Uzbekistan: Walking the Silk Road Through Samarkand and Bukhara

For centuries the Silk Road was a sentence — months of desert, danger and camel sores between China and the Mediterranean. Today its greatest cities are connected by high-speed train, and Uzbekistan has quietly become Central Asia's easiest and most rewarding destination.

Samarkand's Registan — three madrasas faced in impossible turquoise tilework — is one of the great squares of the world, best at dawn before the crowds and again at dusk when it glows. Bukhara is the more intimate city: a lived-in old town of madrasas, hammams and mulberry-shaded ponds where you sleep in converted merchants' houses.

Khiva, out in the desert, is the preserved museum-city: a walled khanate frozen in the 18th century, climbed best at sunrise from the Islam Khoja minaret. Between the three, the Afrosiyob fast trains have made what took caravans a month into a two-hour ride.

Visas are now visa-free or e-visa for most nationalities, the food is plov and fresh non bread from clay ovens, and a comfortable day costs 40 to 60 euros. Go in April-May or September-October; the steppe summer is merciless.