Author Archives: Andrew

Here’s the usual “Group Panorama”. Left to right: Ganisher, Mehmet, Ingrid, Charlotte, myself.

It was a bit tricky to stitch because of the extreme background changes shot to shot around such a small table, and something happened to the settings half-way round the table so Charlotte is a wee bit blurry!

However I think it still works, as long as you don’t inspect the wine glasses too carefully…

Day 1

We have another moderately early start, as we have to catch a plane back to Tashkent. The staff of the Hotel Bankir once again prove that while the hotel may not have the best-designed rooms, it has a really excellent staff. They go the extra mile by opening up breakfast nearly an hour early so we can travel adequately fed. We then squander this benefit slightly by getting our wires crossed about departure time, and I’m sitting drinking coffee when Mehmet starts sending the "where are you all, we need to go" WhatsApps.

Check-in at the airport is remarkably easy, with most of the formalities being handled on our behalf by Ganisher, and no complexities around extra baggage fees like in Mongolia. The good news: it’s dramatically faster than the 2+ days we spent doing the outbound journey by train and minibus. The bad news: it still takes almost 4 hours, not because of the flying time but because the plane also stops at Bukhara, and the process of disembarking some passengers and then boarding a few more is interminable. There are no refreshments, and we could really do with a coffee when we arrive.

On the leg from Bukhara to Tashkent we fly relatively low, in almost cloudless conditions. Much of the terrain is no more noteworthy from the air than from the roads, but there is one exception, the man-made Aydar-Arnasay system of lakes, a Soviet-era reservoir arrangement. Some are so shallow that from the air you can see distinct colour bands highlighting features in the lake bottoms.

We grab a bite on the way from the airport, check into our hotel (the Excellent Lotte Palace, again), and then head out to photograph the Tashkent Metro. This, like its counterparts in other Soviet cities, is a magnificent, well-decorated tribute to Soviet and Uzbek excellence. We start at Kosmonavtlar (Cosmonauts) station, decorated with images of famous figures in Russian and joint space exploration, and then travel on to Alisher Navoi, named and decorated in honour of a famous Uzbek poet. On the way back we split up, and I spend a happy half an hour chilling with a latte in the park opposite the hotel.

For dinner we have booked into a smart and supposedly posh Turkish restaurant above the new Zarafshan shopping centre. The décor is excellent, but it becomes rapidly apparent that food service may be sub-optimal. The waiters are all circulating with two things: a large laminated menu with pictures of their dishes, and a long printed paper list of "what’s off". There’s a purported range of about a dozen soups, but the only ones available are broccoli, and lentil. Yeuch! The meat dishes have a similar shortfall, and I end up with about my third choice, lamb chops. However they are generous, beautifully cooked, and delicious, which provides some mitigation.

The issue seems to be that we are now towards the end of the Eid al-Adha (Jacob’s Sacrifice) Festival, which takes place over four days in Uzbekistan, and clearly digs deep into food and drink reserves. It’s not a disaster, but might be worth avoiding if you have a choice.

Last Supper taken, we head back to the hotel.

Day 2

We have the morning for a leisurely breakfast and repack, and head off to the airport around noon. The formalities are trouble-free, but amazingly bureaucratic. My passport and boarding card are checked four separate times between the check-in desk and the exit from Security, in a couple of cases only a few meters apart.

Once through one of our number slips off to the Business lounge, leaving Mehmet and myself to find a bar with beer and kebabs. Once again Turkish Airlines have a horribly confused "queue" (not really worthy of the name) through their boarding process, but at least I get on and get my baggage away without problems.

The flight to Istanbul is smooth, but has to be the hottest & sweatiest I have ever experienced. Ladies are all fanning themselves, other large men literally radiate heat as you get within a few feet of them. Either the air conditioning is not working or the cabin crew simply can’t be bothered to set it properly – I certainly don’t hear any apology.

On arrival there is the same lengthy walk and the same confused arrangement re transfer gates as on my flight back from Mongolia. I completely bypassed this complexity on the way out from London. (I have a suspicion, yet to be confirmed, that that is because Turkey and the UK have a visa-free travel arrangement, part of which was "and no two-mile walk to the transfer gates". If so, well done to whoever agreed it.)

My first stop is a Costa, where I am able to purchase an Efes beer. That’s an excellent innovation even if it does cost €15! Welcome back to Istanbul Grand Airport.

My layover is 12 hours, so after a short wander around the "retail opportunities" I get yet another kebab and beer (about ten times the cost of lunch), and then head off to try and get some sleep.

After the disappointment of the lounge, I have splurged slightly over £200 on 8 hours in a "sleep cabin" within the airside Yotel. The sleep cabins (not to be confused with the "sleep pods" which are suspiciously like temporary-use coffins) are single rooms with a proper bed, but linked to a shared bathroom area. Let’s see how this works…

Day 3

The sleep cabin is a fully-ledged hotel room, just small and not en-suite. I get to bed quickly, but take a bit of time to nod off, due mainly to a mattress and pillow which probably qualify as construction materials. However I eventually get several hours reasonable sleep. When I wake up the display on my Fitbit says 5.30am, exactly as I planned. I get a towel from the reception area, and head off for a shower. While the shared bathroom area is not ideal, it’s kept clean and well stocked, and I don’t have any real complaint.

