I had long been fascinated by the history of the Silk Roads and the stories of the people who travelled along them, from Marco Polo to (more balefully) Genghis Khan. I had read books like Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game and much of Peter Frankopan’s magisterial The Silk Roads. All of which had whetted my appetite to learn (and see) more.
So joining an ACE Cultural Tours trip to the Silk Road cities in Uzbekistan seemed like a good idea. And a timely one, given the way that China’s President Xi is playing up Silk Road branding in relation to the digital, infrastructure and health aspects of his country’s Belt & Bridge initiative. These are themes I plan to cover this week in my Rewilding Markets channel on Substack.
In addition, I plan to do four posts on this site as a more personal (and briefer) series of blogs, one each on Tashkent (where our journey began) Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand. We arrived in Tashkent, via Istanbul, on Saturday, 11th October, and then departed for Istanbul and London again on Tuesday, 21st October. What follows in these four posts is brief summary of what happened in between, as we travelled the length and breadth of the country.
As I began to process the images of the trip, however, it strikes me that the overall impression given will be a bit glitzier than the reality sometimes was. So this seems like a good time – and place – to than our British and Uzbek guides, Steve Mastin, the tour director, and Muminov (said) Saijon, our local guide, who accompanied us throughout, but is normally based in Samarkand.
Before we set off, I knew little about Tashkent, I confess, though I do remember reading, as a teenager, the news of the massive earthquake back in 1966 – which destroyed some 80% of the city. It has certainly recovered, though the Soviet influence is still evident in various parts of the city.
We flew from Tashkent International airport to Urgench integration airport, en route to Khiva. And that’s the subject of the next post.
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