I love the country. Its insurance market. Especially, how they celebrate… I am at the International Insurance Forum in Tashkent, to which I was coming and speaking at it for a decade, at least. Мне очень нравится страна Узбекистан — и люди. Нравится небольшой, но развитой страховой рынок. А еще — как они отмечают свои праздники. «Наманганская полька» — это нечто!
26 ноябрь 2021 г.
На Востоке, на Востоке
Что за жизнь без чайханы!
Фарух Закиров, Ялла!!!
(Учкудууууук). 3. К——а.
7 сентябрь 2023 г.
The Fabulous Uzbekistan!
Нет-нет, я не на Эль-Регистане в Самарканде.
Просто прочитал вчера в Таймс статью об Узбекистане —
о том, как прекрасна эта страна,
но пока в нее не так много туристов из Британии приезжает.
Вспомнил я, как два года назад на страховой конференции в Ташкенте предложил создать Фонд Развития Туризма в Узбекистан.
А пока почитайте, что англичане предлагают посмотреть в этой сказочной стране (по неразумным ценам). Про Мингбулок я, правда, не слышал. Зато несколько лет назад коллеги отвезли нас в фантастическую Бурчмуллу — так, оказывается, правильно пишется Бричмулла, никитинскую песню про которую я напеваю аж с 1981 года…
Сладострастная отрава… Золотая Бричмулла!
Поезжайте в Узбекистан и спросите!
This is a spectacular country — so where are the British tourists?
Uzbekistan, in the heart of the Silk Road, enchants with its intricate madrassas and desert fortresses. And yet it’s still largely undiscovered
Shah-i-Zinda necropolis in Samarkand
My guide, Mashkhura, is enjoying an early morning wander along the back streets of Bukhara when she sees a black cat. She takes seven steps back, spits twice to the left and asks for the bad luck to leave.
But it seems the ritual doesn’t work. A few hours later, as we’re driving across the Kyzylkum desert, our van claps out in the middle of nowhere. “We have a saying in Uzbekistan,” Mashkhura says, one sceptical eyebrow raised as our driver, Abdullah, props open the bonnet and peers mystified at the silent engine. “Even if a man wants to slaughter a tiny sparrow he should call a butcher to do it.” It doesn’t feel like the moment to ask if there’s an Uzbek equivalent for the phrase “up the creek without a paddle”.
Abdullah is no mechanic and thankfully he doesn’t try to turn into one. He flags down a passing car to take him to the nearest village to find help and we wait, wondering when, if, we’ll see him again. With no air con the van feels like a tin can with windows.
It’s a lip-cracking 45C and the water bottle I nonchalantly finished earlier rolls around in the footwell, mocking me. I’m tempted to check Google Maps to see how far it is to the nearest village, but fear that picking up my phone will only confirm my suspicion that there’s no such thing as a desert with 4G. This is the only moment during my 12-day tour of Uzbekistan that I question whether taking the trip on my own was a good idea. But two sweaty hours later we’re back on the road.
Uzbekistan is hardly a popular destination for Britons — only about 10,000 visit each year — and the idea of navigating the central Asian country solo had felt a little daunting. However, I wasn’t keen on joining a group tour, so I opted for the middle ground: a private tour with a local guide where I could learn as much as possible while in safe hands. Better still, there would be no planning on my end and high-speed trains and low-cost internal flights were tickets to seeing the highlights in one visit.
Uzbekistan, a seven-hour flight from London, is at the heart of the Silk Road, a network of trading routes that connected the Far East to the western world for more than 1,500 years. From the second century BC to the 15th century, the Silk Road crossed more than 4,000 miles of mountains and deserts, passing through 40 countries and facilitating trade along the way. Much of this exchange was transactional and tangible — reels of silk from China for handfuls of precious jewels from India — but it also extended to the invisible and transformational: religious revelations and cultural practices that were observed and shared by the likes of Marco Polo.
Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent, was a popular spot for caravanserais (essentially roadside campsites) and Chorsu Bazaar, located at a crossroads, was one of them. Today, the horses, wagons and Marco Polo-types are long gone, but a thriving local market stands in their place. There’s a whole floor dedicated to desserts that showcase the sweetest of Uzbek traditions: elaborate engagement gifts made from halva (a cross between nougat and fudge) and mountains of crystallised amber sugar that mothers place on the tongues of newborns, believing the ritual will help them to sweet-talk future customers once they become traders. I spend hours wandering the equivalent of the middle of Lidl, a floor stacked with everything from brooms that are gifted as part of a dowry to sacks full of juniper leaves used to flavour meat while it cooks.
