Things to do in Uzbekistan

I was also considering visiting Uzbekistan last month but just don't have the time.  I think I am mainly going for the food and yes to look at the culture too.  Apparently the food is very nice and reasonably priced.   Night life should be interesting there but I am more for sightseeing.   

It's been a while since I've been there but... 

Khiva is beautiful, and different again from Bukhara and Samarkand. I went Khiva-Bukhara-Samarkand-Tashkent, and it felt like a natural progression, with each city getting larger, more cosmopolitan etc. And each city had something different about it - Khiva the old city walls are glorious; Bukhara has the covered market; Samarkand the walk of tombs, and so on. 

I know folks who went up to Moynaq and around to see what's left after the Aral Sea, but it's a looong way for not necessarily much reward, and there's less tourist infrastructure there (like, people speaking English, for example). For some reason I know the name Nukus, but don't know/ can't remember what's special about it. 

Obviously Tashkent is good; the underground/ metro stations there are absolutely glorious. And it's worth looking at the Fergana Valley; it's different again, lusher, more agricultural, and different things to see around the cotton and silk trades. 

Otherwise, I found the people to be fairly friendly and interested in tourists (Tashkent aside); getting around not particular tricky, with decent rail between Samarkand and Tashkent for example. The cops could be dodgy, in a half-hearted "we need to look in your bag, oooh, where's your passport gone, you'll need to pay us $50 to get it back" kinda way - it never felt particularly threatening, as long as you had an eye out and were alert to it; and I suspect that increased tourism has forced them to tidy up. 

We spent a few weeks there about 10 years back on our overland move from Oz to the UK. Tashkent was ok, useful base and some nice food but otherwise meh. Mostly caught sleeper train which were fantastic. We did the classic Bukhara, Samarkand, Khiva loop.  I think we both liked Bukhara the most.  Samarkand, the Registan etc is incredible but the city itself is a bit meh.  Khiva is properly lovely but maybe a bit more museum and less lived in than Bukhara.  One thing we did there which I totally recommend is get a driver out to the Eliq Khala, which are a bunch of ruined forts on the desert you can explore. 

I think the currency situation is less weird now, there was basically two exchange rates when we were there. A crap official one and a black market one that everyone used which was about 4x better.  Also taxis were regarded as dodgy but you could basically flag anyone down and negotiate a fare. We had some great rides around Tashkent via dropping someone's kids off at school etc. 

Eat plov and samsa...lovely. Try to find a Georgian restaurant too while you're out there.

There are mobile apps for taxis now - total game changer. Yandex Go (Russian-owned, so may be inaccessible now) and MyTaxi.

Thanks all, very useful - feels like our plan's a good starting point and there's some interesting stuff here we need to add in. 🙂 

Pretty well agree with the two long posts above. We had three weeks.

We did a trek in the mountains east of Tashkent and at Sentyab near lake aydar.we took the overnight train Tashkent to Khiva and then hopped back by train. The train was fabulous.

IMO Khiva (with the driver trip to the castles) and Bukhara were our favourites. The buildings in Samarkand are amazing but for a short trip I would skip. The town is more like a Disney wonderland. Not a lot in Tashkent except the wonderful underground stations.

Food is definitely hit and miss. An incredible Indian restaurant in Tashkent. Some great restaurants in Khiva and Bhukara. 

Some photos to wet your appetite https://photos.app.goo.gl/3fEz5yY86TGGNq7C7

Our treks were with Nuratau travel

Well, thank you for all of the above, we had a fab time. 😀 We managed to get direct flights to Tashkent (about 6 and a half hours each way, flew out of Gatwick and into Heathrow which worked fine - left the car at Heathrow and transferred via National Express), but the outbound flight was Sunday night and the return Friday (yesterday), so we lost a couple of days which meant skipping Khiva - ah well, a reason to go back, and we have the weekend to recover, which is ace.  😀 

Outbound left Gatwick at 18:00, arriving at 4:50 local the next morning - could NOT sleep on the flight, so we were cooked by the time we landed. We'd hoped to use Yandex but couldn't register in the UK - we both had e-sims and hoped to register in country, but neither would work on landing, and our heads would NOT work, either. We were due to be picked up by the hotel, but couldn't find the driver, couldn't then get back into the airport to buy a physical sim, couldn't use our e-sims, and airport WiFi required a working number to register and we didn't have one. An awkward start! 😬  But a $10 bill got one of the taxis to take us - probably about double the Yandex rate, by then we didn't care. 😀 Hotel was full so no chance of checking in that early, but they were very good, we bought breakfast (zero doubt the cash went straight into matey's pocket) and they let us doze in reception until the room was free about midday. If we did it again, we'd have different sim strategies (first time we've both done the same) and would book the hotel for the night before so we could get straight in for a shower and a snooze. 

