Uzbekistan: Samarkand, Bukhara and the Silk Road

I had carried Samarkand in my head for years as a word more than a place — one of those names that sounds like a colour. So when I finally stepped off the Afrosiyob train and the heat of the Uzbek afternoon hit me, I half expected to be disappointed by the ordinary. I wasn't. Uzbekistan sits right at the crossroads of Central Asia, and for centuries the great caravans of the Silk Road passed through here on their way between China and the Mediterranean, leaving behind cities built to dazzle merchants who had crossed deserts to reach them. They still dazzle.

My loop was simple and old: Tashkent to land and find my feet, then Samarkand, then Bukhara, with Khiva as a longer reach to the west, across the Kyzylkum desert. Three cities of blue domes, joined by fast trains and a thread of asphalt through the sand. I paid for everything in thick wads of Uzbek som, learned to say thank you in two alphabets, and let the turquoise do the rest.

The Registan, and the colour blue

Nothing prepares you for the Registan. You turn a corner and there it is: three madrasahs — Ulugh Beg, Sher-Dor, Tilya-Kori — facing each other across a single square, their great portals tiled floor to crown in blue and gold, the domes a turquoise so deep it looks wet. This was the heart of Timurid Samarkand, the empire Tamerlane built, and you feel the swagger of it still. I came back at sunset, when the low light turns the mosaics to embers and the crowds thin, and I sat on the warm stone until the call to prayer rolled across the square. Nearby, the Gur-e-Amir holds Tamerlane's tomb under a ribbed dome, the vast Bibi-Khanym mosque stands half-restored and humbling, and the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis — a narrow lane of tombs, each tiled more lavishly than the last — is, for my money, the single most beautiful corridor in Central Asia. All of it is on the UNESCO list, and for once the label undersells.

« The domes are a turquoise so deep they look wet, and the whole square seems to glow from within. »

A word on staying connected, because it shaped how I travelled. Uzbekistan is well outside the EU, so no roam-like-at-home applies here — your European plan simply won't follow you. Buying a local SIM has long meant a registration step at a counter, passport in hand, which eats an afternoon you'd rather spend under a dome. I'd installed a data eSIM before I flew, and it had me online the moment I landed in Tashkent: enough to book Afrosiyob seats on my phone, translate signage flicking between the Uzbek Latin and Russian Cyrillic alphabets, and find my way through the unmarked lanes of the old cities. In Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara the signal was genuinely fine.

Bukhara, where the Silk Road slows down

If Samarkand is a series of showpieces, Bukhara is a city you can simply live in. Its old centre, the Itchan core, is UNESCO-listed and remarkably whole — you wander from one trading dome to the next, past caravanserais turned into workshops, and end up, as everyone does, at the Lyab-i Hauz: a stone pool ringed by ancient mulberry trees, where old men play backgammon and the day comes to a gentle stop over a pot of green tea. Above it all stands the Kalon minaret, a brick tower so commanding that, the story goes, even Genghis Khan ordered it spared. I climbed onto a rooftop café at dusk and watched the swifts wheel around it while the sky went the same blue as the tiles. Then there was Khiva, far to the west: Itchan Kala, its walled old town, is a fortified museum-city you enter through a single gate, mud walls glowing gold at sunset, so complete it feels staged until you realise people still live inside.

Between the cities, the desert. The road to Khiva crosses the Kyzylkum, long flat hours of sand and scrub, and that is where the signal thins to a whisper or vanishes outright — perfectly normal, and worth planning for. I'd saved offline maps and my train tickets to my phone before leaving the last city, the same reflex every long-distance trip teaches you. It's also out here, somewhere north and west, that the Aral Sea has all but dried away — once one of the world's great inland seas, now mostly salt flats and beached hulls, a quiet environmental wound the country lives with. I didn't go; I only kept it in mind, the way you hold the weight of a place you're passing near.

Plov, trains, and two alphabets

The other thing that holds Uzbekistan together is plov — the national rice dish, slow-cooked with mutton and carrots in a wide cast-iron pan until it's glossy and deep orange, served in mounds and eaten with real ceremony. I ate it in a Samarkand courtyard, in a Bukhara teahouse, off a plastic stool at a Tashkent market, and it was different and wonderful every time. Tashkent itself surprised me most: a green, modern capital whose Soviet-era metro is a museum you ride through, each station a different fantasy of chandeliers, marble and tilework, no two alike. The fast Afrosiyob trains stitched the whole trip together, gliding between the cities in a couple of hours each, comfortable and punctual — and having data on board to read about the next dome before I reached it felt like a small luxury.

What I take away

Uzbekistan gave me the blue I'd been promised and a great deal I hadn't: the hush of Shah-i-Zinda at opening time, backgammon by the Lyab-i Hauz, a plate of plov shared with strangers, a desert horizon with the Aral's absence somewhere beyond it. It's a country that has thrown its doors wide open in recent years — visas eased, trains fast, welcome warm — and still feels like a discovery. I planned my connection the unglamorous way, eSIM in before take-off, and it let me spend my attention where it belonged: on the domes, the tiles, and the long blue light of a Silk Road dusk.

— Inès, under the turquoise domes, with desert dust still on my boots.