Uzbekistan was the most difficult country of this trip to arrange travel to. A visa is required and in order to get a tourist visa a letter of invitation is required. This requires a contact in the country who can issue the letter, usually a tour company. A web search led me to a company called Advantour and I had given them a rough itinerary and asked them to provide hotels, transportation and guides for the trip. They had responded with everything I was looking for - hotel bookings, train tickets, guides and of course the letter of invitation. This enabled me to get the visa which I had picked up at the Uzbek Embassy in Rome. However before my arrival in Uzbekistan I had not paid any money so I was a little apprehensive as to whether everything would work out.
My flight from Azerbaijan (via Istanbul) arrived in Tashkent around 1:00 am Sunday morning (2 April). We were bused from the plane to the terminal and when we arrived it was a mad rush to the customs hall - old ladies, women with children were literally running down the corridor. I figured they knew better than I so I joined the fray. It actually was a relatively quick passage through customs and all went quite smoothly. Welcome to Uzbekistan.
It was a great relief to walk out of the airport and see a waiting driver with my name on a card. I was taken to my hotel (The Wyndham) and there in the lobby of the hotel I gave the driver $1450 in cash and in return he gave me an envelope of train tickets and hotel vouchers to cover my next 8 days in Uzbekistan.
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| Khast Imom, Tashkent |
I had a late breakfast and lazy morning and then at 1:00 pm my driver picked me up with my guide for the city tour - a lady named Delia. She spoke excellent English. The weather was not particularly good - it was cold and drizzling with rain and as a result the city did not appear that attractive - a rather drab Soviet city. We drove through the streets of Tashkent to our first stop at a mausoleum and madrassa one of many I was to see in the next few days. Beautiful tiled buildings and wonderful minarets. The guide called it Khast Imom. Uzbekistan is all about the 4M’s - Mosques, Madrassas, Mausoleums and Minarets.
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| $60 in Uzbek Som |
The driver arranged to change some money for me. There was an active black market for money changing in Uzbekistan. The official exchange rate was 3,500 Som to the US dollar. The black market rate was double that at around 7,000 Som to the $ so it didn't make sense to change on the official marketplace. The main denomination of bank note is 1,000 Som so that makes for a lot of notes. I literally had a 2 inch stack of notes for changing only $60 - around 400 notes. Too many to even bother to count, it just felt about right.
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| Chor-Su Bazaar, Tashkent |
We visited the Chor-Su Bazaar next. A large domed market with sections for the various products - vegetables, meat, cheese, bread, nuts, dried fruit, spices, etc. The meat area was the most interesting of course. Lots of slabs of meat and lots of weird and wonderful looking stuff. The horse meat sausage looked particularly disgusting. The Uzbeks like a sweet treacle-like substance made from boiled wheat grass called Sumalec. I tried some and it was alright by the spoonful but the locals were buying it by the pint. I bought bread and fruit for the evening’s train journey.
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| Interior, Museum of Applied Arts, Tashkent |
After the market we visited the Museum of Applied Arts. Some beautiful examples of embroidered and printed cloth, jewelry and metalwork all housed in a wonderful ornate old building. The rooms in the museum were quite wonderful - carved and painted plaster and wood, ornate tilework - quite beautiful.
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| Amir Temur, Tashkent |
Next stop was Temur Square where there is a statue of Amir Temur or Tamerlame as we call him in the west. Temur was quite a violent and ruthless person in the 14th Century but he has been rehabilitated in the minds of the Uzbeks as a great leader and someone who did a lot for Uzbekistan. The Russian Tsars and the Soviets did nothing that the Uzbeks could be really proud of, so Temur, much like Ghengis Khan in Mongolia, has become a heroic national figure. Anyway there he was, sitting on his horse in the middle of a square surrounded by examples of Tsarist and Soviet and modern era architecture.
