Category: 2022-10 Aktau to Almaty

Our next stop was the legendary Silk Road city of Samarkand. We arrived as night fell, to find that the number 3 bus that we’d hoped to catch into the city centre was driving around empty and not admitting passengers. We never did quite find out why! Instead, a local chap pointed us towards a tram, so we hopped on and hoped for the best. At least this provided us with another opportunity to play our favourite new game: Public Transit Roulette, where Oli tracks our route on Google Maps and we try by sheer force of will to ensure that we go in the right direction, calling out ‘stick’ or ‘twist’ at each junction, until we have to grab our bags and run to the exit. Unsurprisingly, the house always wins! When we left the train station, we were an hour and 20 on foot from our hotel and we bailed from the tram at 45 minutes from our hotel (not our best result on PTR to date). We began what felt like quite a long trudge in the dark with our bags, but things looked up when we found pizza on the way and we eventually reached the comforting lights of the ‘Ideal Hotel’. What a name.

The next day, we finally made it out and about in the afternoon, after a morning of unrelated faffing while the sun shone (e.g. finding somewhere to do our laundry – an unexpected challenge of Uzbekistan is not being able to do our washing in Airbnbs, since we need to stay in hotels for registration purposes). By this point, the sun had left us and that was the last we saw of it in Samarkand! We decided to start at the Registan, a square bordered by three enormous medressas, since this is the most iconic sight in the city. It was spectacular, even if this doesn’t come through in the photos because the sky was SO grey and threatening.

Tucked away in a small room at the rear of the Tilla-Kari Medressa was an exhibition showing photos of Samarkand and its iconic buildings, streets and bazaars from the past.

This is where we spent most of our time – the photos were so evocative and also helped us make sense of just how much restoration had been necessary.

The Ulugbek Medressa

This was the oldest of the three medressas that make up the Registan (it was completed in 1420) and the first one that we explored.

Inside, there were exhibits showing what had been taught in the medressa, including astronomy, maths and philosophy. Probably the most striking exhibit was the photograph of one of the minarets looking extremely lopsided before it was restored!

The Tilla-Kari (gold-covered) Medressa

Of the three, this medressa looked most different from the black-and-white photographs we had seen in the exhibition. This was largely because of the addition of the turquoise dome, which had been previously unfinished. Our guidebook was rather disparaging about this Soviet addition, but I am a big fan of a turquoise tile so I was on board!

We also read that the ceiling of the mosque in the Tilla-Kari Medressa was actually flat, and that the domed effect was just a trick of perspective. We couldn’t quite believe this and spent ages trying to reconcile this fact with what we could see. (I think it is actually less convincing in these photos than it was when we were there.)

The Sher Dor (lion) Medressa

This was my favourite exterior of the three, partly because of the gorgeous fluted domes but mostly because of the tiled lions on the exterior. Yes, they are stripy and do look like tigers, but apparently that wasn’t the intention!

After the Registan, we moved onto the Bibi-Khanym Mosque, which had a soaring facade and a huge courtyard in the middle. Local legend says that any woman who crawls through the pillars underneath the oversized stone Quran stand (below left) in the courtyard will have many children. It seems that the administration were less keen on this ritual, as it was both fenced off and entirely enclosed in a glass case!

Finally, we visited the city cemetery in the half-light and caught a glimpse of the Shah-i-Zinda Mausoleum complex, to which we would return the following day for a proper visit.

By this time, our luck had well and truly run out and the heavens opened. We all but swam the hour back to our hotel, pausing briefly to admire the Registan by night on our way.

The next morning, it was still raining. Most of my cold/wet weather clothes were still at the laundrette, so I put together a stunning outfit of cropped, wide leg trousers, long red socks and muddy walking boots. If you need style tips, you know where to come.

We first headed to the Gur-e-Amir Mausoleum, which was described in the Lonely Planet as “surprisingly modest”.

I think the author might have been a bit overloaded on Samarkand architecture when they wrote this, because the interior was entirely gold and anything but modest!

