Underexplored7 min
Samarkand at Six in the Morning
Everybody photographs the Registan at sunset. The mistake is understandable and it is still a mistake.
Three madrasas face each other across a square in Samarkand, and they are tiled in a blue that does not survive being photographed. I say that having watched perhaps two hundred people try, myself included, and having concluded that the camera flattens it into something merely pretty. Standing in front of it at six in the morning, with the light still low and the square genuinely empty, is a different experience and it is available to anybody willing to set an alarm.
By nine the coaches arrive. By eleven the light is flat and hot and the square has become a place where people take photographs of each other rather than a place anybody is looking at. This is not a complaint about tourism, it is a scheduling observation, and it is the single most useful thing I can tell you about visiting Uzbekistan.
The train question
Uzbekistan has a fast train. Tashkent to Samarkand takes a little over two hours and the carriages are clean, punctual and entirely unremarkable, which is the highest compliment available to a railway. I mention this because a surprising number of women ask us whether they would need a private driver for the whole route, and the honest answer is no, and the money is better spent on the four nights in Bukhara.
Bukhara is where I would tell you to stay longest. Samarkand has the monuments. Bukhara has the actual town: a working old city where the madrasas have carpet sellers in them and the pace drops about thirty per cent the moment you arrive.
Rishtan, and the glaze
In the Fergana Valley there is a town called Rishtan where the ceramics have been made with the same ishkor glaze for something like eight hundred years. We spent an afternoon in a workshop with a woman whose family have been potters for six generations and who explained, with no particular ceremony, that the recipe has never been written down.
She let us try. Mine was terrible. Hers took about four minutes and is the thing I look at most often in my kitchen. This is the sort of afternoon that does not appear on an itinerary as a headline and is invariably the thing people describe first when they get home.
On travelling alone here
I have been asked more times than I can count whether Uzbekistan is safe for a woman on her own. It is, comfortably, and I say that as somebody who has walked back to a guesthouse in Bukhara at eleven at night more than once. What is more interesting than the safety answer is the social one.
This is a country that sat on the Silk Road for two thousand years. Foreigners arriving is not a novelty and has never been a novelty. Nobody asks why you are alone. Nobody arranges their face into concern about it. You are simply somebody who has turned up, which is what the place has been dealing with since before most European capitals existed.
Priya, who travelled with us in the spring, put it better than I can. She said she went out there wanting somewhere nobody would ask her about her divorce, and what she got was a country where she was interesting because she had arrived, rather than because of what had happened to her.
Written by the Red Camellia team. Every trip we write about is one we have taken ourselves.
