Follow the Silk Road through “the Stans” for a romantic connection to the past!
Welcome to our post about Uzbekistan. We promised all the friendly folks we met in UZ that we’d spread the word: this is a country you should visit! Nestled amidst its fellow “stan” countries, Uzbekistan is great for family-friendly travel into fascinating human history and thriving culture. Read on to find some highlights of each city we visited, as well as a general info guide for transportation and logistics.
How do you get there?
Many ways, surely. We entered into Uzbekistan from Osh, Kyrgyzstan, crossing the border on foot through a highly-trafficked and foreigner-friendly customs checkpoint. After the short walk to the other side, we negotiated with several drivers, having been told by the locals in Osh not to pay too much for a 45-minute taxi to Andijan. Most taxi drivers were trying to fill up their minibusses for the several-hour trek to Tashkent, but after a lively exchange, we finally found someone willing to accept our price and destination.
We also managed to change our Kyrgyz money into Uzbek money with the help of a questionable character by the side of the road. Having flashbacks to younger days when a swindler gave my naive self some Slovakian money instead of my expected Czech bills, I carefully checked the exchange rate my an app, pulled up photos of the bills online, and triple-checked them for security marks. His rate was ridiculous, but the bills were legit. We decided it was worth it to have some local currency in hand… how right we were (see below, MONEY).
Andijan
We picked Andijan because it offered the closest train station to the border. At first glance, it wasn’t our kind of town. The main thoroughfares were noisy and bleak. The skyline was hazy, sunbleached, and lacking visual interest. We quickly learned, however, that the back alleys of Andijan are quiet and quaint, with enormous, beautifully carved doors guarding glimpses of traditional courtyards within tall walls of mud brick.
One of these alleys led us to the Jami Mosque, where we lunched on a tea bed for the first time. This piece of furniture is one of my favorite Uzbek experiences, repeated many times throughout our stay. A meal on a tea bed literally and sensorily has a more laid back posture than a meal with feet flat on the floor; it would be harder to leave your cross-legged seat, so you stay!
It was here that we first experienced the legendary friendliness of the Ferghana Valley, while sharing our meal with two local doctors. For the rest of that afternoon, we were greeted with incredible hospitality from the locals, in the beautiful open-air market, at the bank, and lounging in a cafe. We wished that we’d planned more time to explore this city, purely because its people are extraordinary, break-out-into-song welcoming!
Alas, around 4:00 PM that day, neither the tea beds nor the amicable folks on the street could cause us to linger any longer; we boarded our train for the 6-hour ride to Tashkent.
Tashkent
The capital city, Tashkent, is much larger and more developed than any other we visited in Uzbekistan. It is home to enormous, sprawling parks, diverse dining options, an extensive and unique public transit system, and a curious amalgam of 1970’s Soviet Russia influence atop a Central Asian foundation.
Our favorite experiences included the following:
- strolling through the quiet, broad, manicured landscapes of Alisher Navoi National Park
- admiring the astounding artwork (as well as the antiquated token fare system) in the subways
- renting bicycles at Broadway Park and riding around the city for hours searching for an ATM (see below, MONEY)
- dining outside at one of the many sidewalk cafes
- hearing a real-life, present-day Romeo and Juliet tale, Uzbek tribal version, from the teachers at Legacy School of American English
- a delicious meal with excellent beers on tap at The Irish Pub
After all this city time, we were eager to explore the surrounding natural areas. We arranged at the front desk of our hotel for a ride to Chimgan Mountain, at the cost of sixty American dollars. Our driver, a full-time police officer currently putting his two children through college, spent the whole day acting as our tour guide. Near the base of the mountain, we rode the chair lift for a few dollars and were a bit disappointed not to be able to hike from the drop-off point. Nevertheless, we could see Kyrgyzstan from where we were standing, and it was a fun improvised slide on gravelly slopes back down. Had we more time, there were open trails that would have taken us to the summit.
We declined the many offers for ATV and horseback rides, choosing instead to drive on to Charvak Lake. October was apple season, and many mountain cottages along the road were selling baskets of fruit from their personal orchards. To stroll along the strikingly blue and breezy lake, we paid a small fee at a resort hotel complex built on the shore. Offers for speedboat rides abounded, but we chose instead to stroll (the parents) and plunge around in the super squelchy mud (the boys) along the shore.