Back in the sleep cabin, I start thinking about moving off, but glance at the TV which has come on for some unexplained reason. The corner of the screen is a clock showing just before 4am. 4AM? WTF? A quick scan of available timepieces reveals that the TV and my watch are in agreement, whereas my Fitbit is still on Tashkent time. Bugger. Back to fitful sleep for another two hours…

Note to Tissot: the T-Touch Expert Solar is almost the perfect travel watch. So why, oh why, did you not make the outer dial markings and hands luminous?

Note to Yotel: if you’re going to charge £200 for a few hours, you could at least provide a clock…

Ominously, the gate for my flight will be announced two hours ahead of departure, so I steel myself for a walk the length of the whole airport (tick), and a long queue (tick). The queue is not actually that deep, but the process is very slow and bureaucratic, with no fewer than 3 separate checks of my passport and boarding bass within about 3m. I’m puzzled why they need the duplicate checks, but then observe someone who has tried to jump the queue and skip one of the steps being escorted back out into the hallway to queue again. One can’t help thinking that a proper queuing system with barriers outside the gate, plus all the document checks being done once, fully, before entry into the gate, might be a better solution?

Flight, arrival at Gatwick and taxi home are uneventful. As Ole’ Blue Eyes sang "it’s nice to go travelling, but it’s nice to come home".

Yes, the travel has been hard work, and I’m certainly no fan of Istanbul Airport, but otherwise it’s been a thoroughly enjoyable and very successful trip. I’ll take full stock of it in the next post.

As in Bukhara, our hotel in Khiva is a few minutes’ walk from the historical centre, but it’s still a 4am start to try and shoot at blue hour. However on this occasion we really could have had an extra half an hour in bed, as it turns out they don’t light the buildings in the morning.

Mehmet does his usual positive tour leader thing and tries to find subjects which can be shot in almost total darkness, but I’m not buying it. Is there a special "photo tour leader course" where they learn how if you turn up and your subject has been buried under concrete and there’s a hailstorm they suggest "why don’t you try capturing the graceful arcs of the hailstones hitting the concrete"?

Fortunately there is a bit of security and street lighting and I’m free to safely wander the streets for a while until the sun comes up. Once the buildings are naturally illuminated everything changes. We get some great shots, including a nice old street cleaning lady who happily poses for a small tip, and a mosque illuminated by the sun, but where I’m ideally positioned so that my shadow, and those of things around me, form part of a dramatic composition.

After breakfast there’s considerably more activity. I try on one of the local hats, which is designed for the depths of an Uzbek winter which is allegedly colder than Iceland, but not ideal headwear in over 30C. We explore an old mosque and the Sultan’s palace, where we encounter a lady selling shoes, who is just in a perfect setting and light.

One thing which is really heart-warming is to see even quite small children playing in the street, running errands, interacting with adults, just being allowed to BE, not locked away somewhere with only a screen for company. There’s one particular little girl of maybe 5 in a pink dress who we see all over the city and on the route down to our hotel, usually carrying a bag of stuff with a determined expression on her face. Her mother obviously keeps her busy when she’s off school running little errands, but I suspect it’s growing a sense of self-reliance which will be valuable later. If I have to guess which environment will create the more capable young adults, it won’t be ours.

After lunch we go to yet another cultural show. This is very different to the others – it’s a group formed by three generations of the same family, who perform traditional music and dances. It’s much easier to photograph, as we’ve commissioned the performance so we have the best seats, we’re straight on to the performers with a beautiful background, and there’s enough light to capture the movement at a chosen shutter speed. There’s less variety than the other shows, but I still take quite a few shots in the hope of securing particularly photogenic moments.

Dinner is taken at what is supposedly one of Khiva’s best restaurants. Our guide keenly points out the smartly dressed woman a few tables away who owns the restaurant and many others in Khiva. He’s ordered ahead for us, including the "house special".

Drinks are entertaining. Our usual four local beers to start turn up without a problem, but we decide to also get a bottle of wine. We tackle the young waiter, and say "can we please see the wine list". He disappears off for several minutes, and then turns up and proudly announces "we have red wine, and we have white wine"! Suspecting we’re not going to get any more information we send off for a bottle of red wine. Fortunately it’s the same locally-bottled merlot we’ve been drinking all week, but the concept of grapes and vineyards seem to be bypassing our hosts. (In fairness, most are Muslim, so it’s not of direct interest to them.)

Starter out of the way the house special arrives. My immediate summary is "sausage in a pancake". I am chided that this is being unfair to the local cuisine, and I reframe it as "kofta in a pancake", but after everyone has had a couple of bites my initial assessment is widely accepted. Perfectly acceptable, but maybe not quite as expected.

