The Perfect Silk Road Trip

Travel Onion · 1:58

In one week you can cross the heart of the old Silk Road by train, through three cities of blue-tiled domes. It starts underground in Tashkent, where the metro stations look like palaces — and until 2018 you weren't allowed to photograph them, because the system was classed as a military site. Two hours on the fast train, Samarkand: the Registan is three enormous tiled colleges facing one square, built over more than two centuries, and one of them has tigers on its gateway carrying suns with human faces, figures you almost never see on an Islamic building. The prince who built the first of them, Ulugh Beg, was also an astronomer — his observatory measured the length of the year to within about a minute. Bukhara's great minaret was almost a hundred years old when Genghis Khan arrived in 1220; the story goes it was the one thing in the city he spared. And the line ends in Khiva, still inside its mud-brick walls — in 1990 the first place in Central Asia on UNESCO's World Heritage list. Save this for the trip you actually take. Follow for more places worth the trip. 📍 PLAN YOUR VISIT — THE SILK ROAD, UZBEKISTAN ✈️ Getting there: fly into Tashkent; the fast train runs to Samarkand and Bukhara, and trains continue to Khiva — about a week 📅 Best time: spring (April–May) or autumn (September–October); summer is very hot 🎯 The route: Tashkent · Samarkand · Bukhara · Khiva