The rain got heavier and heavier, so we ducked into an unsigned restaurant behind the bazaar for lunch. At least we hoped it was a restaurant – we just marched straight in! There was no menu, which is my favourite kind of place as the food is always better when they specialise in just one thing. Sure enough, it was the best Plov we’ve eaten so far. As we left (after they kindly tried to persuade us to stay longer to shelter from the rain), I tried to convey by gestures to one of the ladies how much I had enjoyed the food but I think she actually took from this that I was expecting a baby (as she then asked whether we were married – which admittedly would be a slightly strange follow up to me saying I had enjoyed my lunch). We’ll never know for sure, but she seemed absolutely delighted either way!

Once the rain eased, it was finally time for a proper visit to the Shah-i-Zinda Mausoleum complex, which consisted of a narrow alleyway with huge tiled mausoleums on both sides. They were truly spectacular, but after extensive (and controversial) renovation work in 2015, most of the tiling is actually less than a decade old, which was rather less impressive. What we did find mind-blowing was that the labelling suggested that they don’t know who is buried in several of the mausoleums. We found it so surprising that these people had been considered important enough to have burial places alongside royalty but their identities were now lost in time.

Our final destination for the day was to take a walk around the old Jewish Quarter of the city, which was tucked behind a large new wall near to the Registan. We’d read that the authorities are very keen to ensure that visitors see only the sides of each city that they deem suitable, and this area didn’t fit the mould. Of course, that only made us more determined to visit, and slipping through the small unmarked gate felt like entering a hidden world.

We spent a while exploring, and came across several local mosques, a synagogue (which served the small remaining community of Bukhara Jews) and even some cats (we’d seen none at all in the rest of Samarkand)!

While we cannot speak for how local people feel about living hidden behind this wall, we struggled to see any tangible benefits of its construction. It seemed a deep shame that investment prioritised hiding anything that might not be fit for tourists’ eyes rather than focusing on local communities’ needs. In any case, we didn’t see anything remotely unpalateable and enjoyed a slice of neighbourhood life – the bakery churning out fresh bread, people out shopping and children cycling home from school. It was a far cry from the sanitised streets around the Registan, home only to souvenir shops and tea houses.

On our way back to the hotel, we stopped for one final view of the Registan, where they were busy building a stage for the finishing line of the Samarkand Marathon, which was taking place just after we left town. Here, we met Ruslan, who comes every day to the area in the hope of finding and chatting to English-speaking tourists to help him prepare for his upcoming IELTS exam. He seemed both excited and flustered to come across native speakers (it sounds like he normally chats to people who speak English as a second language). We had a nice chat about Merlin (the TV show) before getting on our way.

While Samarkand didn’t exactly fulfil our fantasies of a sandy, dusty outpost in the desert (mostly our fault for coming in November), it was very cool to see that it has survived, thrived and is now such a vibrant city. Next, we were very excited to be moving on to Tashkent, Central Asia’s biggest hub and where we had set our sights when we first planned this overland trip on a rainy day during lockdown.

Although we didn’t manage to get tickets for the high speed train from Khiva to Bukhara, I was still pretty happy with our spacious seats and table on our seven-and-a-half-hour journey on the slower train. Apparently tour groups often block book tickets, which meant that the first two carriages of our train were full, while ours was half empty.

Fully embracing travelling slowly, we happily spent the journey napping, writing, eating, and crucially not planning how to get between the train station and our B&B.

We pulled into Bukhara train station and ran the normal gauntlet past the crowd of taxi drivers. One particularly persistent driver followed me across the station forecourt (he only ever spoke to me, not Sara), until Sara told him in no uncertain terms that we didn’t need a taxi. I’m guessing this broke a few social norms, but it certainly did the trick.

The next step was to find our way onto the right bus/marshrutka, but we couldn’t find the bus we thought we wanted, and explaining our route through hand gestures was proving difficult. Eventually, a local teenager took pity on us and showed us onto the right bus (he was also going the same way). He introduced us to another English speaking friend, and en route to the old town we covered topics from the UK’s energy crisis to Arsenal’s position in the Premier League.

