Registan Walks

Samarkand before the crowds

The square is at its best in the hour after sunrise, when the tiles of the three madrasas are still cool and blue rather than bright. Street sweepers move along the edges with long brooms, a few photographers set up near the railing, and the pigeons have the whole paved centre to themselves.

From the square we walked north along the pedestrian street towards Bibi-Khanym. The shops were only half open; the bread sellers had already arrived, stacking round loaves stamped with patterns on carts covered with cloth. The mosque itself is enormous and a little tired, which somehow makes it easier to imagine how it looked when the scaffolding came down six centuries ago.

Siab bazaar starts just behind it. In the morning it smells of dill, melons and warm bread, and nobody minds if you only look. We bought dried apricots, a handful of salted apricot kernels and a bag of raisins in three colours, and then sat for a long time with green tea on the low steps by the gate.

• The square is free to walk around; the madrasa courtyards need a single ticket.
• Shah-i-Zinda is a short walk from the bazaar and is quietest before nine.
• Carry small notes: change for large bills is often a problem at stalls.

The Tashkent metro, station by station

The metro is the best way to understand how large Tashkent is, and also the most pleasant museum in the city. Each station on the old lines has its own idea: cotton bolls in plaster, ceramic panels, chandeliers like stacked bowls, columns covered in carved marble. Photography has been allowed for years now, and the trains are frequent and cool even in August.

We spent an afternoon riding the blue line from end to end and getting off wherever the platform looked interesting. Kosmonavtlar is the famous one, with portraits on dark blue ceramic and lights that look like a slow night sky. Alisher Navoi has domes and deep turquoise ornament. Some of the newer surface stations on the ring line feel completely different: open, airy, with views over courtyards and building sites.

A transport card works on the metro and on city buses. It is worth topping it up for a week rather than buying single rides.

Chorsu on a Saturday

The green dome of Chorsu is visible from the metro exit, and from there the bazaar spreads out in every direction. Under the dome are the meat and dairy halls: rows of white-coated sellers, mountains of suzma and kurt, the dry salted cheese balls that every family seems to buy by the kilogram. Outside, the fruit rows run in long lines of pomegranates, grapes, figs and the first quinces of autumn.

We came for spices and stayed for the bread. In one corner the samsa ovens work non-stop, and the queue moves quickly because everybody knows exactly what they want: two with meat, one with pumpkin, wrapped in paper. Across the road are the old streets of the mahalla around Kukeldash madrasa, where the noise of the bazaar falls away in a hundred metres.

• Saturday and Sunday mornings are the busiest and the most fun.
• Bargaining is normal for souvenirs, much less so for food.
• Bring a bag; plastic is being phased out at many stalls.

Bukhara: the courtyards behind the walls

In Bukhara the monuments are close together and the old town is small enough to cross on foot in half an hour, which makes it the most relaxing of the big cities. We stayed in a guesthouse with a courtyard and a mulberry tree, and every evening the owner served tea on a raised platform covered with carpets.

The days fell into a pattern. Morning at the Kalon minaret before the tour groups, then the covered trading domes where coppersmiths and knife makers still work. Lunch by Lyabi-Hauz, the old pool under the mulberry trees, where the shade is the real attraction. Long afternoons wandering the lanes of the Jewish quarter and the residential streets west of the Ark, where children play football against carved wooden doors.

The fortress walls of the Ark are most beautiful at the end of the day, when the brick turns gold. From the top of the walls you can see the whole town: flat roofs, satellite dishes, domes, and beyond them the long brown line of the desert.

A train across the steppe

The fast train runs between the three cities in a few hours, and it is booked out on many days, so we bought tickets a week ahead. The carriages are clean and quiet, and the attendants come round with tea and small packets of biscuits. Outside the window the cotton fields give way to dry hills, then to long flat stretches with only a road, a line of poplars and the occasional village of low houses with blue gates.

The slower day trains are cheaper and much more social. People share bread, ask where you are from and recommend their cousin's guesthouse in the next town. If you have the time, one slow train in each direction is a good balance.

Times are approximate and depend on the train; check the current timetable at the station or on the railway website before planning a connection.