At the outdoor bakery a multitude of cooks oversee giant clay tandoor ovens, watching discs of circular bread turn gold as they cling to the oven walls like bats in a cave. One baker throws a frisbee of dough across the room and catches my eye, smiling the same big, gold-toothed grin as most other Uzbeks over 50. It’s a shiny reminder that less than 30 years ago the country was still under Soviet rule and gold teeth were a sign of wealth. Go underground and you’ll see more Soviet scars running across the skin of the city. Subway stations are modelled on those on the Moscow metro, each a work of art with decorations carved from alabaster and lit by glitzy chandeliers, and manned by equally immaculate workers in jade-green uniforms and square caps. Then there’s the brutalist Hotel Uzbekistan, a hotel so ugly it feels only right that it should have been preserved as a sort of historical monument.
Ancient Khiva is at the other end of the beauty spectrum. This glorious walled city is essentially an open-air museum, its great monuments stuffed inside a series of wooden gates that traders would have passed through in the days of the Silk Road. There’s been a mini-sandstorm on the day I arrive and the city is so deserted that wandering through its labyrinth of caramel-coloured streets feels surreal, like stumbling on to a film set long after the crew has left. Towering teal-coloured minarets, wrapped in ribbons of intricate majolica tiles, loom above, while madrassas (Islamic schools) appear on every corner alongside raised clay tombs of religious leaders. I can’t help but think of the sights we flock to see in Europe: compared with Khiva’s Islamic architecture, the Eiffel Tower seems like a child’s Lego creation; the Trevi Fountain a jam-packed paddling pool. If Uzbekistan’s sights outshine those in Europe, however, its hotels do not. My riad-style stays look pretty on the outside but often lack the basics inside; no kettles in the room or toasters at breakfast and, in one, a mattress so thin that I wonder, half-asleep at 3am, if I’m sleeping on a Ryvita crispbread.
A more pleasant surprise is the eight-hour drive from Khiva to Bukhara, which isn’t the slog it first sounds. The Khorezm region is known as the land of a thousand fortresses and as the carpets of desert unroll around us, abandoned citadels rise up from the sand. We break the journey at Ayaz-Kala, a collection of three citadels that date back as far as the 4th century, and explore the remains of rooms where royalty once roamed. There’s not another soul in sight and the only guards are a group of hummingbirds that circle the ruins and keep watch from above.
The first sign that we’ve arrived in Bukhara are the city’s original trading domes, which initially appear like a cluster of stone molehills. Beneath their curved roofs men embroider pomegranates — symbols of fertility — on to cushion covers and forge silver scissors into the shape of swallows.
Equally well preserved is the city’s Poi-Kalyan complex, a set of monuments so astonishingly beautiful that I almost get teary-eyed, but it’s nothing compared to what awaits in our next stop:
Samarkand.
The big-name act in the Silk Road’s most famous city is Registan, a square containing three intricate madrassas with gleaming turquoise cupolas. The buildings are hypnotic by day, covered as they are in thousands of mosaics and Zoroastrian symbols, my favourite a huge pair of tigers that stretch over a doorway. And the spectacle is equally magical by night, when the locals munch on buckets of popcorn and watch the square glow gold and green as the sun sinks. I realise the only thing that could make the show better is having my guide, who at this point feels more like a friend, there to watch it with me. That’s the thing about travelling solo, I realise: often the best part is who you meet along the way. Especially when it’s someone who knows the place inside out and won’t laugh when you ask if they can walk you back to your hotel to avoid any strange men on the way.
There’s more magic 25 miles from Samarkand at Mingbulok, a village said to have one million springs and a shrine that brings good luck. Families come to wash in the holy water of the stream and generations gather on thick blood-red Persian carpets to picnic together. Daughters sweat over pots of steaming plov (rice topped with beef and dried apricots); sons carry huge canisters of tea and grandmothers sit back, bouncing babies and swapping stories.
A trickle of brides and grooms head to the shrine, housed in a cave, to be blessed. I stoop inside and spot the local imam praying with all who enter. The cave, he says, is a sacred spot, and while I’m here I need to think carefully of what I most want to come true. I bow my head, place my hands together and ask for no more black cats.
Lucy Perrin was a guest of Wild Frontiers, which has nine nights’ B&B from £2,705pp on a private Classic Uzbekistan tour, including guided excursions and transfers . Fly to Tashkent
9 декабрь 2023 г.
Uzbekistan in Dubai.
And UK, as well.
На Экспо 2020 — павильон Узбекистана, нашего любимого.
А еще тут за неделю на COP28 перебывало
половина Британии — и Король наш, и
ПМ — теперешний и прошлый. А договориться все никак не могут. Якобы Абу-Даби пробивает свою нефтяную тематику. А Дубай, как обычно, не при чем…
А приятно видеть столь знакомые и полюбившиеся за 20 лет узбекские сувениры и красОты!
