Four walled cities, one land border, and a lake above the passes

Arrive Tashkent

Flights from Europe land at an hour that suits nobody, so the room is held from the night before wherever the hotel will do it and the first day is shapeless on purpose. Sleep, then a walk when you are ready.

Tashkent is the least Silk Road thing in Uzbekistan and it is a useful introduction anyway. Broad avenues, plane trees, fountains and a Soviet ministry every few hundred metres: this is the administrative capital of Central Asia as the twentieth century built it, and the three cities that follow will make more sense for having seen what replaced them.

Tashkent, and the oldest book in it

Khast Imam in the morning for the Uthman Quran, a manuscript on deerskin that is among the oldest surviving copies anywhere. Its history is as interesting as the object: taken to St Petersburg after the Russian conquest, returned by the Bolsheviks as a political gesture, and now kept behind glass in a room that asks for silence and mostly gets it.

Afterwards the Museum of Applied Arts, which is housed in a Russian diplomat’s mansion and is the best place in the country to look at suzani embroidery and ikat closely before you start seeing them for sale in every bazaar. Lunch at the osh markazi, where plov is cooked in cauldrons the size of a bath and sold by the kilo until it runs out, usually by two.

West to Khiva

A morning flight the length of the country to Urgench, then about forty minutes by road across irrigated cotton to Khiva. You are now in Khorezm, which was a separate country for most of its history and still feels like one: the accent changes, the bread changes shape, and the desert starts at the edge of the fields.

The Ichan Kala is the walled inner city and your hotel is inside it, which is the whole trick. Day visitors come by coach from Urgench and leave in the late afternoon, and the streets between the walls are then almost entirely yours until the following morning.

Khiva, which is a museum and knows it

The morning is the Kunya Ark, the khans’ fortress, with its throne courtyard and the summer mosque tiled floor to ceiling in blue and white, and the Tash Hauli palace next door, where the harem courtyard carries the best tilework in the city and a set of carved wooden columns on stone bases shaped like camel feet.

The uncomfortable part of the history is worth having straight. Khiva ran one of the largest slave markets in Asia, supplied by Turkmen raiders working the Persian and Russian frontiers, and it was the last of the three khanates to fall to Russia. A good guide will tell you this without being asked and without dressing it up.

The afternoon is loose: the wall walk, the Pahlavan Mahmud mausoleum, where a wrestler-poet became the town’s patron saint and got the finest tiled chamber in Khorezm for it, or the silk carpet workshop where the dyes still come from madder, indigo and pomegranate rind.

Across the Kyzylkum to Bukhara

The desert day. The road runs southeast across the Kyzylkum with the Amu Darya somewhere off to the right, and for several hours there is sand, saxaul scrub, and the occasional shepherd who is a very long way from anything. Lunch is at the roadside place that exists rather than the one you would choose, and the tea is the good part.

That emptiness is the honest reason the desert cities were worth what they were worth. Bukhara appears at the end of it as a low brown town with domes in it, and the first thing you do is sit down by the Lyab-i-Hauz pool under the mulberries and stop moving.

Bukhara on foot, which is the only way it works

Bukhara was a university town before Europe had universities, and the reason to spend a whole day walking it is that the monuments are not laid out for visitors — they are the ordinary furniture of a lived-in old town. Start at the Bolo Hauz mosque, whose painted wooden columns are doubled by the pool in front of them, then up to the Ark, the walled citadel from which the emirs governed until the last of them was removed in 1920.

Under the Ark is the pit where two British officers, Stoddart and Conolly, were held before their execution in 1842 — the Great Game at its least glamorous, and a story your guide will tell better standing there than any book tells it. Afterwards the Kalyan ensemble, the covered trading domes, which still trade, and Chor Minor, a gatehouse with four unequal towers hidden in a residential lane where nobody finds it by accident.

Late afternoon at Char Bakr, the necropolis on the edge of town, which is empty, unrestored and the quietest thing in Bukhara.

Bukhara to Samarkand

East by road through the Zarafshan valley, which is green in a way nothing since Tashkent has been: cotton, orchards, canals and villages selling melons off the tailgate. It is a morning rather than a day, and it ends at the city the whole route has been building towards.

The first afternoon is Gur-e-Amir, where Timur lies under a slab of dark jade with his teacher, his sons and two grandsons around him. It is a small building compared with what comes tomorrow, and it is the one that makes the best sense of the man: he built an empire from Delhi to Ankara and chose to be buried at his teacher’s feet.

Samarkand, and how much of it is a reconstruction

The Registan first thing, because the tile takes low sun and because the square empties for an hour after the first coaches leave and before the next arrive. Three madrasas on three sides, built across two and a half centuries, facing inwards onto what was the civic centre of an empire and later a grain market.

Then the thing most pages avoid saying: a great deal of what you are photographing is twentieth-century work. Soviet restorers rebuilt collapsed domes, re-cut tile and straightened a leaning minaret with cables, and the programme continues today. This does not make Samarkand less worth crossing the world for. It does mean the honest question at each building is which centuries you are looking at, and a good guide answers it rather than skating over it.

Bibi Khanym after lunch — built too big and too fast, falling down within the builder’s lifetime, and still enormous — then the Siyob bazaar behind it for bread stamped with a wooden seal, and dried apricots that taste nothing like the ones sold at home.

Shah-i-Zinda at opening, and an astronomer prince

Be at the Shah-i-Zinda gate when it opens or do not go at all. The site is a stepped lane with tomb chambers on both sides, faced in tile by three centuries of different workshops, and it is narrow enough that forty visitors turn it into a corridor. Arrive first and it is a street of blue with nobody standing in it — the best twenty minutes in the country.

