Asia Tour 2026 - Day 7/25 - 16th August - Samarkand, Uzbekistan - City 6/15 - Country 4/9
Updated: Sep 29
At the reception of our hotel the young guy ordered us a taxi to the railways station, quite an impressive soviet style building. The driver was not happy as he realised the nice guy at the reception had actually paid him via the app but I gladly paid the cash which I assume he gave to the hotel guy.
I tried to sleep on the journey to Samarkand, but at a certain point I noticed dry brown mountains and very arid looking landscapes.
We arrived in Samarkand and of course there was a "taxi taxi" guy, we said "yes" but we first needed to buy a ticket to Dushanbe. The driver followed us into the booking office. I pre-booked what I believed to be a 1st class sleeper, which would leave at 19:00 and arrive in Dushanbe at 09:30.
Our driver it turns out was Tajik and he agreed to be our personal guide the following day. He dropped us off at our lovely hotel, It had a lovely little courtyard, complete with a swimming pool and a traditional Uzbek-style wooden veranda. Intricately carved wooden pillars supported the roof, with tables and low seating underneath — a wonderfully peaceful place to sit after a day wandering around Samarkand.
After check in we went for a walk to get cash to pay for the room and ran into lots of tourists. This was the first time we really encountered that. We went for lunch at a place we nick-named "The Boys" as lots of young boys seem to be working as waiter there. For late breakfast I had fried eggs and nice Turkish bread. I ordered coffee with milk and again it was sickly sweet.
We went for a walk around the city taking pictures of mosques and brutalist buildings eventually arriving at the large Mosque called "Bibi-Khanum Mosque". we took quite a lot of pictures there and decided to just walk home believing it was maybe 4 km away, when all of a sudden we recognised the surroundings and we were within 100 M of our hotel. There was a wine shop nearby where I got them to open the bottle and brought it home.
For the evening meal at "The Boys" I had a potato shaslish and tomato shashlish, it turned out that the cabbage soup had meat so Stanislav actually had my soup along with his vegetable meal. I ordered the local beer which was a bit warm.
After dinner as the sun was setting, we went back to the mosque which was full of tourists and took pictures, and returned to "The Boys" and had tea and wine, the wine being for me.
Back at the hotel I enjoyed the local wine before going to sleep.
Comments