The Last Great Wilderness Trek: Mongolia
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Silk Road Adventure: Uzbekistan
Twelve days along the heart of the ancient Silk Road, from the blue domes of Samarkand and the medieval alleyways of Bukhara to mountain trails above Tashkent and a night under the stars in a Kyzylkum desert yurt camp.
- Duration
- 12 days, 11 nights
- Difficulty
- MediumFull days on mixed terrain, at a steady pace.
- Price
- From £2,895 per person
Trip highlights
- Three UNESCO Silk Road cities — Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, each one a World Heritage Site and each one completely different in character.
- The Registan by night — Three vast madrasahs facing one another across a square, floodlit after dark. Many people call it the most beautiful square on earth, and they have a point.
- A night in a desert yurt camp — Camel riding in the Kyzylkum, sunset over the dunes, traditional music around the fire and a night under an enormous sky.
- The Chimgan mountains — Two days of walking, cable car viewpoints and traditional villages in the mountains above Tashkent, well away from the tourist trail.
- Travel like a local, fast — Uzbekistan's high speed rail network links the Silk Road cities, which means more time in them and less time on a coach.
- Bazaars, domes and artisans — Chorsu, Siab and the trading domes of Bukhara, plus the workshops of Khiva where the old crafts are still worked by hand.
About this adventure
Some countries you visit. Uzbekistan you walk into, and then wonder why nobody told you sooner.
This is the heart of the ancient Silk Road, where caravans once carried silk, spice and ideas between China and the Mediterranean, and where the cities they built are still standing. Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva are three of the great historic cities of the world, all UNESCO listed, all extraordinary, and all still comparatively quiet by the standards of anywhere else with architecture this good.
We travel between them by high speed train, but we also go where the coaches do not. Up into the Chimgan mountains for walking and big valley views, and out into the Kyzylkum desert to ride camels, eat around a fire and sleep in a traditional yurt camp with nothing overhead but stars.
Culture, history, adventure and genuinely good food, in a group of no more than twelve. This is Uzbekistan beyond the guidebooks.
Day by day
Day 1Arrival in Tashkent
You arrive into Tashkent, where we meet you at the airport and transfer you to our centrally located hotel.
Tashkent is not what most people expect. Rebuilt on a grand Soviet scale after the earthquake of 1966, it is wide, green, orderly and full of surprises, and it makes a very easy landing pad for a first trip to Central Asia.
There is time to shower and rest before we gather in the evening for a welcome dinner and the expedition briefing, where you meet your fellow travellers and we run through the twelve days ahead.
Day 2Exploring Tashkent
A full day introduction to modern Uzbekistan and to the country you are about to travel across.
We start under the great blue dome of Chorsu Bazaar, which is a working market rather than a tourist one: mountains of dried apricots and melon, spice cones, bread stalls and butchers, and traders who will happily feed you samples all morning. From there we walk the surviving old town quarters and visit the Hazrati Imam complex, home to one of the oldest Qurans in the world.
We also ride the Tashkent metro, which is an attraction in its own right. Each station was designed as a piece of public art, all marble, chandeliers and mosaics, and photography is now permitted, which it was not for decades.
The evening is at leisure, and your leader will point you towards the best places to eat.
Day 3Into the Chimgan mountains
We leave Tashkent behind and drive up into the Chimgan region, in the foothills of the Western Tian Shan. The change is fast and total: within two hours the city gives way to orchards, then to river gorges, then to open mountainside with snow still lying on the high tops in early season.
We take the cable car up for the viewpoints, walk a section of mountain trail at an easy pace, and stop in traditional villages along the way. This is where people from Tashkent come to escape the summer heat, and where very few foreign visitors ever bother to go.
The sunset over the valleys from up here is the reason we stay two nights rather than one.
Day 4Chimgan adventure day
A whole day to enjoy the mountains, built to suit whatever you feel like doing.
There is guided trekking for those who want to walk properly, with routes chosen on the day to match the group and the conditions. There is horse riding, which is how people have always moved through these valleys. There are gentler photography walks, and there is time to wander the local villages and simply sit somewhere with a view and a pot of green tea.
Nothing today is compulsory and everything is suitable for all fitness levels. It is a deliberate breathing space in the middle of a trip that is otherwise full of cities, and by tomorrow evening you will be standing in front of the Registan.
