Where to start. First, Uzbekistan is not a country I ever expected to visit. Our travel friends have family working there so we tagged along. What an amazing but tiring 5 days. Due to the sudden influx of Russians avoiding the conscription for the Ukrainian war, available transportation was scarce. So we had late night/early morning train rides and van rides on bad roads into the early morning hours to get from place to place. Not fun travel, but great destinations. Incluing the final van ride to the Nukus airport to fly back to Tashkent, we travelled about 90% of the length of Uzbekistan by train and van rides.
In each city we had great guides who filled our heads with way too much information about the buildings and the people who built them, their conquests and defeats and the general history of the Uzbek people.
We visited ancient mosques, madrassas (Islamic schools) and mausoleums. There were Bazaars with nuts, dried and fresh fruit, spices, meats and other foods. Other bazaars with artwork, ceramics, clothing, cloth, silk, carpets and more. Interesting cuisine, meals arranged at local’s houses. We saw tour groups of Uzbeki people on the flight returning from their Haj to Mecca and others on their way to Mecca. Just a whole lot of unique sights and flavors.
And some food poisoning and a gut wrenching day for one of our travel party (not us). Enough said.
The cities we visited: Tashkent, the current capital of Uzbekistan; Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva. These are all cities along the ancient Silk Road, a trading route between the Far East and Europe. They were important trade cities and some were former capitals of ancient empires. The buildings we visited were mostly from the 14th century, and one from the 10th century. All had fallen into disrepair over time, some had been covered with sand. The government has meticulously restored and reconstructed in the past 30 years or so and now they are UNESCO World Heritage sites.
We are using Dubai as a hub for our trips in this area, as round trips from Dubai to our various destinations was cheaper than chaining our destinations together. We will spend several days in Dubai towards the end of our stay here so we’ll cover Dubai then. A terse description: Oil money gone wild.
At the airport in Dubai, the Uzbeki’s checked in tons of produce and lots of other consumer goods. We were approached by someone wanting us to transport fruit for them. We politely declined.
Tashkent
Foods, spices and other goods in the markets. Great bread baked in wood fired ovens. They stick the bread dough to the inside walls of the oven to bake.
Our introduction to mosques and madrasas in this part of the world.
Samarkand, Uzbekistan
Night train to Smarkand, arriving around 1 am
More beautiful Islamic mosques and madrasas
And hand woven wool and silk rugs, and ceramics. We bought the tile on the second row on the left.
Bukhara, Uzbekistan
Another beautiful interesting city where we could easily have spent several days exploring the shops, buildings and restaurants.
Khiva, Uzbekistan
The most grueling travel; 7 adults crammed in a van riding bad roads for 6 hours, arriving after 3 am. And one member of our group having food poisoning, Two exits, no waiting. But the town looked like a movie set. A walled city with many buildings still intact and mostly restored. In fact, they were filming a movie in part of the town. Our hotel was a converted 19th century madrasa inside the walls.
Congratulations if you got all the way to here in this blog post. One of the purposes of this blog is to help us remember where we were and what we did, which may be a lot more info than a casual reader would want to read and see.
Next stop: Something completely different: Nepal for 10 days of sightseeing, including about 5 days of trekking in the valleys near Anapurna.
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