I’ll never again be as stunned by a travel destination as I was by the Teotihuacán pyramids in the mid-1990s. I was in Mexico that summer to study Spanish, had signed up for the day trip on a lark, without any advance notion of what I’d see there.
Color me amazed. Wide-eyed, open-mouthed, shocked silly. Most any adjective falls short of how I felt. Some other tourist attractions may be more spectacular, but had come with advance billing. I’d never read a word about ancient Mesoamerican Teotihuacán while growing up in the U.S.
Second place on this list of sightseeing stunners, however, now belongs to the fifteenth century monuments of the Timurid Empire that I saw earlier this month in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Conqueror Amir Timur regarded himself as a successor to Genghis Khan, commanded a kingdom that encompassed modern Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, much of Central Asia. Samarkand was the capital. My trip research didn’t prepare me for how I’d feel to stroll before the towering madrasas of the Registan, or walk among the mausolea at Shah-i-Zinda. Clicking through youtube vids isn’t the same.
Russian speakers are already up to speed on tourism here; after all, Uzbekistan was a Soviet republic. For Westerners, however, Uzbekistan may be the most important travel destination they’ve never heard of.
The rest of this post aspires unashamedly to tedium. Would-be visitors can find history and highlights lists on other web sites. I can add value by telling you how I got around. For a solo traveler without Russian fluency, Uzbekistan is a challenging trip.
VISA?
Spaniards don’t need one. Americans do, unless visiting for thirty days or fewer while younger than sixteen or older than fifty-five (as I am). I made a pre-trip paper print-out of the relevant text from the Uzbekistan Embassy web site, but was never questioned or asked to furnish a visa while traveling.
AIR TRAVEL
You’re not unlikely to arrive via Turkish Airlines. I did, and assumed that the willingness of TA’s online booking to suggest and sell a trip with a one hour transfer at Istanbul International had to mean that an hour would be plenty of time.
Ha ha ha. Never again. A two hour IST transfer, yes; one hour, no. My flight from Madrid docked at the far end of concourse F; my departure was from gate A9. Istanbul International is huge. A panting, sweating Tim made it to A9 on time, but learned that my assigned seat was no longer available. I accepted a replacement, heard ‘boarding completed’ when I entered the plane, and noted the cynical glances of fellow fliers as I huffed down the aisle. They’d pegged me as a flake who doesn’t know how to arrive at an airport on time.
CELL PHONE
A CSR for my cell phone service provider as much as begged me to swap to a pre-paid SIM card in Uzbekistan. (I haven’t yet experimented with eSIMs.) Costs for using the Spain SIM were prohibitively high.
I arrived at Tashkent International airport at about 1:00 a.m., was pleased to find the ‘tourist information center‘ open. Yes, they could sell me a pre-paid UZTelecom SIM card. Forum posters had recommended other providers, but the UZTelecom sim worked fine, at least after the staffer tweaked the Access Point Name setting in Android.
I think, but am not sure, that another cell phone provider kiosk was open at that hour at TAS.
CURRENCY
In travels a decade ago, I looked for an airport ATM in the arrivals hall and used my home debit card to withdraw local currency. Articles read since of account-draining ATM skimmers/shimmers have discouraged me. I’ve taken a resigned step backward, have retreated to the pricey, time-consuming swapping of paper bills at a currency exchange counter.
(Too paranoid? One article suggests I could be; another says no. When at home, I try to stick to ATMs in a bank branch interior.)
Uzbekistan’s currency is the SOM. I couldn’t obtain SOM before the trip, but could obtain U.S. dollars, which I’d read are widely accepted in Uzbekistan.
A currency exchange kiosk also was open at the Tashkent airport at 1:00 a.m. That was the good news. The bad: I’d have to wait in a forty minute long line to swap bills with the single employee on duty. A sign on the counter indicated that they could take euros, so my pre-trip swapping for dollars had been unnecessary.
I exchanged for about 800,000 in SOM, assumed correctly that I’d be able to pay a lot of tabs with a U.S. or Spain credit card.
Memorizing the exchange rate for 100,000 SOM — €7.20 or $7.81. — helped me retain a perspective on prices while I paid fares and bills in an unfamiliar currency.
SAFETY
travel.state.gov rates Uzbekistan as safe, and I certainly felt safe during the trip. I’ve never been misled by this site, but the wary can check online for other opinions: from Spain, the UK, Canada, Australia.