Day 5High speed train to Samarkand
We transfer back down to Tashkent and board the high speed train to Samarkand. Uzbekistan's rail network is genuinely excellent, and the journey that used to eat most of a day now takes a little over two hours through steppe and cotton country.
Samarkand needs no introduction. Tamerlane's capital, a city that has been trading, building and rebuilding for two and a half thousand years, and the name that more than any other stands for the Silk Road.
We save the best for tonight. Our first visit is to the Registan after dark, when the three great madrasahs are floodlit and the square is quiet. Seeing it lit for the first time, before you have seen it in daylight, is a deliberate choice and it lands every time.
Day 6The wonders of Samarkand
A full day with a local specialist guide, and one of the great days of sightseeing anywhere.
We start in daylight at the Registan, then walk the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis, an avenue of tombs tiled in every conceivable shade of blue and turquoise, which is quite possibly the most beautiful place in the country. We visit the enormous Bibi-Khanym Mosque, built for Tamerlane's wife and so ambitious that it began collapsing almost immediately, and the Gur-e-Amir Mausoleum where Tamerlane himself lies.
We also spend time in the Siab bazaar next to Bibi-Khanym, which is where Samarkand actually shops: bread stamped with wooden seals, dried fruit, nuts, spices and a great deal of good natured haggling.
This evening we eat together, a proper traditional Uzbek dinner with plov done the way Samarkand does it.
Day 7Samarkand to Bukhara
We take the high speed train west across the heart of the Silk Road to Bukhara, roughly ninety minutes through open country that has been crossed by traders for two thousand years.
Bukhara is the opposite of Samarkand in character. Where Samarkand is monumental, built to impress and spread out across a modern city, Bukhara is intimate and continuous. The old town is largely intact, low and sand coloured, and you wander into things rather than being driven to them.
We arrive with time to settle in, then head out on foot in the evening when the heat has gone and the monuments are lit. The streets around Lyabi-Hauz come alive after dark, with families out, tea being drunk under the mulberry trees and the old trading domes glowing.
Day 8Discovering Bukhara
A full day exploring one of the best preserved medieval cities in Central Asia. Bukhara has more than a hundred protected monuments and, unusually, they sit inside a living town rather than behind a fence.
We visit the Ark Fortress, the vast mud brick citadel that was the seat of the emirs, and stand beneath the Kalon Minaret, which is forty six metres of twelfth century brickwork so impressive that Genghis Khan is said to have spared it while levelling everything around it.
We walk the trading domes, the covered bazaars where money changers, hat makers and jewellers have worked in the same spots for five hundred years, and spend time around Lyabi-Hauz, the shaded pool square at the heart of the old town.
This evening there is a traditional cultural performance, with music, costume and dance, which is a great deal more enjoyable than that description makes it sound.
Day 9Into the Kyzylkum Desert
We leave the cities behind and drive out into the Kyzylkum, the red sand desert that Silk Road caravans had to cross and that swallowed a fair number of them.
Our yurt camp sits out in the dunes, well away from anything. In the afternoon there are camels, which are more comfortable than you expect and funnier than you expect, and time to walk out among the dunes as the light goes long and gold. Sunset here is enormous, because there is absolutely nothing in the way of it.
After dinner there is traditional music around the fire, and then the thing everybody remembers: the sky. With no light for a hundred kilometres in any direction the stars are genuinely startling, and most of the group ends up lying on their backs on the sand rather than going to bed.
The yurts are traditional, warm and comfortable. The facilities are simple. That is entirely the point.
Day 10Desert crossing to Khiva
A long drive today through some of the emptiest country in Central Asia, following the line the caravans took towards the Khorezm oasis. There is very little out here beyond sand, scrub and the occasional roadside stop, and that emptiness is exactly what makes the arrival so good.
Because eventually the walls appear. Khiva's old city, Itchan Kala, is enclosed by ten metre mud brick walls and is unlike anywhere else in Uzbekistan. It is small, complete, and so intact that it can feel like a film set until you notice that people still live there.
We arrive with time to get inside the walls in the evening, when the day trippers have gone, the light turns the brick to gold and the streets belong to the residents again.
Day 11Ancient Khiva
A whole day inside Itchan Kala, which is small enough to walk end to end in twenty minutes and rich enough to fill a day easily.
