Four Silk Road cities, nine nights, one party

Arrive Tashkent

Met at the airport and driven in. Most European arrivals land at an uncivilised hour, so the day is deliberately empty and the room is held from the night before your arrival date where the hotel allows it.

Tashkent is not what people come to Uzbekistan for and it repays a day anyway. An earthquake levelled the centre in 1966 and the Soviet Union rebuilt it as a showpiece, which is why the capital looks nothing like the three cities that follow.

Tashkent

The morning is Khast Imam, where the Uthman Quran is kept — one of the oldest surviving manuscript copies anywhere, and a queue-free ten minutes if you are there at opening. Then Chorsu bazaar under its blue dome, which is a working market and not a display: bread, dried apricots, horse sausage, and the sound level of a market that has been there for centuries.

The afternoon is the metro. Photography was banned in it until 2018, which is why so few travellers know that the stations are chandeliered, tiled and themed, and riding four or five of them is a better hour than most museums in the city.

Tashkent to Samarkand on the Afrosiyob

Morning train, about two and a half hours, and the difference between this and the road is most of a day. Economy fares run around 311,000 som, business around 455,000 som and the VIP saloon around 709,000 som at 2026 prices; we book business as standard because the seat pitch matters on a train this full.

The Registan in the late afternoon. Three madrasas on three sides of a square that was the civic centre of Timur's empire and was still a grain market in the nineteenth century. Go in the last hour of light rather than at midday: the tile is glazed and it throws the low sun back at you.

Samarkand

Shah-i-Zinda at opening. It is a lane of tomb chambers climbing a hillside, each face tiled by a different hand across three centuries, and it is narrow enough that forty people turn it into a corridor. Being there first is the whole point.

Then Bibi Khanym, which was built too fast and too large and began falling down within the builder's lifetime, and Gur-e-Amir, where Timur is buried under a slab of dark jade. The afternoon is the Ulugh Beg observatory: what survives is the buried arc of a sextant cut into rock, used by an astronomer prince to measure the year to within a minute of the modern figure.

Samarkand, at your own speed, or over the pass

A free day with two arguments for how to spend it. Staying put: the Afrosiyob site on the edge of town, where the pre-Mongol city stood and where the seventh-century ambassadors' fresco is kept, and the paper workshop at Konigil, which makes mulberry-bark paper the way it was made here before the craft reached Europe.

Going out: Shakhrisabz, over the mountains to the south, where Timur was born and where the gate of his palace still stands at a scale nothing else in the country matches. It is a full day and a mountain road, and in early April the pass can still hold snow.

Samarkand to Bukhara

West by train where the timetable allows and by car where it does not; either way it is a morning, and the country in between is cotton, canals and flat light. Bukhara in the afternoon, starting at Lyab-i-Hauz, the pool the old town is arranged around, under mulberry trees that are older than most of the buildings facing them.

Bukhara is the one city on this route where the monuments are not set apart from the town. People live in it. The trading domes still trade, mostly in scarves and knives now rather than in silk and books, and you walk between sights rather than driving.

Bukhara on foot

The Kalyan minaret is the thing Genghis Khan is said to have spared, and it has stood over the city since the twelfth century. Around it: the Kalyan mosque, the Mir-i-Arab madrasa which is a working seminary and not open to visitors, and the Ark, the fortress the emirs ruled from until 1920.

The Samanid mausoleum in the park to the west is the oldest thing here and the best, a cube of patterned brick from the tenth century that survived because it was buried in silt for several hundred years. Late afternoon at Sitorai Mokhi Khosa outside town, the last emir's summer palace, which is where Bukhara stops being medieval and turns into a Russian province.

Bukhara to Khiva across the Kyzylkum

The long day of this journey, and there is no way to make it short. The road runs northwest across the Kyzylkum, the red sand desert, with the Amu Darya on one side for part of it and nothing at all on the other. Lunch is at a roadside place chosen for the fact that it is the only one, and the tea is better than the food.

Khiva appears as a wall in the middle of irrigated fields. You go inside it and stay inside it: the hotel is within the Ichan Kala, so the walled city is yours after the day visitors leave at five.

Khiva

The whole walled city is the museum and it takes a morning to cross properly: the Kalta Minor, the fat turquoise minaret that was abandoned unfinished, the Juma mosque with its forest of carved wooden columns and its single hole of light in the roof, and the Islam Khoja minaret, which can be climbed by a dark spiral stair if you are neither tall nor claustrophobic.

The afternoon is free and most people spend it on the wall walk or in the silk-carpet workshop, where the dyes are still made from madder, indigo and pomegranate rind. Khiva is smaller and more restored than Bukhara, and it is fair to say some of it is reconstruction. It is also the only one of the four you can walk out of your hotel at six in the morning and have entirely to yourself.

Depart Urgench

Breakfast, then the drive across the irrigated plain to Urgench airport for the flight to Tashkent or a regional connection. Departures from here are thin on the ground, so the last night is set by the flight and not the other way round.