Khiva And Across The Kyzylkum Desert

*I loved Khiva, but much of it was a bit like a film set*

*But the sun setting, seen from our hotel’s roof, was wonderful, cinematic*

*A camel train passing by on a wall of tiles*

*A man of the book reads on the back of a bronze camel*

*A museum exhibit shows a traditional coin mint*

*In the harem, a somewhat palatial bed* – but, then, they didn’t have Netflix

*A wide-open sky above the harem – where women and girls were confined*

*The Registan Square, where slave markets were once held*

*Samples of dyed silks in a silk workshop*

*City walls as we prepare to leave for Bukhara*

*We cross the Oxus River, now the Amu-Darya, more easily than Alexander the Great did*

*A guard post overlooking the Amu-Darya basin*

As we walked into Khiva, there was a palpable sense of entering a trading hub in a vast desert. These was a taste of dust on the air. This is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. That said, much of the city now feels a bit like a film set, beautiful, but there to impress outsiders. Still, maybe that was always part of the game.

Once in Khiva, we visited a wide range of attractions, including the Ichan Qal’a, the ancient citadel surrounded by crenellated walls, the Juma Mosque, the Muhammad Amin-Khan Madrasa, the Mausoleums of Pahlavan Mahmud and Sayid all-Uddin, and the Madrasas of Islam-Khodja and Alla-Kuli, and the Tash-Kauli Palace.

For me, at least, there came a point where the architecture and decoration began to blur a bit, but the city is certainly impressive. Then, on the morning of Tuesday, 14th October, we walked through the city walls for the last time to head off across the Kyzylkum Desert – said to have red sands, though we reflected that they mainly seemed to be various shades of khaki.

Along the way, we crossed the River Oxus, aka the Amu-Darya, whose still vast expanse brought home the scale of the challenge Alexander the Great faced back in 329 BC when in pursuit of his enemies. But I tell the tale of what is happening in the second of my Substack posts, to be posted on Wednesday, 29th October.

Happily, we got to Bukhara with few losses along the way – but that is a story for the next post in this series.

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