The rest of the morning is the Ulugh Beg observatory, where what survives is the buried arc of an enormous sextant cut into bedrock. Timur’s grandson sat here and worked out the length of a year to a figure modern astronomers would quarrel with only at the margins, and produced a star catalogue that held its authority for two centuries. A faction that preferred a less inquisitive ruler had him killed for it.

The afternoon is free and the suggestion is the other Samarkand: the Russian colonial grid west of the old city, laid out after 1868, with its boulevard, its plane trees and its cafes. Two cities, one grid drawn across the other, and almost nobody walks the newer one.

The Afrosiyob back to Tashkent

A late-morning departure, roughly two and a half hours on a Talgo set that touches 250 km/h and covers ground the car needs most of a day for. Three classes are sold: at 2026 prices the economy seat is in the region of 311,000 som, business about 455,000 and the VIP saloon around 709,000. Business is what we book without asking, because these trains leave full and the extra room is the whole difference on a morning like this.

The afternoon in Tashkent is deliberately unambitious, because tomorrow is long. Ride four or five metro stations, which are vaulted, chandeliered and built deep because they were designed to double as shelters, and where photography was forbidden for most of their working life. Then Chorsu bazaar under its blue dome at the end of the day, when the traders are cutting prices rather than starting them.

Over the Kamchik pass and out of Uzbekistan

The long day, and the one people remember. There is exactly one road from Tashkent into the Fergana valley and it climbs over the Kamchik pass through a gap in the mountains, with tunnels, switchbacks and lorries. On the far side the valley opens out into the most densely farmed and most densely populated country in Central Asia.

We break at Margilan, where silk has been woven since the road ran through it and where the workshop still boils cocoons, reels the thread by hand and ties the warp for ikat before dyeing it — which is why the pattern on atlas cloth has that blurred edge. If the day is running well, the blue-glaze pottery kilns at Rishton are the second stop; if it is not, we skip them and say so at the time.

The crossing itself is at Dostyk, near Andijan. You walk it: out of the Uzbek hall with your own luggage, across a strip of no-man’s-land, into the Kyrgyz hall, where a different guide and a different car are waiting. Neither passport needs a visa, so the whole thing is stamps and queueing rather than paperwork. Osh is under an hour beyond it.

Osh, the oldest city in the country

Sulaiman-Too rises straight out of the middle of Osh, a limestone ridge with petroglyphs on it, caves used as shrines and a small mosque that Babur built on the summit before he left to found the Mughal empire. Pilgrims still climb it, mostly women, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the archaeology, and the stair is steep and unshaded.

The Jayma bazaar runs a long way along the river and is the reason to be here: knives from Tuluk, felt, horse tack, kalpak hats, whole sheep, and the sound of a market that has been trading on this spot since long before anyone thought to date it.

One thing to know rather than to worry about: Osh is a majority-Uzbek city in Kyrgyzstan and it saw serious inter-ethnic violence in 2010. What a visitor meets today is an ordinary, busy provincial city, and Kyrgyzstan as a whole sits at Level 1 on the US advisory scale. We would rather you heard that from us than found it in a search after you had booked.

North to the Kochkor valley

A morning flight over the ranges to Bishkek — the road version is two days and a pass, and the flight is the sensible use of a day — then east along the Chuy valley and up into Kochkor, a small town at the head of the road that leads to the pastures.

Kochkor is where the felt comes from. The women’s cooperatives here make shyrdak, the cut-and-inlaid felt carpet that is the actual furniture of a yurt, and you can watch a piece being made rather than just bought: wool washed, rolled, boiled, dyed, cut in mirrored halves and stitched together so that neither half is background. It takes two women a long time, and they will tell you exactly how long.

Over the pass to Song Kul

Up onto the high pasture, and this is the day the route exists for. The track climbs in tight switchbacks onto a plateau where there are no fences, no poles and no buildings except felt ones, and then the lake appears: a sheet of water in a bowl of grass, with herds and horses on every side of it and nothing on the shore.

The camp is yurts. That means a felt tent with a stove, a shyrdak floor, a shared washblock or a pit latrine depending on the camp, no mains electricity beyond a solar lamp and no telephone signal at all. It is cold after dark even in August, and it is one of the great nights in Asia. Ride if you ride; walk the shoreline if you do not; help bring the herd in at dusk if the family will let you, which they usually will.

What we will not do is promise you this in early June or late September. The road over the pass is seasonal, no authority publishes an opening date, and if the snow says no we run the Kyrgyz half at lower altitude instead and tell you before you leave home.

Down to the Chuy valley and Bishkek

Off the plateau in the morning and back down the switchbacks, which look entirely different in daylight going the other way, then west along the valley towards the capital.

The stop is Burana, where a stub of a Karakhanid minaret stands alone in a field with the mountains behind it and the town it belonged to has vanished completely into the grass. Around it somebody has gathered a collection of balbals, the carved stone grave-markers of the Turkic nomads, which stand in rows looking mildly surprised. You can climb the minaret by a dark internal stair if you are neither tall nor claustrophobic.

Bishkek in the late afternoon: a planned Soviet grid with irrigation channels running down both sides of every street and the Tien Shan filling the end of each one. An hour at the Osh bazaar and dinner is the right shape for a last evening.

Depart Bishkek

Manas airport is about forty minutes out of the city and most long-haul connections leave at an hour nobody would choose, which is worth knowing before you book the flight home. If yours goes late, you keep a room for the day rather than a seat in a lobby.