• Home
• /
• Travel

Planning a trip to Uzbekistan? Here's what you need to know

The country is an exotic and eye-opening novelty to still whet any adventure traveller’s appetite

When we hear the term ‘Silk Road,’ most of us think (unsurprisingly) of silk, and a road, and maybe Marco Polo. In reality, however, The Silk Road was more than just one road: it was a network of many highways, both on land and water. It was also about more than just the trading of silk and goods — it was a meeting point of cultures and a site for an avid exchange of knowledge. And Marco Polo wasn’t the only explorer who wrote about his travels on the Silk Road — so did Ibn Battuta, for example, long before it was even called ‘the Silk Road’, as this is an often misleading term coined by the German traveller and geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, at the end of the 19th century. Those three — and many other travellers - would have visited places like Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva in their heydays — three breathtakingly beautiful cities located in what is today Central Asia’s Uzbekistan, one of the only two double-land-locked countries in the world.

Uzbekistan is no longer your typical off-the-beaten track destination for individual tourism, but just enough of an exotic and eye-opening novelty to still whet any adventure traveller’s appetite. When you board a night train from Khiva to Bukhara, expect to be asked by many locals to have your picture taken with them (also around major tourist sites!) — their curiosity is still genuine, kindled by pre-mass tourism, not yet spoiled by the popularity and fame that brings mass tourism. But don’t wait for long. The country has too much to offer, the infrastructure keeps improving so fast, and it won’t stay that way. More high-speed trains will soon connect major hubs, in this country five times the size of the UAE, making train adventures like the one described above unnecessary, as most travellers would opt for velocity and commodity over a slow, non air-conditioned — but also more memorable — ride.

The city of Khiva, only ten kilometres away from the country’s border with Turkmenistan, is just a short plane ride away from the capital, Tashkent — and a great starting point to wander the marvels of the Silk Road. When you enter through the gate of the thick, still-intact wall surrounding the city, your time travelling begins almost instantly. The echoes of the once-active slave markets seem to reverberate from the ancient stones around you, or when entering one of the incredibly lavish harems that once offered individual rooms for 40 mistresses. One of the oldest mosques in Bukhara is said to have been buried in the sand to save it from the Mongols, and until the 16th century, the mosque was used by the Jewish population as a synagogue in the evening; another indication of the melting pot of religions and cultures that the city once was. Bukhara’s local Hammam has been continuously in business since the 16th century — the stones you sit on are still the same ones used hundreds of years ago. If only they could talk.

An unknown poet wrote that “you can travel the whole world, see the pyramids and admire the smile of the Sphinx, (…) you can kneel in awe in front of the Acropolis, you can be captured by Rome and the Colosseum (…), but once you’ve seen Samarkand, you will always remain enchanted by its magic.” The poet’s words only truly sink in when you begin to wander, open-minded and open-mouthed, through the hundreds of madrasahs — adorned with that intricate and colourful ceramic tile work that many Expo 2020 visitors came across when visiting the Uzbekistan pavilion — Islamic schools that were once filled with eager students when Samarkand, a city as old as Rome and Athens, was a crucial centre of Islamic scholarly studies.

All around the country, you come across names that might have never been covered in your school curriculum: like the astronomer and mathematician Ulugh Beg, grandson to Amir Temur, founder of the Timurid Empire, an area comprising what is today Iran, Afghanistan, a big chunk of Central Asia, the South Caucasus, Pakistan, North India and Turkey. Soon, Marco Polo evap-orates behind the thin veil of whitewashed history, as your mind makes place for the heroes of their time: such as the poets Firdausi and Rudaki, or Pahlavon Mahmud, who enjoyed a similar stature in the Persian Islamic world as Newton and Shakespeare, for example, had in the West.

The choice of hotels for the individual traveller is often quite as original as Uzbekistan itself still is, as a destination: sleep in a converted Madrasah, and wake up under the dome in what was once a classroom, when the thin beam of sunlight tickles your face in the morning; or stay in an intricately adorned room from the 16th century overlooking the equally lavish courtyard of a once wealthy merchant house.

Tashkent is far more modern than its three Silk Road siblings, but no less attractive. While to many, riding the metro is a means to an end, riding the metro in Tashkent is a true delight. As is the case with many formerly Soviet cities, where metros were built as ‘the palace for the people’, Tashkent, too, boasts some of the most picturesque metro stations one has ever seen, and each is different from the other. Until 2018, you weren’t even allowed to take photos of the stations — they also doubled as nuclear bomb shelters for the inhabitants of the capital, and security was on high alert (the stations have also all been built to withstand any of the earthquakes common to the area). Today, when you take a photo, you’re still eyed somewhat suspiciously by the guards — but not because you might pose a security threat (spying for the enemy). Instead, as several of them asked, they were simply wondering, why you would take photos of something so old, as opposed to the modern stations other cities have to offer?

This sums up perfectly why you should go. An escape from the modern to one of the most fascinating historical periods in time. This is true time travel.

wknd@khaleejtimes.com