We then drove out to a modern mosque complex. It was an impressive white marble structure but it was only a few years old and frankly I could have skipped it. That was the end of the tour and Delia left me with the driver who took me to a restaurant near the train station. I had some mutton dish that wasn’t particularly appealing washed down with a local Uzbek beer which was quite nice. After dinner the driver took me to the very modern railway station where I waited for my train.
The train left on time and I had a comfortable night en route for Urgench in northern Uzbekistan. I remember feeling that it was more like a proper train trip than the Italian trains. The clickety-clack of the rails, the swaying of the carriage, it’s all much better than the smooth welded track of the high speed trains of Europe.
In the morning, I awoke to find us traveling over a flat desert plain with nothing but the occasional low scrub vegetation. There wasn’t much sign of habitation either - only the very occasional small settlement. Just before we arrived in Urgench we crossed the Amu Darya river, the major river of this part of the world flowing north into the now disappearing Aral Sea. Much of the river’s water has been stolen along the way to irrigate the cotton fields of Uzbekistan - one of the disasters of the Soviet period. Thank you Mr. Khrushchev whose idea it was to bring a cotton mono-culture to Uzbekistan.
At the very modern Urgench station a driver was waiting for me and he drove me the 30 or so kilometers to Khiva where I was staying for a couple of nights. We arrived in Khiva in the mid afternoon and I got installed in my hotel, the quite adequate Hotel Asia which sits just outside East Gate to the old walled city.
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| City Walls and East Gate, Khiva |
I went out to walk around the old town in the afternoon. Within the city walls the old town is fairly small and it that can be walked in a couple of hours. Beautiful mosques and minarets but since I was supposed to have an official tour the next day I stuck to exploring the back streets. The streets were primarily earthen, and while the wealthier homes had plastered walls most homes were mud and straw.
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| Minaret and Satellite Dish, Khiva |
In the evening I found a restaurant that was listed in the Lonely Planet Guide. I was the only diner until at the end of my meal a group of German tourists came in. I escaped before the ethnic music and dance show started for the Germans. As for the food, all I can say is that you don’t come to Uzbekistan for the food.
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| Islam Khoja Minaret, Khiva |
On the next day (Tuesday 4th April), my guide, Ali, showed up and we started a tour of the city. As I mentioned old Khiva is not a large area and we covered much of the ground that I had walked around the previous afternoon. This time we took our time and entered the various mosques. madrassas and minarets. The most memorable thing was the two minarets (Islam Khoja and Juma) which you are allowed to climb - narrow and low spiral staircases, old wooden steps, the absence of any light except for the occasional opening in the wall. I pretty much felt my way to the top. No health and safety issues there and fortunately no one else coming down as I was going up. The incomplete minaret, Kalta Minor, was also impressive - wider than any of the others it was designed to be the tallest in the city until the benefactor of the construction died. Now it is just the immense fat stub of a minaret with a beautiful tiled surface.
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| Kalta Minor, Khiva |
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| Tile Decorations Madrasssa, Khiva |
While walking around we heard the muezzin call to prayer somewhere outside the city walls. This apparently doesn’t happen too much. My guide said they have been clamping down on the overt evidence of Islam as they are paranoid about Islamic fundamentalism taking hold. He also says that in the big cities the muezzin’s call is banned. I am not sure that is true but then I didn’t hear the call anywhere else.
We stop for lunch in a restaurant and I sample the local speciality - plov. A bed of rice and vegetables with lamb/mutton. It was actually quite tasty and the meat was good quality.
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| Mausoleum of Makhmud Pakhlavan, Khiva |
After the tour of the city was completed Ali left me and I wandered around the old town for the rest of the day. By the North Gate you could climb up onto the old city walls and walk around the perimeter. The entire construction is earthen mud and straw and there were signs of serious erosion in places. It left me wondering how often they have to shore up the walls. Surely they need some frequent maintenance, but who does that.
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| Islam Khoja Minaret |
The next day (Wednesday 5th April) a driver arrived to take me from Khiva to my next stop in Bukhara some 450 km away. We drove back to Urgench and then picked up the main road south to Bukhara. For the first 30 km or so the road was in very bad condition then it suddenly changed to a very modern dual carriageway where we made very good time. The driver had a radar detector which saves him from a ticket a couple of times.