We walk the city walls, climb a minaret for the view across the rooftops, and visit the palaces, madrasahs and mausoleums packed inside them. The unfinished Kalta Minor, squat, fat and covered in glazed turquoise tile, is the image of Khiva that everybody takes home.
We also spend proper time with the artisans, in the workshops where silk carpets are still knotted by hand, wood is carved and hats are made, and where the crafts are still being taught to the next generation rather than performed for visitors.
This evening we gather for the farewell celebration dinner, which is the point at which everyone realises the twelve days went considerably faster than expected.
Day 12Departure
After breakfast we transfer to the airport for your flight home, either connecting through Tashkent or on an onward international routing.
You leave with a phone full of blue tile, a suitcase that probably contains at least one thing you did not plan to buy, and the slightly smug knowledge that you have been somewhere most people have not yet worked out they want to go.
What's included
- Expedition leadership by Joe Alexander throughout
- Local specialist guides in each city
- 24 hour expedition support
- Eight nights in quality hotels
- Two nights in a mountain lodge in the Chimgan region
- One night in a traditional desert yurt camp
- Airport transfers on arrival and departure
- All internal transport by private expedition vehicle
- High speed rail tickets between Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara
- Daily breakfast
- Welcome dinner in Tashkent
- Farewell celebration dinner in Khiva
- Dinner on both nights at the Chimgan mountain lodge
- Traditional Uzbek dinner in Samarkand
- Dinner at the traditional cultural evening in Bukhara
- Dinner at the desert yurt camp
- Guided city tours in Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva
- Mountain trekking and guided walking in the Chimgan region
- Cable car in the Chimgan mountains
- Camel riding in the Kyzylkum Desert
- Traditional cultural performance in Bukhara
- Artisan workshop visits in Khiva
- All entrance fees for included activities and monuments
- Full pre departure support and information pack
What's not included
- International flights
- Travel insurance, which is mandatory
- Visa costs, where applicable
- Lunches throughout
- Evening meals not listed as included
- Alcoholic drinks
- Personal expenses, souvenirs and laundry
- Camera and photography fees charged at some monuments
- Tips for local guides and drivers
- Optional activities on free time
- Single supplement, where requested and available
Difficulty and preparation
It is graded Medium, the second of our four grades. That is 12 days of it, so being ready matters more than being fast. If you are unsure whether it suits you, talk to us before you book rather than after: we would far rather move you to the right adventure than watch you struggle on the wrong one.
Safety and support
Every trip runs with qualified leaders, a risk assessment written for the route, emergency procedures and communications planned before departure, and local support on the ground. Travel insurance covering your chosen activities is a condition of booking.
Questions about this trip
Getting there and flights
The expedition begins in Tashkent and ends in Khiva, with the departure day transfer to the airport for onward flights via Tashkent or an international connection. Most UK guests fly into Tashkent direct or via Istanbul or a Gulf hub. Because the trip starts and finishes in different cities, check your return routing carefully before booking, and allow a sensible connection time in Tashkent on the way home. We are happy to check your flights before you pay.
Visas and entry
British citizens and many other nationalities can currently visit Uzbekistan without a visa for short tourist stays, and most others can apply for a straightforward e-visa online in advance. Your passport should have at least three months validity beyond your travel dates. Entry rules change from time to time, so confirm current requirements for your own nationality against official guidance shortly before departure.
Registration
Visitors to Uzbekistan are registered during their stay, and hotels handle this automatically when you check in, usually issuing a small slip. Keep every slip together with your passport until you have left the country. The desert yurt camp may register differently or not at all, which is normal, and your leader will manage it with the local operator.
Insurance
Comprehensive travel insurance is mandatory. It should cover walking and light trekking, horse riding and camel riding, as well as medical treatment and repatriation. Horse riding in particular is excluded by a number of standard policies, so read the activity list rather than assuming, and upload the policy number and your insurer's 24 hour emergency number to your guest portal by four weeks before departure.
Fitness and what to expect
This is graded Medium, the second of our four grades, and is suitable for most active adults, with no technical skills required. Expect comfortable walking, light day hiking in the mountains, long days on your feet in the cities on uneven historic paving and worn steps, some steep and narrow minaret staircases which are entirely optional, and warm to hot temperatures. The Chimgan adventure day can be scaled from a full day's trekking to a gentle stroll, so everyone can pitch it at their own level.