Khiva at dusk

Itchan Kala, the walled inner town of Khiva, is a complete museum in which people still live. In the middle of the day it can feel like a film set, but at dusk the visitors leave, the shops roll down their shutters and the clay walls glow orange for a few minutes before everything goes grey and blue.

We climbed the wall near the west gate for the sunset, then walked slowly back through the lanes past the unfinished Kalta Minor minaret, its turquoise tiles still faintly visible in the last light. Dinner was in a courtyard restaurant: shivit oshi, the green dill noodles of Khorezm, with yoghurt and a meat stew poured on top.

• A single ticket covers most of the museums inside the walls for two days.
• The town is small: two full days are enough, three is a luxury.
• Nights are cold from late October; bring a warm layer.

Up to Chimgan for a day

When the city gets too hot, everyone with a car drives east towards the mountains. Chimgan and the Charvak reservoir are less than two hours from the centre, and the air changes completely: dry grass, juniper, the sound of water somewhere below the road.

We took a shared taxi to the foot of the chairlift and then walked up the ridge on foot rather than riding. The path is steep but clear, with views back over the turquoise water of the reservoir. Near the top there are shepherds with horses for hire, and in the hollows the grass is still green in September. We ate bread, cheese and grapes on a rock and watched the paragliders circling over the valley.

In the evening the road back is slow, with every car stopping at the roadside stalls for apples, honey and kurt. It is part of the trip; do not plan anything important for the evening.

Plov, properly

Every region of Uzbekistan cooks plov differently, and every family believes its own version is the right one. In Tashkent the big plov centres cook it in enormous kazans from early morning and it is a lunchtime dish: by two in the afternoon the best places have run out.

The basics are always the same. Lamb or beef fried in a lot of oil, onions and long strips of yellow and red carrots, then rice laid on top and steamed until every grain is separate. Then the differences start: chickpeas, raisins, quail eggs, a whole head of garlic buried in the middle, slices of horse sausage on special days.

• Order by weight or by portion; a small portion is still a lot.
• Plov comes with a salad of tomatoes and onions and plenty of green tea.
• In Samarkand the rice is often cooked separately and the plov is lighter in colour.

Tea houses and the art of sitting

The chaikhana is where nothing in particular happens for a long time. Older men sit on raised wooden platforms covered with carpets and cushions, around a low table with a pot of green tea, a dish of sugar crystals and a plate of bread. Conversations drift, someone plays backgammon, the radio plays songs from the seventies.

In Margilan we found a tea house by a canal under huge plane trees and went back three days in a row. The silk workshops nearby still weave ikat on wooden looms, and by the third afternoon the owner was sending his nephew to bring us fresh samsa from across the road. Nobody was in a hurry, and after a while neither were we.

Tea is poured back and forth from cup to pot three times before it is served; it is a way of mixing it, and it is polite to wait. The cup is only ever half filled, so that the host can keep refilling it — a full cup means it is time to leave.

Shah-i-Zinda, slowly

The avenue of mausoleums climbs a hillside just outside the old city wall, and the best way to see it is to stop every few steps. Each small building has its own tilework: carved terracotta glazed in turquoise and cobalt, geometric bands that look simple from a distance and turn out to be endlessly complicated up close, calligraphy wrapped around doorways like ribbon.

Pilgrims walk the stairs alongside visitors, and many count the steps on the way up and again on the way down; tradition says that if the two numbers match, your wishes are pure. We lost count both times. At the top there is a quiet courtyard with a view over the old cemetery and the domes of the city, and an old man selling cold water from a cooler box.

• Shoulders and knees should be covered; scarves are available at the entrance.
• The light on the tiles is best in the morning, when the sun comes from the east.
• The cemetery behind the complex is still in use; walk there quietly.

Old Tashkent: the mahalla around Hast Imam

Most of old Tashkent was lost in the earthquake of 1966, but a few neighbourhoods of narrow lanes and mud-brick walls survive west of Chorsu. Walking from the bazaar towards the Hast Imam complex, you pass doorways painted blue and green, vines climbing over the lanes on wires, and the occasional open gate that shows a courtyard with a tapchan under a fruit tree.

