Travelling time: 09:30 – 13:30 – Distance: 206 miles – Temperature: 16 – 22°C

“Hassan

We travel not for trafficking alone: 

By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned: 

For lust of knowing what should not be known

We make the golden journey to Samarkand.”

James Flecker, 1913

We had read and heard so much of the ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand that we were very excited to be on our way, leaving Tashkent on a clear and cool day, perfect for travelling.

The roads from Tashkent to Samarkand are very good, most probably to serve the slowly growing international tourist presence (notably groups of retired Europeans), and so we made far swifter progress than usual and arrived at our hotel in the early afternoon.

Throughout the journey there were regularly posted melon and fruit sellers on the sides of the road making punctuations of colour along the flat landscape, albeit bordered by the Turkestan Mountains to the southwest and the Nurota Hills to the northeast. The proximity to Afghanistan came as an unexpected realisation whilst map reading – our schooled knowledge of this region frequently shown to be lacking!  The cotton harvest was well underway and bands of cotton pickers were in evidence all long the route giving colour to the fields of fading crops.

Labour intensive hand picking of seed cotton

Seed cotton ready to harvest; a vital cap for this region’s economy

Roadside fruit stalls

An example of the Soviet style signage absorbed into modern day Uzbekistan

The wast open road

Opportunistic storks on stalks!

We arrived in the remarkable city of Samarkand. While steeped in so much history it has the very modern feel of a new university city in the centre. However, beware anyone veering off the main roads as one quickly descends to the typical potholed Uzbek street and the real locales of the Uzbeks! Knowing that we only had one full day in Samarkand we spent the afternoon walking to the nearer sites and planning the best use of time for our visits the following day.

Samarkand holds some of the most impressive Islamic architecture in the world, brilliant with turquoise and lapis majolica tile work, and was most significantly the seat of Amir Temur, known historically in the West as Tamerlane – Timur the Lame. He was damaged in both his right arm and leg as a young man, attributed to an inauspicious encounter while stealing sheep!  Under Temur’s rule  Samarkand was the ancient capital city of a much larger Uzbekistan in the 14^th and 15^th centuries.

Amir Temur – the mighty Tatar

Temur deserves much more attention here but suffice to say in a nutshell, he was a thug of a Tatar warrior, ostensibly carrying the sword of Islam, who conquered huge swathes of land and peoples from Bagdad to Delhi paving the way for his immediate descendants to establish seats of great Islamic, philosophical and mathematical learning and ultimately founding the Mughal dynasty, ruling India until 1858.

Our hotel manager was very obliging with advice and recommendations, not only for restaurants but also for sharing the knowledge of a rare diesel pump hidden away in the back streets! Armed with a map for our site seeing the next day we headed out for a late supper at a nearby restaurant called Atlas Xan for possibly the best food in Uzbekistan – and certainly the best value. (Dining out well in Uzbekistan is possibly the best value of anywhere in the world that we’ve yet encountered.) While the young staff spoke not enough English for us to confidently order something recognisable from the Russian menu (I really should have bought an English-Russian dictionary and learnt the Cyrillic alphabet) they brought out the most knock dishes of perfectly cooked meat, grilled veg and salads. To finish there was much conferring between the three delightful waiters who announced they would bring what I thought they called ‘chocolate Fanta’. Not a fan of Fanta myself I thought it would be awful to decline such sweet attention and was soon thrilled receive the most prefect hot chocolate fondant pudding. It was heaven! (I hadn’t seen chocolate for weeks.)

What a result the outing had been, and such a successful surprise. Food and beers for two in a beautiful traditional yet modern Uzbek restaurant for the equivalent of £11.20!