Weather and climate
Uzbekistan has a continental desert climate with big swings. In spring the cities are warm to hot and very dry, often in the high twenties to low thirties Celsius, with intense sun and almost no shade around the monuments. The Chimgan mountains are noticeably cooler, particularly in the evening, with snow possible on the high tops early in the season. The desert is hot by day and can be genuinely cold at night. Pack for all three.
Getting around and the high speed trains
Uzbekistan's high speed rail network links Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara, and it is fast, modern and comfortable. Passports are required both to buy tickets and to board, and stations have airport style security, so we allow a full hour and travel together. Everywhere else we use a private expedition vehicle. The two desert transfer days are long, on rougher roads, with limited facilities en route.
Money
The currency is the Uzbek som. Uzbekistan still runs substantially on cash, and while cards are increasingly accepted in city hotels and better restaurants, you will need cash for bazaars, artisans, the yurt camp, entrance extras and tips. Bring US dollars in clean, undamaged notes for exchange, as worn or torn notes are frequently refused, and bring a card plus a backup. ATMs are available in the cities but not reliably beyond them.
Tipping
Tips for local guides and drivers are not included and are customary and appreciated. Your expedition leader will advise sensible amounts and the best way to give them. Restaurant service charges are sometimes added, so check the bill before adding more. Bring this money in cash.
Food and dietary requirements
Uzbek food is generous, hearty and far better than its reputation abroad. Expect plov, shashlik, lagman, samsa, non bread baked in clay ovens, fresh salads, apricots, melon and endless green tea. It is also very meat heavy, and vegetarian and especially vegan requirements need real notice so the local team can arrange alternatives, particularly at the mountain lodge and the yurt camp where supplies are ordered ahead. Add them to your guest portal when you book, not on arrival. Daily breakfast is included, along with the welcome dinner, the farewell dinner and the dinners listed in the itinerary. Lunches are not included, which keeps the days flexible.
Water and staying well
Drink bottled or filtered water only, including for brushing your teeth, and use hand sanitiser before eating. Stomach upsets are the most common health complaint on any Central Asia trip and are largely preventable. Stick to food that is hot and freshly cooked, be cautious with salads, ice and unpeeled fruit for the first few days, and carry rehydration sachets. Bring any personal medication in your hand luggage in original packaging.
The desert yurt camp
The yurt camp is the highlight of the trip for a lot of guests and it is worth knowing exactly what it is. Yurts are traditional felt tents, shared between roughly four to six people, with proper beds and blankets. Washing and toilet facilities are basic, shared and outside. Electricity is limited and there is no Wi Fi or phone signal. Nights are much colder than the days, so keep a warm layer and a torch with you rather than in your main luggage.
Dress and cultural etiquette
Uzbekistan is a secular country and everyday dress is relaxed, but mosques, mausoleums and pilgrimage sites expect shoulders and knees covered, shoes removed where indicated, and women are often asked to cover their hair, so carry a light scarf every day. Ask before photographing people. Shah-i-Zinda in Samarkand and several of the Bukhara sites are active places of pilgrimage rather than museums, so keep voices down and give worshippers space.
Shopping, bargaining and taking things home
The bazaars, the Bukhara trading domes and the Khiva workshops are among the best places to shop anywhere on the Silk Road, for silk, carpets, ceramics, miniatures and hand carved wood. Bargaining is expected and should be good humoured. Keep receipts for anything of value, because export rules apply to antiques and to items over a certain age, and your guide will advise on anything that needs a certificate.
Connectivity and electricity
Wi Fi is generally good in city hotels, patchy at the mountain lodge and absent at the yurt camp. Mobile coverage is reliable in the cities and intermittent on the desert transfers. A local eSIM with a data bundle is inexpensive and worth arranging before you fly. Plugs are the European two round pin type, so bring a UK to Europe adapter rather than a US one.
Group size and who this suits
The group is capped at twelve, with a guaranteed departure once eight places are taken. It suits couples, friends travelling together, solo travellers and anyone drawn to history, architecture, photography or food, and it works particularly well as a first trip to Central Asia. Solo travellers are very welcome. Rooms are twin or double share as standard, with a single supplement available on request and subject to availability.
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£2,895
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Talk it through with someone who has been there. Call 0191 903 9936 or send us a question.
Dates and prices
| Dates | Availability | Price | Book |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 - 12 May 2029 | Places available12 places left | £2,895 | Book this date |
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