TRAIN FROM TASHKENT TO SAMARKAND
A Seat61 page suggested alternatives, but I had no trouble buying a train ticket at the official site: https://eticket.railway.uz/en/home . What I couldn’t do for a short-notice trip was buy a Tashkent-to-Samarkand ticket on a high speed train. These sell out quickly.
I booked a ticket on a slower-speed train instead: three hours between cities, instead of two. Photos show my seat and the train interior. The train left on time; the ride was agreeable, set me back a mere €10.61. I’d do it again. Further, the experience may be more authentically Uzbek. I overheard one voice in UK-accented English while disembarking in Samarkand, but encountered no Westerners in my car.
One travel blogger suggested arriving at the train station two hours before departure. This was overkill, but it wouldn’t hurt to arrive a full hour early, to deal with my one significant problem with riding the Uzbekistan intercity rails: an absence of tourist-friendly signage, at least at the Tashkent station.
I found train 716ФА to САМАРКАНД only because an English-speaking clerk at an information desk told me to look for it on platform 3. The in-station signage that I likely missed must have been in Cyrillic. I remember no screen listing a departure for 716ФА or any other train. For that matter, I saw no sign telling me which platform was which; I found ‘3’ by deduction.
SAMARKAND TRANSPORTATION PROBLEMS
Samarkand’s major tourist attractions seem to be clustered in a diagonal strip, from the Gur-i Amir complex to the Ulughbek observatory about six kilometers northeast. If you can book accommodations close to that strip and can hack the walk, you may be able to forego the transportation woes that plagued me. Arrange an arrival pick-up from the train station or Samarkand train station or airport, and an equivalent ride on your day of departure.
If you can’t book digs near the tourist strip — as I couldn’t, not on short notice in the height of tourist season — you likely won’t get much help from city transit services. The #2 tram line will ferry visitors from the train station to and from the tourist center, but that’s about all. Forum posters had no kind words for Samarkand buses.
That leaves taxis.
Maybe I made it tough on myself. Some western countries have sanctioned or blocked the Russian YandexGo taxi/delivery app, but I likely could have downloaded it with an Uzbekistan SIM card — and certainly could have via APKPure or APKMirror — and have read that it works well in Uzbekistan. Worth knowing, but I couldn’t rouse enthusiasm for installing a dicey app from Russia. Uber hasn’t come to Uzbekistan. I’d have to hail taxis on the street.
Total chaos! Wild West! A zoo!
A hotel staffer told me that a ride to the tourist center should cost no more than 28,000 SOM, never more than 30,000. This was indeed true … true, that is, for the taxi rides that the hotel arranged for me. Further, the drivers summoned by the hotel behaved professionally, drove cabs in good condition and navigated with a taxi meter application that showed how much I should pay.
How about the taxis I hailed on the street?
The cabbies didn’t drive with taxi meters, didn’t drive vehicles in good condition, and sometimes showed well-developed Uzbek imagination in prices asked for travel. Further, none understood my print-out showing my hotel location, even though drafted in Russian with a map. At one point, with figurative tail between legs, I had to go to the tourist-centric (and fully booked up) Mövenpick hotel to beseech a clerk to order a taxi for me, even though I wasn’t a guest. Thank you, Mövenpick!
Worst-case example: after a quarter-hour of failing to convince a cab to stop, I successfully flagged one clunker on Toshkent yo’li. How much for a ride? The driver leered: 200,000 SOM. My fare may have paid for a new paint job.
200,000 SOM comes to about €14.33. That’s the one silver lining I can offer to potential tourists: in so inexpensive a country, a cabbie’s most imaginative gouging likely won’t force you to skip meals. Still, it is hard to feel welcome while charged seven times the going rate.
ODDS N’ ENDS
(♦) The Bellissimo Pizza at Orzu Makhmudova sold me an excellent veggie pizza, unlike the disaster-on-dough mentioned in my Wuppertal post. Unfortunately, my meal coincided with the after-school visit of a dozen middle school boys, monitored by a harried dad who frequently left his charges alone so he could yak outside on his cell phone. Fellow teachers can guess how splendidly these lads behaved while Pa was outside.
(♦) A local told me that Bukhara‘s sights are the equal of Samarkand’s. I may return!