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Bukhara’s Lyab-i Hauz is a plaza in the centre of the old town containing one of the few remaining communal pools, which used to provide water for drinking and bathing to the city’s inhabitants. The plaza was surrounded on nearly every side by beautiful medressas, sparkling in the sunshine in all their restored beauty, and is still frequented by wizened old men (known locally as aksakal, or white beards) sipping tea while putting the world to rights.

Beyond these grand buildings, the old town extends out to what’s left of the original mud-and-brick city walls via a maze of alleyways. We spent some time meandering through these tiny streets on our way to the Chor Minor, a stunning Indian-style building with four towers, each uniquely patterned and topped with vivid turquoise tiling. Although we’d seen the building referred to as a medressa and the towers as minarets, apparently it was actually a gatehouse to a since destroyed medressa, but today only houses a small souvenir shop.

While the handful of bazaars in the old town were mostly dedicated to souvenirs and clothing, the real action seemed to take place at the central market, confusingly located just beyond the city walls. Even in the late afternoon, this market was still bustling with stalls selling fresh produce, spices, textiles, and seemingly anything else you could possibly need. We particularly liked the freeloading birds to which the seed sellers seemed to have turned a blind eye (below right).

On the way back to the old town we popped into the Ark of Bukhara, a huge fortress barely within the city walls where the Khan would have lived and received visitors. Just inside the Ark’s entrance was the Juma (Friday) Mosque, fronted by a row of intricately carved wooden pillars (below left). A few minutes down the road from the Ark was the Zindan (city jail). Back in the days of Queen Victoria, this jail held two English diplomats in its notorious bug pit (below right), along with a handful of rats, scorpions and goodness knows what else. These two unfortunate souls were sent on separate missions from England, but had both managed to offend the Khan upon arrival in Bukhara, and were promptly thrown into jail. A few years later they were each marched from the jail in front of huge crowds, forced to dig their own graves, and beheaded. Needless to say, our levels of politeness and respect skyrocketed prior to leaving the jail.

It felt like Bukhara had a seemingly endless number of blue-tiled, sand-coloured Islamic buildings extending north-west from the Lyab-i Hauz. Our highlights were the Kalan mosque with its 47m minaret, and the Mir-i-Arab Medressa opposite featuring twin turquoise domes either side of its colossal facade. And just when we thought we’d seen and photographed everything, the light would change, and we’d take another lap.

While Bukhara isn’t internationally renowned for its cuisine, we were keen to try some local dishes while in town. First up was MANTUXONA P.M.K, a manti (dumpling) restaurant located just beyond the central market. Our table was set inside an arched compartment, but some other tables were even more private, with a curtain shielding them from the rest of the restaurant. I’d tried and failed to translate the Uzbek menu using my phone, so we took a partially-informed guess and fortunately it worked out (with a bit of help from the waiter). The manti themselves consisted of minced beef, onion and fat inside a thin, pasta-like parcel, and topped with butter. While I’m glad we tried them (and they were really tasty when eaten alongside the fresh herbs from our salad), they didn’t quite fill the place in our hearts reserved for khinkali.

Another popular lunchtime dish is Plov, an oily and slightly sweet rice and vegetable dish, topped with pulled meat. And where better to eat it than The Plov, a large restaurant located just outside the old town, where we snagged a table just as it became vacant. I think this is the first time either of us have tried horse meat, and despite our initial reservations, this meal was by far our favourite in Bukhara. Judging by the restaurant’s huge popularity with locals and tourists alike, we weren’t the only ones.

Taking the bus back to the train station might sound like a straightforward task given that we’d already done it once in the opposite direction. Still, we couldn’t find our bus number listed at the bus station where we were hoping it would stop, and only once we had begun to walk further down the road did we see one sail past us. It wasn’t far to the next stop though, and when the next bus pulled up, we were greeted once again by the English speaking teenager from 4 days ago – what are the chances?! We covered more world events on our way to the train station, before wishing him luck in his upcoming English exam.

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The next stop on our journey will be Samarkand, a city almost synonymous with the ancient Silk Road, and we couldn’t wait to see it with our own eyes.

