I'll be honest—when we first landed in Tashkent, the tourist registration in Uzbekistan (Регистрация туристов в Узбекистане) was the last thing on my exhausted mind. I just wanted to find my hotel, collapse into bed, and start exploring the Silk Road cities I'd been...
I'll be completely honest with you—when I first stepped through the massive Ata Darvaza gate into Khiva's Itchan Kala, I thought I'd made a terrible mistake. I'd spent ten days exploring Uzbekistan, and after the grandeur of Samarkand and the authentic bustle of...
I woke up to rain in Nukus, and honestly, I was relieved. After days of intense desert sun on the Aral Sea tour, the gray sky felt like permission to slow down. This worked out perfectly because Nukus isn't really an outdoor exploration kind of city anyway—it's a...
Let's be honest, Urgench is the transit hub you pass through on your Silk Road journey, the place guidebooks tell you to skip entirely in favor of staying in Khiva, the fairy-tale walled city instead. But here's what happened. After arriving from Khiva, dropping our...
I spent two weeks exploring Uzbekistan, from Tashkent's Soviet-era canteens to Samarkand's tourist spots and roadside shashlik stands. I averaged about €25 per meal at tourist-friendly places, but enjoyed some of my best food for €5-10 at local spots where nobody...
Standing on what was once the seabed of the Aral Sea, surrounded by rusted fishing boats that haven't touched water in decades, I realized something: every stupid mistake I'd made over the previous ten days had been worth it. I spent two weeks traveling through...
I organized every single leg of my two-week Uzbekistan journey myself—train tickets through the not-so-well-functioning railway website and at the train station ticket counters, Yandex taxis at 6 AM, negotiations with drivers to take us from Urgench to Nukus, and even...
I came to Uzbekistan for the turquoise domes, not the Soviet mosaics. My boyfriend was the one who wanted to find Soviet art—he'd been researching Tashkent's metro stations for months. I nodded along politely while secretly planning which angles I'd photograph...
I thought Tashkent was impressive with its Soviet grandeur. Then Samarkand blew me away with Registan Square's impossible turquoise domes. But when I arrived in Bukhara on September 24th—my third stop on a two-week Uzbekistan journey—something shifted. Each city had...