We liked Tashkent! Hotel was five minutes from Chorsu bazaar, metro was easy and super-cheap (like, £0.11, no matter how far you go) and we found plenty to do in the three days we were there. Still couldn't get Yandex to work, but hotels and cafes would always call one for us - that gave us the price and we just paid cash. 

Took the overnight train from Tashkent to Bukhara - bizarrely, the metro doesn't link to either the airport or main rail station, so that was another taxi job. The overnight train was a bit nuts - seemed like absolute chaos at the train station, but the one we got on was fortunately the right one! 🙂 Didn't sleep too good, but it was an experience. 🙂 

Train station at Bukhara is well outside town (what is WITH these guys?!? 😀) but no problem to negotiate a taxi in, our guest house were great and let us straight in at eight o'clock in the morning. Lots of old stuff to look at - we had a walking tour booked in that morning, so got to have a directed and narrated look at all the main stuff. The next day was a bit rained off, but still had a nice potter about. 😀

Ww left Bukhara early the next morning for a trip via the above-mentioned Nuratau Travel - our driver picked us up bang on time, we had a trip to a family-run pottery (which was ace), looked at some pictoglyphs, stopped for lunch and had a look around a fortnight from the time of Alexander the Great. We were supposed to have a look at Lake Aydarkul but that never happened - I presume we just ran out of time, and it was never mentioned. 🙂 Stayed in a yurt one night at Sayyod in the hills, which was a very cool, very different experience, great to have some calm away from the madness of town. 🙂 Had a hike the next day, which was awesome, then off we went to Samarkand. 🙂 

We actually had a few days in Samarkand, which was cool - had a walking tour booked, which was cheap and very good, but it went on forEVER (scheduled for 3 hours, went on for 5, no food breaks, started raining at Shah-I-Zinda), and showed us pretty much everything, so we were a little bit "now what...?" So mooched about, finslly got Yandex to work (after buying a sim in Tashkent - you have tonregister it with the hovernmentbthen it takes 24 hours to work, or something), had a look at Ulugh Beg's observatory and St Daniel's massive long leg before getting the train back to Tashkent for one night then flying home. 

We had a great time. 🙂 The sights are really very beautiful, we found the people generally cheerful and wanting to talk, and the food was unexpectedly good - we had a list of things to try but no expectation that we'd particular like them that much, but it was almost all really nice food! I don't know if it's a cultural thing, but we found that service would be very quick, so a dish would very often arrive before you'd finished the one before, so it felt a bit of a race to keep up! But it was great - plov (Bukhara was our favourite), lagman, shaslik, somsa, try them all. 🙂 

It felt like a bit of an adventurous holiday to me in prospect (Mrs Pondo was more sanguine), but was actually very easy. I'd listened to a few podcasts about some of the characters you'll hear about (Temur, Ulugh Beg, Bobur) and that really helped give context to a lot of the old stuff we saw, but you don't have to, if you have a good guide. Great place, loved it. 🙂 

Ah that sounds great - fabulous to hear how it went, and it's got me pining to go back. 

You had no issues with police/ semi-official uniformed people asking to see your passport followed by asking to see dollars then? That was about the only problem I really had in Uzbekistan; as you say everyone else is quite friendly, sometimes chatty and interested in what you do and why you're there.

Glad to hear that you had a good time in Uzbekistan.  It is my to go destination which I will visit one day when I can organise my time properly.  

Posted by: nicko74

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Ah that sounds great - fabulous to hear how it went, and it's got me pining to go back. 

You had no issues with police/ semi-official uniformed people asking to see your passport followed by asking to see dollars then? That was about the only problem I really had in Uzbekistan; as you say everyone else is quite friendly, sometimes chatty and interested in what you do and why you're there.

No, no problem!  😀 We were travelling on our own so didn't speak to too many other tourists but none of the ones we spoke to mentioned anything like that either. 😀 Didn't really expect the locals to be as chatty as they were - it exposed our sporting ignorance, as we had a couple of people talk about football and bring up Man City's Khusanov (we'd never heard of him until then...), and my Djamolidine Abdoujaparov references were met with polite indifference... 🙂