Nearly every car in Uzbekistan is a Chevrolet and nearly every Chevrolet is a white one. Apparently the Korean company Daiwoo built a factory in Uzbekistan but later sold it to Chevrolet. Now Chevy dominates the car business in Uzbekinstan.
The drive to Bukhara was relatively unremarkable. We crossed the Amu Darya river just south of Urgench and from time to time we saw signs of it in the distance to the west. We cross the large expanse of the Kyzylkum Desert so there was not a lot of variety in the landscape. In places we must have been very close to the Turkmenistan border. About 40 km outside Bukhara the road turned bad again and we slowly dodged potholes the rest of the way into the city.
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| Kalon Minaret, Bukhara |
I am dropped at my hotel, the Omar Khayam, in the center of old Bukhara. In the afternoon I walk around the old town to get a feel for the city. Bukhara is larger than Khiva and there are some wonderful sights - again mosques, madrassas, minarets and mausoleums. In the back streets the houses are similar to the ones in Khiva but perhaps a little more prosperous. More of them have plastered walls and more roads are paved. Lots of overground piping throughout the old homes which supply gas to the homes - that seems a little scary.
I had a nice meal in the evening. The dish had the unfortunately name of Jiz but it was basically beef and fried vegetables.
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| Mir i Arab Madrassa, Bukhara |
The next day, Friday April 6, my guide for the tour of Bukhara arrived at the hotel and we set off on foot to explore the city. The guide, Jama, is a young guy with pony-tail (very unusual in Uzbekistan) also with an iPhone, and an Apple Watch (not so uncommon). First place on the tour was Lyabi Hauz around the old pool, one of many that once provided water to the old city and that were supplied by a series of canals. We spent a lot of time there talking about everything from caravanserais, Sufi teachings, Soviet control, and modern Uzbek politics. Jama had a lot of opinions.
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| Lyabi Hauz Pool, Bukhara |
Next stop was a small synagogue in the Jewish section of the town. Not a very impressive building though I don’t really know what a good synagogue looks like, but there are pictures of Hilary Clinton and Madeleine Albright paying a visit so perhaps it is an important one. Possibly because there aren’t many Jews in this part of the world.
We walk through town through various bazaars each specializing in different products or trades - woodwork, metalwork, carpets, jewelry, gold, spices, hats (hats must be very important in Uzbekistan).
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| Kalon Minaret, Bukhara |
The Kalon Mosque and the adjacent Kalon Minaret and Mir i Arab Madrassa are the most spectacular sights in the city. Definitely the highpoint of the old city. They are impressively large and impressively well restored. The tile work is wonderful. Unlike the minarets of Khiva you could not go up this one.
We visited the Citadel (or Ark as it is sometimes called). It is basically a walled complex within a city. It houses the King’s Palace, a couple of sections of which are now relatively mediocre museums. The Guide indicated that the Citadel has the honor of being the first place to suffer an aerial bombardment when it was bombed by the Red Army in 1920. Searching on the internet later finds that this was not the case. The Italians dropped grenades on the Ottomans in Libya much earlier.
We walked out towards the old city walls and a couple of mausoleums that are nearby - Chashma Ayub and Ismael Simani.
That was the end of the day’s tour and I headed back to the hotel. I had a late lunch of Plov at the Minzifa Restaurant - quite good. The afternoon was spent walking around the backstreets of the city. I wanted to buy a silk scarf - the ladies at the stall were such good sales people that I ended up walking away with three of them.
In the evening I visit the local hammam bathhouse. It was in a very old building with a large room with large marble massage slabs and a series of hot, warm and cold rooms leading off from it. After warming up for 15 minutes I was laid out on one of the marble slabs and soaped, rinsed, pummeled, stretched and twisted into all sorts of contortions. It did feel very good - and this is from an Englishman who is not entirely comfortable with having another man touch his body let alone being naked at the time. It all finished off with a cool down and dry off before partaking of a cup of tea. Very nice and relaxing.
