Travel brings us many things. Each time I arrive somewhere new, I enjoy different foods, customs, and meeting new people. Although well-travelled over the years, I had never been to Central Asia. Having read so much of Uzbekistan’s history and its exploration, I settled on travel there, for its abundance of rich cultural crossroads.
I looked forward to the destination with a zeal that surprised me.
In Uzbekistan with my parents, we discovered ancient history at every turn
Uzbekistan lies squarely in Central Asia between two converging mountain ranges, north and south, and a broad desert and steppe in the west. To the north of the country is Kazakhstan; to the south, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan; to the east, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Even western China is only a few hours’ drive away. It took 20 hours to fly from Victoria to Seattle to Doha in Qatar, and then Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital.
My interest in the region started years ago. In my mid-20s, I read Mountains of the Gods by Ian Cameron. It described hidden mountain passes, early Western explorers encountering remote kingdoms, and tales of capture and escape from foreign rulers. It was a magical read and I determined to visit Central Asia one day to see what vestiges of intrigue and bygone realms might still exist.
I engaged a local fixer to be able to explore on my own rather than going with an established tour operator. I paid him a lump sum of US$2,000, which included his fee as well as in-country flights, rail fees, about half my hotel nights (I stayed longer in some cities at additional expense), local city guides, entrance fees and so on. Food was not included.
The Chorsu Bazaar in the centre of Tashkent’s old town. Under the large, multilevel domed structure, visitors can shop for fresh produce, spices, dried fruits and nuts, and sample traditional Uzbek cusine.
I didn’t need to see Uzbekistan this way (and might have saved several hundred dollars by going it alone) but having someone local to organize things removed much stress and opened up options I might not have known about otherwise. It was money well-spent.
I travelled for three weeks in Uzbekistan, eager to find out what modern Uzbeks were like. I wondered: Do they resemble Tibetans? (Sometimes, yes.) Do they resemble Indians? (Sometimes, yes.) And what about Chinese influence in their genetic makeup, or Russian for that matter?
Soviet-era trinkets, remnants of the country’s past as a constituent republic of the USSR, are sold in the maidan in Bukhara.
The truth is that modern Uzbeks are all of these combined. They truly are a mix of all the peoples who travelled through there over the centuries, from Constantinople to eastern China and all points in between.
The mix of peoples is not modern; it is ancient and has been going on for well more than a millennium. That realization gave me pause and I smiled a little at the history lesson I saw before me: People striding to and fro buying groceries, cooking at roadside stands, taking tickets, selling trinkets, laughing with children.
Tashkent, Samarkand, Kokand, Bukhara, Khiva, Ferghana: All of these are Uzbekistan’s Silk Road cities, full of magical stories of back-of-beyond adventure, camel caravans loaded with silks and spices, adobe buildings lining murky back streets with the scent of hashish drifting in the air.
Filtering through this, too, is the history of the Great Game, as it’s called – the struggle between Czarist Russia and Imperial Britain from the 1830s and 1914 for trade and influence in this region. Czarist Russia had long had designs on taking India from the British and Uzbekistan played an important role.
But modern Uzbekistan is not like this history. It is a thriving, progressive, Islamic society more open to change and trends than I expected. There are Apple computer stores in Tashkent and Samarkand. Italian designer Ermenegildo Zegna has a store in the capital. The rate of development and construction is startling in what seems to be so remote a country.
But Uzbeks have been quietly building their country up out of the desert in a way that has attracted much attention in the region. Medicine and patient care are well established as are dental practices. Tourism is doing very well, pulling in mostly Europeans.
A restaurant perched on a mountain at Amirsoy resort in Chimgan, Uzbekistan. Visitors come to the area for downhill skiing and snowboarding in winter.
But they are not coming for the food. I found the local dishes unremarkable in this meat-heavy culture. That might be because I am gluten-free and ended up subsisting on chicken salad and peeled fruit. Even plain rice dishes were difficult to come by unless ordering the national dish plov – a kind of oiled rice pilaf with soft vegetables and a skewer or two of meat. Shashlik, or skewered cuts of lamb/beef, are often popular on their own as an entree.
As I explored, I noticed huge infrastructure projects are under way. New Tashkent is being built on the outskirts of the current capital with much on the go already. Reportedly it will soon accommodate an additional two million inhabitants on top of the five to six million currently living in the capital.
There are two enormous sports stadiums built beside each other – each the size of Calgary’s Saddledome, one resembling it and the other looking like a giant doughnut. You can even go snowboarding or downhill skiing in the winter at Chimgan, a Soviet-built ski resort some 80 kilometres northeast of the capital.
It’s fair to say the Russians have been in Uzbekistan for a long time. Early incursions, courtesy of czars Paul and Alexander in the mid-1700s and then on into the early 1800s, led to the Russians building wide roads, leafy suburbs and railways to and from the Motherland. Tashkent was thought of, for many years, as one of the four greatest cities in all of Czarist Russia.
So much history in this one nation, and so much modernity. The two don’t quite mesh in the way they do in Egypt, for example. No matter where you go in Egypt, Heliopolis or the Valley of the Kings, you always know you’re in the same country. Not so in Uzbekistan.
In the 1960s, the Russians, with keen attention to detail, rebuilt almost from scratch many of the fabled structures from antiquity in Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. The decimation of ancient buildings and cities by the Mongols in the 13th century didn’t leave much to rebuild from.
Khiva is often touted as an open-air museum, but a closer look reveals the complete reconstruction of mosques, madrassas, even side streets – and that should be understood when gazing at the restored architecture and Islamic tilework.
Walking through the old city gives one a sense of wandering through a movie set, or a theme park. The dust of the desert is here, but it doesn’t have the historical truth of Cairo or other cities in the Levant.
I was taken aback by what I found in Uzbekistan, but I realized that what I had expected was wholly informed by the history I’d read. I am glad I visited and travelled the length and breadth of the country. How else would I have known its modern circumstances? As for my next trip, I have begun to wonder about Tajikistan. I understand it has massive mountain ranges.
Tashkent is home to the oldest subway system in Central Asia, and is recognized for its impressive station architecture.
If you go
From the West Coast, flights to Uzbekistan pivot out of Seattle to Doha, Qatar (14½-hour flight), before a roughly four-hour flight to Tashkent. Flights from Eastern Canada generally pivot through Frankfurt.
Tour operators offering trips to Uzbekistan include G Adventures as well as Wild Frontiers.
Uzbekistan is more than affordable. Fast trains run between several of the major cities. A ticket for the two-hour ride from Tashkent to Samarkand was $60 (first-class coach).
Decent three- and four-star hotels run between $80 and $100 a night. Hotels always came with full buffet breakfast. WiFi was readily available in all locations.
U.S. cash is king. Do not take Canadian dollars. Do not rely on banking machines to offer access to your debit account. You can use your credit card for hotels and some store purchases, but you should bring what cash you need with you on arrival. Make sure those bills are new issue. You will have difficulty exchanging older bills.