A late lunch was easy to find along the road, and our return drive of an hour had us back in time to enjoy one more evening in the city before the morning train to Samarkand.
Samarkand
We booked a cheap apartment near the Registan, a short taxi drive from the train station, for our Samarkand stay. This location was a perfect starting point to explore the main historical attractions of the city. There is a lovely new paving stone promenade connecting the sandstone and ceramic tile structures—many mosques, madrassas, and mausoleums—that teach about empires past.
Our favorite of these strikingly beautiful buildings was the Registan, which positively radiates with golden light after the sun sets. After paying a small entrance fee, we accepted an offer for a private guided tour at a very reasonable rate. This hour-long exploration taught us the purpose of the Registan as an ancient center of learning. It was fantastic; it really helped us all to engage with what we were seeing!
Another highlight was cutting through the old graveyard at the end of the promenade to get to the Afrasiyab Museum. We only had an hour before closing to take this one in, enough to appreciate the relics and marvel at Samarkand’s connections to paleolithic peoples, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and the Silk Road.
Dining in Samarkand was easy, as it is ready for many tourists. Menus often have English translations or photos to guide the non-native speaker to tasty traditional dishes. Other benefits of being a touristy spot include excellent public restrooms, coffee, and many parks that welcome children to play freely and safely.
Bukhara
The restored ancient city of Bukhara is famous for its historic houses. We stayed with a family in their mud-walled home, down a narrow alleyway, through a rough wooden door. It was two stories high, with a central courtyard open to the sky, four guest bedrooms, a centuries-old original dining room, and a rooftop lounge where friendly kittens stretch out on silk rugs to watch the sun rise and set out of one half-opened eye.
Our host husband was a famous photographer whose work is displayed in the art gallery a few hundred meters down the way. His wife is a superb cook who turned up things like pumpkin dumplings, fresh figs, and local butter for breakfast. All of this, including the kittens, cost us US$50 per night.
Bukhara is another area remade in such a way as to give pedestrians free rein to enjoy its sights without the nuisance and noise of vehicle traffic. By day, we wandered the tidy dirt pathways to admire the Kalon minaret and the wares of tradespeople making modern versions of historic crafts like sewing scissors in the shape of elegant birds and miniature paintings of whirling dervishes. By night, we dined leisurely beside the romantically lit Divan-Beghi, an old well that is now surrounded by restaurants and unfathomably old mulberry trees creaking reminders of the Silk Road.
Just outside this delightful maze of the quintessential tan buildings studded with gleaming turquoise and azure tiles lies the Ark, the palace of the Emirs from bygone empires. We recommend the tour, modest in both price and length, for learning insights into the various rooms of this fortress museum.
The Ark impresses, but the Kalon Minaret stuns. More than eight hundred years ago, Chinggis Khaan rampaged his way across Central Asia, ordering most things he found torn down. When the infamous leader of the Mongolian Empire encountered the grandeur of the Kalon Minaret, he looked up until his hat fell off–at least, that is how the story goes. In any case, he ordered everything else destroyed but that this one minaret be spared. As you tour Uzbekistan, it’s worth noting that this one structure may be the only thing you see that predates the thirteen century and Chinggis Khaan’s penchant for destruction.
Out guide to Uzbekistan would not be complete without a recommendation to try a Turkish bath. Mine was hidden through a nondescript doorway just around the corner from the Kalon Minaret. It was a room that would most accurately be described as a stone crypt, were it not for the steamy air and scents of honey and ginger lingering there. Russian matrons await your arrival to politely instruct you to remove all your clothing so that they may scrub away all the detritus that one’s skin harbors like a coat of armor while traveling. Delightful.
Khiva
In our minds, the crown jewel in the collection of old Uzbek cities along the Silk Road is Khiva. So mysteriously, medievally picturesque is this collection of mud-brick houses, mausoleums, minarets, mosques, and torch-lit alleyways, that it was a film crew’s choice of setting for a Bollywood picture during our stay.