The next day was a Friday, the day for Friday Mosque, so the mosques we visited today were busy. Since we were going further afield we (Jama my guide and I) had a driver for the day. The first stop was the Bakhoutdin Naqshbandi Mausoleum and Mosque. It was fairly impressive but I was getting used to these beautiful buildings by then. We couldn’t go into the mosque as it was Friday and prayers were in session. The Mausoleum was a series of unadorned mud/straw graves as I had seen in many places previously.
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| Prayer Times at Mosque, Bukhara |
Onward to the King or Emir’s Summer Palace. This was built in the Russian Imperial time and it was an interesting mix of Bukharan and Pre-Revolutionary Tsarist architecture. Behind the Summer Palace a group of women were making a huge vat of Sumalec. This is the sweet treacle like substance I had tried in the bazaar in Tashkent and is basically boiled wheat grass. The boiling process takes 24 hours and it needs to be stirred continuously so it is an all night affair and they make a bit of a party out of it. In an adjacent cauldron they were preparing a huge cauldron of Plov - the meat, carrots, raisins and rice dish.
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| Summer Palace, Bukhara |
We next drove to the Chor Bakr Necropolis. A not very memorable collection of grave sites. Apparently some religious person of note was buried there - I don’t know who - and then everyone else wanted to be buried nearby so it turned into a large graveyard.
As we drive back into town we pass a lot of small single story modern homes. Apparently these are made available to young couples to encourage them to settle in the suburbs.
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| Char Minar, Bukhara |
That was the end of the guided tour and so I spend the rest of the day walking around. I did explore a couple of new places. One was Char Minar, a wonderful small mosque with a minaret on each corner. It is apparently modeled on an similar building in India. The other was the Zindon - the old jail nearby the Citadel. Zindon is where Stoddard and Connolly were imprisoned in the so-called “bug pit” before being executed. The Stoddard and Connolly story is well worth reading about.
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| Stoddard and Connolly's Bug Pit |
In the evening I again visited the hammam bathhouse. The prior day I had been the only customer and it was nice and quiet. On this day it was full of boisterous Russians who made a lot of noise. I like it when it’s more peaceful.
On the next day (Saturday 8 April) it was an early start to catch the train to Samarkand. The very modern train station is quite a way out of town. Also traveling on the same train were the two Pakistani ladies (Durdana and Shurdana I think) that had been following the same route and hotels as me from Khiva to Bukhara. The train we were on was not one of the fast modern Sharq trains but we did get the privilege of being shunted into a siding for an hour while the Sharq train sped by.
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| Amir Timur's Mausoleum |
In Samarkand I was picked up by another guide and driver - both were named Anvar so it made things easy. We started our tour with a visit to the mausoleum of Amir Timur (Tamerlane). This is a magnificent structure with wonderful tile work. The tile work here was radically different from the work previously seen in Khiva and Bukhara. The patterns were created as a mosaic which gave nice sharp lines to the design. The work up to this point, the so-called majolica tiles, were made by painting colors patterns on tile prior to firing the tile and the edges tended to bleed a little and give a more fuzzy edge.
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| Detail of Mosaic Tile |
We walked from Tamerlane’s mausoleum down to the Registan. The Registan is the most impressive site - three immense madrassas facing a large square. The tile work, again mosaic tile, is stunning and has been impressively restored. This one site is probably the most spectacular location in Uzbekistan. We spend considerable time here visiting each building and marveling at the splendour of the place.
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| The Registan Complex, Samarkand |
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| Madrassa at the Registan, Samarkand |
From the Registan we walk to the Bibi Kharym mosque and mausoleum. This is not so spectacular but it has not been restored to the same level as the Registan buildings so you get a good idea of how these buildings were prior to the recent renovation.
A short distance away was the Siob market and we wander around and visit the various sections spices, dried fruit, nuts, bread, meat, dairy and, an unusual section, snuff.
