Lesley Downer

Uzbekistan: where east meets west and past meets present

It’s so welcoming that at the airport even the immigration officials are smiling

You realise what a rarity western tourists are when the locals ask to take selfies with you. I was standing under the mammoth ramparts of the Ark, Bukhara’s great palace fortress, when two women came up and asked if they could have their picture taken with me. One was dressed Uzbek-style in a colourful dress and matching trousers, with a scarf knotted around her head; the other in a western blouse and trousers. We lined up, beaming, in front of a haughty two-humped camel.

Visiting Uzbekistan is a huge adventure. It’s the heart of Central Asia and the old Silk Road, a land of deserts and oases where you can still feel as if you’re stepping back in time. But it’s also unexpectedly safe, easy, inexpensive and welcoming.

At the airport, even the immigration officials were smiling. As the young man I sat next to on Tashkent’s splendid Metro told me in hesitant English: ‘We have a new president now. Things are much better. He wants foreign tourists to come.’

Thanks to President Mirziyoyev, who took over in 2016, as of last February British passport-holders can enter visa-free. This concession will soon be extended to American and Chinese visitors, but for the moment Uzbekistan is blissfully free of mass tourism. Right now is a small window of opportunity to see this enthralling place while it still preserves a flavour of its exotic past.

Uzbekistan became a country in 1920, under Soviet rule. Before then it was a conglomeration of khanates. Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent were wealthy, cosmopolitan oases where merchants with their camel trains trekked across bandit-infested deserts to trade everything from silks and spices to slaves in its bazaars. The khanates were taken over by Tsarist Russia in the mid-19th century and the khans and emirs were reduced to puppets.

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