We chose for our lodging, and highly recommend, the newly refurbished Boyjon Ota Family Guest House. Of the many bed and breakfast and hostels available, this one boasted a lovingly tended garden of roses, basil, marigolds, pomegranate, and quince. The children in our party were allowed to make perfumes with the petals while the adults explored the offerings of the town.
Khiva is famous for many things, including a charitable and merciful poet wrestler who made outstanding fur hats. Pahlavan Mahmud’s legacy appears in the form of enormous head coverings fabricated with fuzzy animal hides, as well as a breathtaking mausoleum that is quite possibly the world’s most impressive ceiling-to-floor display of blue Arabic lettering on white tiles.
Another building of note is the Itchan Kala in the center of town. A veritable library of carving styles throughout time, this structure is held up by the trunks of hundreds of trees and lit only with the light streaming from two rectangular holes in the ceiling to link earth with sky.
When not admiring the architecture in the city, our favorite pastime was to while away the hours with the view from the best terrace restaurant in town, fittingly named the Terrassa Cafe, sipping ginger tea and eating shivit oshi, the local dish of dill noodles. The loveliest view of all, however, we attained by climbing steps by the North Gate to the top of the wall that encircles the ancient city.
Logistics-wise, Khiva is a bit funny. Since we booked lodging within the city, we were not required to pay the entrance fee at the West Gate. In fact, we didn’t know there was such a fee because we came from the train station on the east side. (By summer 2020, this walk from the station to the city should be quite nice—they were working on new buildings and landscaping while we were there in the fall of 2019.) Tickets are only required where the tour buses drop their passengers—which is mildly hilarious.
We only ran up against this fee when we wanted to purchase entrance into the assorted museums, the old palace, and the guard tower that promised an excellent view atop the city wall. In the end, we found we could climb to the wall for free at the aforementioned North Gate. The museums were hit-or-miss, but we did think that Pahlavan Mahmud’s mausoleum was well worth the price of entry.
Nukus
Our last stop in Uzbekistan was Nukus. Largely ignored by tourists, as it is not officially on the Silk Road, this city bears a liking to Andijan on the travel guide scale. In other words, Nukus feels much less like a romantic re-creation of the past. It is a real working city, a great place to stop being a tourist and just live for a day or two amongst the Uzbek people.
We stayed in the Besqala Guest House, a wonderfully economical place with high-quality beds and a full, beautiful kitchen for cooking our meals. The staff was friendly and available around the clock. They would have happily arranged a day trip to see the odd wonder of rusty old ships left high and dry in the middle of the desert from the excessive draining of the Aral Sea, but we declined and opted instead of more time exploring the city.
At the top of our list of highlights in town was the central market, heaped with local produce and tantalizing delicacies. The sprawl of stalls outside offered any marketable wonder you could imagine, from cell phone covers to new brooms to candied whatnots and deep-fried whose-its. A cadre of shoe maintenance specialists were on the lookout for anyone with a stray lace or worn-out sole, and our boys’ well-worn boots earned a well-received makeover for a few bucks.
Also a bargain, the likes of which have achieved the level of Santillo family lore, were the haircuts we purchased. A bit of speculation here—maybe it’s because of the general wealth of thick, dark hair in the country, but the citizens of Uzbekistan take their barbers very seriously. We were all groomed meticulously, all five of us, for under ten US dollars.
The talk of this town from a tourist standpoint is the Nukus Museum of Art. It boasts one of the world’s largest collections of avant-garde Russian art—art that was banned by the USSR and, in many cases, created by men who were imprisoned for making it. Also present are a good number of cultural artifacts.
Nukus was cold! In the span of a week, we traveled from golden warm fall afternoons to bitter and blustery winter chill. Be prepared for a variety of temperatures as you make your way along this wonderful, ancient route.