We made it out of central Nukus on a packed marshrutka and found our way to a dirt car park near the bus station where negotiations for shared taxis take place. We didn’t have to wait too long to find and fill a shared taxi to Urgench (obviously, it filled up the moment I disappeared to go for a wee, leaving the driver frantically gesturing at Oli). Traffic drives on the right in Uzbekistan, but this was of no consequence to our driver, who had a strong preference for the left side of the road and made this known to many other drivers on the two-hour journey! When we reached Urgench, we changed taxis and had another wild ride. This time, our driver was largely happy to stay on the correct side of the road, but was instead a big fan of watching videos on his phone while he weaved through traffic. Thankfully, we made it there in one piece…

We entered the Ichon-Qala (walled city) of Khiva on foot through the West Gate, and it was a brilliant way to get a first look at where we would be spending the next few days learning more about this important trading city. While we’ve already visited other cities on the Silk Route (because, despite its usual moniker, it isn’t actually a single road but a network of trade routes) – including Xanthi, Istanbul, Sivas, Erzurum and Yerevan), this one was a biggie.

After checking into our lovely B&B and completing a good amount of faffing, we headed out to spend golden hour walking along a 2.5 kilometre section of the city walls. It was a lovely stroll until we nearly fell off one end! Thankfully we realised just in time that there were not, in fact, steps back down to street level but actually just a sheer drop. The walls were very cool but it did slightly take the shine off when we realised how recently they had been rebuilt (during the 18th century) – this was to become a running theme. But still, the walk gave a great perspective on the walled city and our first view on the medressas, caravanserai, mosques and palaces we had come to see.

The next morning, we took a chilly pre-breakfast walk to explore while the weather was clear and the town was quiet.

We returned to our B&B feeling very accomplished and had a delicious breakfast under a traditional painted ceiling – these are everywhere and are so beautifully elaborate.

Khiva offers a two-day ticket that gains access to a long list of attractions in the walled city. Somewhat ridiculously, getting a comprehensive list of which buildings are included in the ticket was an added extra, so we stubbornly declined and spent the next few days trying our luck with our ticket whenever we saw an entrance gate!

Inside each of the medressas and palaces, there were exhibits showing room settings, manuscripts, textiles, silk banknotes, carvings, carriages, and all sorts of other interesting paraphernalia. However, we didn’t see many exhibits that directly confronted some of the darker realities of the city’s history, including that it held a notorious slave market. It felt a bit remiss to be enjoying the glorious architecture at face value without acknowledging the suffering that lived side-by-side with the great wealth generated by the trading city.

After a busy morning of exploration, we were hungry for lunch. However, the walled city had limited dining options and felt more touristy than we prefer, so we escaped into the main city and found a roadside tandir (oven) for lunch. We had no idea what we were buying since there was no sign and the food is kept warm inside the oven until someone orders it, so it was a bit of a mystery lunch! In the end we think it was gumma – probably best described as an Uzbek pasty. They were so good (and affordable – 65p each) that we returned the next day for more, much to the stallholder’s amusement – she definitely recognised us as we’d made such a meal of our first order!

On our second full day, we visited the Pahlavon Mahmud Mausoleum. This was noteworthy for its spectacular tiling – the interior was totally encrusted in gorgeous, tiny turquoise and blue tiles* – but truly memorable for the fact that two newly married couples visited for prayers with their entourages while we were there. We sat quietly and tried not to get in the way, and it was so lovely to see. It did get us wondering about wedding traditions in Uzbekistan, and we read an article over dinner that evening. It was a fascinating (if sometimes shocking) read, but we should preface it by saying that we don’t know how typical some of these traditions really are or how quickly things are changing. I know I’ve read articles about British wedding traditions before and thought, “Yes but no one does that any more!”

By this point, we’d visited all of the open buildings within the walled city, so we set our sights towards the Nurullaboy Palace. It had a couple of interesting exhibits and room settings but was mostly just huge and eerily quiet (and we kept finding ourselves in totally empty buildings).

However, we did amuse ourselves for quite some time running around this room of eight mirrors!

This marked the end of our time in Khiva, and the next morning we walked to the train station at sunrise, ready to catch a train to Bukhara.

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*Oli really cracked me up when he said it reminded him of a particularly memorable London Rental Opportunity of the Week. If you know, you know.