The complex itself is large and calm, with a modern mosque, an old madrasa now full of craft workshops, and a library that holds one of the oldest known copies of the Quran. In the workshops we watched a woodcarver cutting a pattern into a door panel and a miniature painter working with a brush of a few cat hairs.

It is easy to get lost in the lanes, and that is the point. Every few minutes someone asks if you need help, and directions are given with great confidence and very little accuracy.

Nurata and a night in a yurt

Between Samarkand and Bukhara, a long detour to the north leads to the Nuratau mountains and the edge of the Kyzylkum desert. The town of Nurata has a spring-fed pool full of sacred fish and the ruins of a fortress said to have been founded by Alexander the Great. Beyond it the road crosses empty steppe to the shores of Lake Aydarkul.

We spent a night in a yurt camp near the lake. Dinner was cooked over a fire, a local musician played the dombra and sang long songs that nobody translated, and after midnight the sky was so full of stars that it was hard to find the familiar constellations. In the morning there was a short camel ride, which was mostly an exercise in staying on, and then a swim in the cold, slightly salty lake.

• Nights in the desert are cold even in early autumn.
• Mobile coverage is patchy around the lake; download maps in advance.
• Camps usually arrange transfers from Samarkand or Bukhara.

Margilan silk

In the Yodgorlik workshop the whole process of making silk is still done by hand, from boiling the cocoons to tying and dyeing the threads for ikat. The patterns are planned before the threads are woven: bundles of warp threads are tied tightly with cotton and dipped in colour again and again, so that when the cloth is finally woven the design appears with its characteristic blurred edges.

The dyes are mostly natural: pomegranate skins for yellow, madder root for red, indigo for blue, walnut shells for brown. The weavers work at wooden looms that rattle so loudly that conversation is impossible, and a metre of the finest atlas takes many days. In the shop at the end of the tour, prices are fixed and very reasonable for the work involved.

On Thursdays and Sundays the Kumtepa bazaar outside Margilan is the place to see the valley in full colour: silk, cotton, carpets, sheep, tractors and endless stalls of melons.

Small things that helped

• Cash is still useful at bazaars and in small towns, though cards now work in most hotels, cafés and train stations in the big cities.
• Ride-hailing apps work well in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara; prices are shown before the ride.
• Guesthouses often include a generous breakfast: eggs, bread, honey, cream, fruit and endless tea.
• Many monuments close one day a week or for prayer times; it is worth checking the day before.
• Learning a few words of Uzbek — assalomu alaykum, rahmat, qancha? — opens many doors and starts many conversations.
• Tap water is not recommended for drinking; bottled water is cheap everywhere.
• Public toilets at stations and bazaars charge a small fee, so keep a few coins.
• Domestic flights between Tashkent, Urgench and Nukus save a long day on the train when time is short.

Most of all, leave space in the plan. The best afternoons on these walks were the unplanned ones: an invitation to a wedding in a courtyard, a long conversation with a retired teacher on a park bench, a melon shared on a train with a family going home to Karshi.

Bread, everywhere

Non, the round flat bread, is at the centre of every meal and is treated with great respect: it is never placed upside down, never thrown away and is always broken by hand rather than cut. Each city has its own style. Samarkand bread is heavy, dense and glossy and keeps for days; it is the one that people carry home as a gift. Tashkent bread is lighter and best eaten warm from the tandoor. In Khorezm the loaves are thinner and decorated with sesame and nigella seeds.

Bakeries are often just a tandoor oven in a courtyard and a window to the street. Early in the morning the baker slaps rounds of dough onto the hot clay walls of the oven with a padded cushion, and a few minutes later lifts them out with a hook. The smell carries for a whole block, and the first batch is usually gone before the sun is properly up.

Seasons, briefly

Spring has its own charm, especially around Navruz in late March, when families cook sumalak, a sweet paste of sprouted wheat stirred all night in huge cauldrons, and the parks fill with picnics, music and kites. In summer, the only sensible plan in the plains is to walk early, rest through the heat of the afternoon in a shaded courtyard, and go out again after sunset, when the whole city seems to come outside at once.

Autumn is our favourite season: the bazaars are at their fullest, the light is soft, and the long walks between monuments are comfortable from morning to night.