Uzbekistan
Trip Samarcande - Boukhara - Khiva - Tachkent Août 2026
See it on the interactive map · Flyby videos
Chapters
- Samarkand Day 1 · 5 pebbls
- Samarkand Day 2 & 3 · 11 pebbls
- Samarcande J4 · 2 pebbls
- Bukhara Day 1 · 3 pebbls
- Bukhara Day 2 · 4 pebbls
- Khiva Jour 1
- Almaty Day 2 & 3
Samarkand Day 1
Visit to Samarkand
Local food
Plov (pronounced plop) is the national dish of Uzbekistan and neighboring countries. It's a rice pilaf with beef and vegetables. It's tasty but quite heavy, especially in 38°C heat.
The other dish is meat dumplings, which are very good.
Musée Afrisayab
Ulugbek Observatory
Night Registan
The streets are crowded tonight and the tourist sites are all lit up. The registan is made up of three madrasas, which are old Islamic schools from the Middle Ages. I'll visit them during the day the day after tomorrow.
Decoration
In Samarkand, some tourist streets have Christmas-style string lights. There's a little children's train with reindeer, yet it's August 15th and still 32°C at 9 pm. 🤷♀️
Samarkand Day 2 & 3
Visit to Samarkand for a second day then the next day, visit to Shakhrisabz which is a city about a hundred kilometers away.
Chakhrisabz - Ak-Saray, le palais blanc
Built at the end of the 14th century, this palace was so immense that the entrance gate alone was over 80 meters high. Tamerlane had a phrase engraved on the mosaic of the facade: "If you doubt our power, look at our buildings."
In reality, the palace and its gates collapsed just a few years after construction was completed due to an earthquake. It was built too high to withstand the construction methods of the time. Today, only two towers of the entrance gate remain.
Local bread and small shop
Here, the bread is baked in a traditional oven where they stick the dough to the oven wall (by hand, using just an oven mitt). Once baked, they remove it with a large shovel.
Next to it, there was a sort of small stall by the side of the road. The white balls by the roadside are a local cheese. They dry the milk until only a very hard little ball remains. It's not bad, but nothing extraordinary either.
In addition to that, they sell solid mud (the Tupperware container with the brown and gray pieces) which is apparently good for the bones. I tasted it; it's mostly disgusting.
Statue de Tamerlan
Tamerlane was a 14th-century military leader. He founded the Timurid Empire and conquered parts of Central Asia, the Middle East, and northern India. He commanded an army of 800,000 men and killed millions. He was also a great patron of the arts and architecture. He had all the books in the libraries he looted measured and copied before burning cities. Shakhrisabz is his birthplace. Although he made Samarkand his capital, it was here that he chose to erect his monuments to demonstrate his power to his homeland.
Today, he is considered a great national hero of Uzbekistan.
Restaurant tandoor
The restaurant doesn't have a proper dining room. It's more like platforms overlooking the valley where you eat cross-legged.
Chakhrisabz - Dorus Saodat
This place was intended to become Tamerlane's mausoleum, but he died before the end of construction during a military campaign towards China in the winter of 1405. The passes leading to Shakhrisabz were blocked by snow, so he was buried in Samarkand in an emergency, and the mausoleum was never used.
Chakhrisabz - Dorut Tilavat
The Dorut Tivolat complex ("House of Recitation" in English) is a group of buildings constructed in the 14th century on the orders of Tamerlane which contains the Kok Gumbaz mosque (literally "Blue Dome", they didn't exactly go out of their way) and mausoleums including that of Tamerlane's father.