Russian Turkestan.

Most of the centre is an architectural preserve, full of medressas, minarets, a massive royal fortress and the remnants of a once-vast market complex. Government restoration efforts have been more subtle and less indiscriminate than in flashier Samarkand, and the city’s accommodation options are by far the best and most atmospheric in the country.

Until a century ago Bukhara was watered by a network of canals and some 200 stone pools where people gathered and gossiped, drank and washed. As the water wasn’t changed often, Bukhara was famous for plagues; the average 19th-century Bukharan is said to have died by the age of 32. The Bolsheviks modernised the system and drained the pools, although it’s most famous, Lyabi-Hauz, remains a cool, mulberry-tree shaded oasis at the heart of the city.

You’ll need at least two days to look around. Try to allow time to lose yourself in the old town; it’s easy to overdose on the 140-odd protected buildings and miss the whole for its many parts

Samarkand

We travel not for trafficking alone,

By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned.

For lust of knowing what should not be known

We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

These final lines of James Elroy Flecker’s 1913 poem The Golden Journey to Samarkand evoke the romance of Uzbekistan’s most glorious city. No name is so evocative of the Silk Road as Samarkand. For most people it has the mythical resonance of Atlantis, fixed in the Western popular imagination by poets and playwrights of bygone eras, few of whom saw the city in the flesh.

On the ground the sublime, larger-than-life monuments of Timur, the technicolour bazaar and the city’s long, rich history indeed work some kind of magic. Surrounding these islands of majesty, modern Samarkand sprawls across acres of Soviet-built buildings, parks and broad avenues used by buzzing Daewoo taxis.

You can visit most of Samarkand’s high-profile attractions in two or three days. If you’re short on time, at least see the Registan, Gur-e-Amir, Bibi-Khanym Mosque and Shah-i-Zinda.

Away from the main attractions Samarkand is a modern, well-groomed city, which has smartened itself up enormously in the past decade. This process has involved building walls around some of the less sightly parts of the old town, which many consider to have made the old city rather sterile, blocking off streets that have been linking quarters for centuries. While this ‘disneyfication’ of this once chaotic place is undeniable, it’s also true to say that Samarkand remains a breathtaking place to visit.

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