Where the Silk Road still stands.
Registan at opening time, the Bukhara trading domes, a night in a Kyzylkum yurt camp and the fast train that links them. What each tour is like, what it costs, where to book.
The seven that carry an Uzbekistan trip.
Four days or two weeks, these anchor the trip. A guide who knows which madrasa to walk into first, a mountain day an hour out of Tashkent, a desert camp where dinner is cooked over fire.
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Tashkent to Samarkand and back by dark.
The Afrosiyob leaves Tashkent after breakfast and puts you under the Registan two hours later. Guides meet the train, the domes fill the afternoon, and the last service home still gets you back for a late dinner. Almost every first trip is built around this one day.
Which city do you start with?
Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva sit on the same railway line and all three get called the highlight. They are not interchangeable. Pick the one that matches how you like to travel, and every tour behind it is already priced and rated.
The showstopper
Samarkand first
5 hours · from $20 · 446 reviews
Three madrasas on one square, the Shah-i-Zinda staircase of tombs, Timur under a ribbed dome the colour of a gas flame. Everything is monumental and everything is walkable, which makes it the easiest city to read on day one. Two hours from Tashkent by fast train.
See the Samarkand tours →
The lived-in one
Bukhara first
from $65 · 66 reviews
A whole old town rather than a set of monuments: trading domes still selling scissors and silk, a minaret Genghis Khan chose not to knock down, hammams working since the sixteenth century. Best if you would rather wander for two days than tick anything off.
See the Bukhara tours →
The walled one
Khiva first
from $25 · 15 reviews
Ichan Kala is a desert fort you sleep inside, small enough to walk end to end before breakfast and lit low enough after dark to feel staged. It sits furthest from Tashkent, so most people pair it with the Khorezm fortresses or the long road down to Bukhara.
See the Khiva tours →
The desert keeps the best nights.
Two hours north of the highway the Kyzylkum flattens out and Aydarkul appears where no lake should be. Dinner comes off a fire, a camel wanders past at dusk, the yurt has more blankets than anyone needs, and there is no other light for a hundred kilometres.
Plov is a whole afternoon.
The rice goes into a cast-iron kazan the size of a bicycle wheel and nobody hurries it. These classes start at the market, move to somebody’s kitchen, and finish at the table with the family who cooked it.
Suzani, ikat and wet clay.
Rishtan blue exists nowhere else, the silk under the Bukhara domes is still woven on wooden looms, and the pottery sessions hand you the wheel rather than a finished bowl. Half a day, and you leave carrying the thing you made.
Bukhara never stopped trading.
There are still shopkeepers under the trading domes, the Kalyan minaret has been guiding caravans for nine hundred years, and at six in the evening the whole town comes out to sit around Lyabi Hauz. A guide is the difference between a pretty walk and understanding what you are looking at.
Pick your city, then your desert.
Uzbekistan travels in a line. Samarkand for the monuments. Bukhara for the old town. Khiva for the walls. Then everything either side of the railway: mud fortresses, yurt camps and the dry bed of a sea.
Know the shape of your day?
Twelve kinds of day, all in the same country. A morning on foot, a night under canvas, a whole week on the train. Choose the shape and the list behind it is ready to book.
Half of Uzbekistan is a day trip.
Fast trains and empty roads put the mud fortresses, the Tian Shan foothills and the birthplace of Timur all between two hotel breakfasts. The seat home is part of the booking.
Three days, three cities.
Uzbekistan rewards a straight line. Land in Tashkent, take the train west, and give each city a single day. This is the order that wastes the least time.
Day 1
Tashkent, then the train
Chorsu bazaar while the bread is still warm, the metro stations that were built to be looked at, plov for lunch. Book the evening Afrosiyob and wake up in Samarkand.
See Tashkent tours →
Day 2
The Samarkand day
Registan at opening, Shah-i-Zinda before the coaches reach it, Gur-e-Amir once the light drops. If you stand still only once in Uzbekistan, do it here.
See Samarkand tours →
Day 3
Bukhara, slowly
A morning through the trading domes, a hammam in the heat of the afternoon, then a table at Lyabi Hauz as the town comes out. Add Khiva if you have a fourth day.
See Bukhara tours →
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