Uzbekistan

Because three of the great Silk Road cities — Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva — still stand within a day of each other, and none of them has been turned into a museum piece. Families live inside Khiva's walls. Bukhara's trading domes still sell hats and knives. The Registan is a working square, not a roped-off ruin. Add the Kyzylkum desert, the yurt camps by Aydarkul and the silk workshops of the Fergana valley, and a single week here covers more ground than most countries manage in three.

Not by European standards. A comfortable mid-range hotel room runs roughly $30–60 a night, a plate of plov in a local canteen $2–4, and dinner in a proper restaurant rarely passes $15. Entry to a major monument is a few dollars. What actually adds up is internal flights, guides and transport between cities — which is most of what a tour price covers.

Better not. It is chlorinated and fine for brushing your teeth, but it does not taste good and the pipes in the old towns are old. Bottled water is sold on every corner and costs very little. A refillable bottle with a filter works just as well and saves a startling amount of plastic over a week.

Most travellers do not. Citizens of more than 90 countries — the EU, the UK, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Türkiye, Israel, the UAE, most of the CIS and others — enter without a visa for up to 30 days. Everyone else applies for an e-visa online: about $20, usually back within two working days. The list does change, so check against your own passport before you book. Where a visa is needed, we send the support letter with the booking.

Uzbek — a Turkic language, close enough to Turkish that a Turkish speaker catches a good deal of it — written in the Latin alphabet. Russian is widely spoken, particularly in Tashkent and among people over forty, and younger people working in tourism usually have some English. Our own guides work in Russian and English.

Yes. It is one of the calmer countries in the region: street crime is low and there is a visible police presence around the monuments. The ordinary rules still apply — keep an eye on your bag in a crowded bazaar, agree the fare before you get into a taxi, carry a copy of your passport rather than the passport itself. Travellers on their own, women included, generally report feeling comfortable here.

Type C and Type F — the two round pins used across most of Europe — at 220 volts, 50 Hz. A European plug goes straight in. Anyone arriving from the UK, the US, Japan or Australia needs an adapter, and should check that the charger itself accepts 220 V.

Almost everyone comes back saying the same two things: the tilework and the people. The first you can see in a photograph. The second is harder to explain until it happens to you — being waved over to a table you were only walking past, being handed bread you did not ask for, being asked where you are from and then not being allowed to leave without tea.