That completed the tour for the day and I went to my hotel - the Grand Hotel Samarkand. Not too grand but good enough. In the evening I dine with the two Pakistani ladies (Durdana and Shurdana) and their guide (who went everywhere with them) at a restaurant nearby my hotel. It was a bit up market for Uzbekistan and we had a wonderful meal. We even had a decent bottle of Uzbek wine - very drinkable.
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| Sound and Light Show at the Registan |
Samarkand is a larger city than Khiva and Bukhara. It is very modern and there is no remaining old section of town as far as I can see. It feels quite safe. I walk the couple of kilometers to my hotel late at night and feel perfectly safe. One of the Pakistani ladies left a bag on the morning’s train and after a couple of phone calls it is located intact in Tashkent. We all speak of how safe and secure it feels. Back in my hotel room I turn on the TV to find news of a Terrorist attack in Sweden, the perpetrator of which was an Uzbek citizen. The prior week’s terrorist attack in St Petersburg, Russia was also perpetrated by an Uzbek living in Osh in Kyrgyzstan. Perhaps things aren’t quite as calm as they appear.
On Sunday morning I took a walk around some of the places I saw on the previous day - Amir Timur’s statue, Timur’s Mausoleum, the Registan. It is Amur Timur’s birthday so his statue was bedecked with flowers.
At midday I am picked up by the guide and driver, the two Anvars, and we visit a few more sites. First is the Observatory of Ulugbek. Ulugbek was a king in the 1400’s who was quite the astronomer. The Observatory houses what is left of his impressive 30 meter astrolabe. Ulugbek was well known in Europe as one of the greats of early Astronomy.
Next stop was a paper making museum which made quite a nice presentation about making paper from mulberry bark (a sideline of the silk business?). The final step where the paper is polished with a smooth stone makes all the difference to the end product.
We moved on to the burial site of St. Daniel. How he ended up there I don’t know but he is there in the longest tomb you ever did see. From the graveyard on the hill above Daniel’s tomb you can see the location of the old city which was once on the hills outside the current city. They moved to lower ground to take advantage of a better water supply.
Next stop was the Afrosiab Museum where there are the remnants of a 7th century mural or fresco of the Sogdian King Varkhouman.
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| Shakhi Zindha Complex |
The final stop for the day was the Shakhi Zindha Mausoleum complex. There are about 6 or 7 mausoleums and a mosque in an avenue stretching up the hillside. We go inside the mosque and sit and listen to a cleric chanting a prayer from the Koran. Though I and presumably all the Uzbeks there do not understand the meaning of the Arabic prayers, the sound was indeed quite moving.
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| Shakhi Zindha Complex |
We killed some time in a coffee shop in the late afternoon before going to the station for my train to Tashkent. Again the train station was quite modern and this time my train was also a new high speed train - the Sharq train that was recently built by the Spanish. We sped along through the late afternoon countryside - mountains in the distance, springtime green lowlands, setting sun behind us. Quite wonderful. It was dark when we arrived in Tashkent and again my driver was waiting to whisk me off to my hotel one last time.
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| The Sharq Train to Tashkent |
The next morning, my last in Uzbekistan, was sunny and warm and the city looked so much better than my first day there the prior week when it was cold and grey and damp. I walked towards the train station where nearby there is a train museum. It had a nice collection of old steam engines from the Soviet era with a few lesser interesting diesel locomotives. It was pretty cool because you could climb all over some of the steam trains - again no health and safety worries there.
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| Tashkent Railway Museum |
On the way back to the hotel, I walk past the Temur Square, the Romanov Palace, and some very modern government buildings. There are some nice parks and pedestrian streets but you couldn’t get near to the government buildings and they didn’t look very welcoming.
My driver arrives one final time to take me to the airport for my short flight to Almaty, Kazakhstan. This trip in Uzbekistan was quite the collection of cities, trains, drivers and guides and everything worked perfectly - great job Advantour.
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