Trains
Uzbekistan seems to have been made to be explored by train—or, better yet, the train system seems to have been made to explore Uzbekistan perfectly. Well, closer to the fact, it was built to supply Soviet Russia with raw materials like coal, iron, and especially topsoil. The Soviets scraped this layer off the surface of Uzbekistan’s ancient grazing grounds and shipped back to the homeland in unfathomable volumes. In The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, a book we highly recommend reading while on the train, by the way, Peter Frankopan suggests that this desperately needed dirt, never before touched by agriculture, was the new treasure of the old Silk Road. After the fall of the Union at the tail end of 1991, the train lines suffered some disrepair, but the sections of track along the ancient trade route are still alive and well.
We highly recommend exploring Uzbekistan by train.
The train line runs east and west through the bulk of the country with spur lines leading north and south as needed. The trains do not connect into Southern Kyrgyzstan to the East, which is why we took a car from the Kyrgyz border to Andijan. However, from there, we were able to get everywhere we wanted to go exclusively by train, riding all the way west to Nukus and on to Kazakhstan and Russia on connecting lines.
Throughout the country, we only took daytime trains, since all of the cities are close enough together that they don’t merit overnights. In contrast, traveling from Nukus back to Moscow required three overnights, though we broke it up by stopping in Saratov, Russia for short stay. Great city, by the way; we recommend visiting there as well.
The trains were universally functional, though they varied considerably in their posh-ness. Some of our seated day trains were so spacious and comfortable that we initially assumed we had boarded a business class carriage by mistake. Others were, shall we say, less spacious and comfortable. I like to call those cars ‘a festival of feet,’ as limbs seem to dangle from every level.
During one daytime trip, we were in a hard class sleeper compartment with so many people that our family was spread over three different carriages. It was a little stuffy, so we spent most of the hours standing in the dining car, sipping cold drinks, and taking in the landscape as it slipped by. It turns out, that was a great way to make friends with the locals—we were invited out to dine on plov back in their city and received some of the most commendable hospitality later that week. The kids, meanwhile, made their own set of friends playing cards and chatting through language barriers with the Uzbek folks back at their seats.
As to be expected, accommodations vary from country to country. An Uzbek second-class sleeper is akin to a Trans-Siberian third-class sleeper, and likewise, a first-class corresponds to a second-class. In our experience, the Uzbek trains do not seem to have an equivalent to the Trans-Siberian first-class sleeper.
We had good luck researching schedules online, but we always ended up buying our tickets in person. This method required payment in cash (see below, Money). The prices felt affordable, so paying cash was a manageable method. However, our final leg (two nights through Kazakhstan and into Russia, for five people in a first-class cabin), which was a non-trivial cost, also had to be paid in cash, and that stung a bit.
Overall, we can’t recommend the trains enough. They quickly and efficiently take you from one beautiful and magical place to another. Sit back, watch the scenery change, and enjoy meeting your fellow travelers.
Money
In much of the world, you can use a foreign credit card with impunity, and if you are like us, you choose to do so because of the convenience, beneficial exchange rate, and more travel points! Again, if you are like us, you will often roam into a new country with little or no currency on your person figuring you can pay for everything with a card (or, increasingly, with your phone!) and find a handy ATM to get some local currency.
This method doesn’t work so well in Uzbekistan. During our time in Uzbekistan, we found exactly ONE restaurant and ONE hotel that would accept credit cards. This situation creates a need for a lot of cash. In some other countries, we have been able to book stays online with sites/apps like AirBnB and Bookings and pay for lodging remotely. This didn’t work in Uzbekistan. We could book, but they generally expected cash payment when we arrived.
To exacerbate the situation, ATMs that accepted foreign bank cards were scarce—not non-existent, but definitely scarce.
Anyway, lessons are: figure out your budget, do some math to plan out what you will need, and get it ahead of time. That said, while we were there, the currency, the Uzbek Som, was worth about 10,000 to 1 USD. The most common banknote was a 10,000 Som note, which means 1,000 USD was about three inches thick. Once you get past taking pictures of yourself covered in cash, you will realize this can be cumbersome at best.
Luckily, US Dollars, Euros, and Russian Rubles can be changed at most any bank (much more commonly than ATMs), so you might consider carrying some of them, rather than a giant stack of local currency. But anyway, don’t leave Tashkent until you have it sorted as it only gets harder the farther you get from the capital.
Makes me want to visit there now. Beautiful pictures!