Early start tomorrow, back to Tashkent.

After a calm night and a slightly more relaxed start we set out on 480km drive from Bukhara to Khiva. The first 400km or so pass very quickly and smoothly on an excellent highway, noticeably newer and in better condition than that from Samarkand. We do have to stop for some goats crossing, and also investigate a series of sand-traps used to help keep the road clear, at which I spot an interesting little lizard. However after the coffee stop things almost literally fall apart.

The plan for lunch fails as all the roadside restaurants are shut due to a bank holiday. However as I have probably eaten a whole sheep so far this week there’s no immediate risk of starvation! At the same time we reach the end of the good road, and revert to a bumpy single carriageway.

I’m following our progress on the map and am expecting our route to follow the main road through Urgench, over the river on the big bridge, and into Khiva. Instead, for reasons never entirely explained our driver decides to turn off the highway and take a minor road. This descends rapidly from road to cart track with passing places. The bridge over the large river has a toll, jury-rigged width restrictors, and turns out to be a series of pontoons, some of which have seen better days, with the joins covered by steel sheets. Our driver admits he has never previously used that route! I have been following on the map, and I predicted a very minor road, but not the pontoon bridge.

We find a supermarket doing a roaring trade due to being the only one open for miles around. Bank Holiday Uzbek cuisine: Lays crisps (US), Bounty bar (Birmingham), Banana (somewhere tropical) & Uzbek beer (brewed by Czechs). Oh well, more lamb tonight!

We eventually reach Khiva, although not without some further diversions as like the other cities it’s undergoing massive construction. Total of almost 8 hours on the road, including only three short stops amounting to maybe 1 hour. I may be unimpressed by Amit’s map-reading, but his endurance is impressive!

After a short pause we gather for dinner (lamb, now there’s a surprise) and then climb up the observation tower to take photos of the wonderfully serpentine walls of the old fort at sunset. We are almost stymied by rainclouds (and a couple of short showers), but our luck holds out and for about 20 minutes before sunset the sun shines below the clouds and bathes the walls in great light.

We’re in a new boutique hotel (the Bankir Khiva) which Mehmet has not previously used. This has made an odd design choice – rooms of a reasonable size, but each is almost completely filled by the most enormous (expletive deleted) huge bed I have ever seen, leaving effectively no room for fripperies like, for example, luggage. Also my room opens onto the car park – noise is not really a problem but the curtains only cover about 50% of the window, so my sleep is regularly interrupted by car lights being turned on. And the bedding is too heavy… This is all a shame as the hotel is well located and staff are friendly and helpful, but more focus on the basics would help.

We have a 3.40 start to walk into historical Bukhara before sunrise. Any initial grumpiness fades rapidly as we realise how beautifully the main buildings are lit. A small courtyard with a dingy green pool becomes a source of fascinating reflections. The main mosque complex is lit in a slowly changing combination of blue, purple and red to set off the dark blue of the aptly-named blue hour sky.

The lights are switched off on the dot of sunrise, but then we can move into the mosque courtyard to capture its buildings in the rich glow of the rising sun.

After breakfast we drive out of town to the Mausoleum of Naqshbandi, a famous Islamic teacher. They have his most famous sayings up on posters in various places. As a card-carrying atheist there is one about Allah which don’t really relate to me, but otherwise they all make a lot of sense. Moral guidance aside, his followers have created a calm, aesthetically pleasing space which provides a number of equally pleasing images.

We have a few hours off and a late lunch, then it’s off to the blacksmith’s workshop. One family has run a metalworking business in Bukhara for seven generations. You can browse their sculptures and watch the latest son working, but we’re down for something special. This is a "crowd pleaser" display in which a piece of hot steel is folded, covered in hardening powder, reheated and then hit hard on the anvil creating a massive shower of sparks. Using a suitable combination of wide angle and relatively slow shutter speed, the images are dramatic.

After the blacksmith we have time for the short cart ride to the Chor Minor Mosque, a tiny mosque with four minarets, then it’s back to the centre for another "culture show". This has a very different character to Marokand: played "cabaret style" in a small courtyard with live music and alternating dances and catwalk fashion show.

The combination of the cabaret setting and the movements particularly in the fashion show segments present an odd focus challenge. Tracking mode with human subject recognition works perfectly as the girls come towards you, but fails immediately the dancers spin or the models turn around, especially if they are wearing unusual-shaped clothes or making odd arm gestures. Then focus flips to a random member of the audience in the background and the girls go out of focus. I spend some time experimenting with different settings, but fail to find a fool-proof set-up. At least I can use my go-to shutter speed of 1/250s to freeze movement "just enough".

In terms of the fashion itself, it’s a fascinating fusion. The shapes owe a lot to traditional Central Asian forms of dress, but thoroughly modernised, and arguably Westernised. However the fabrics, with their bright colours and dramatic geometric patterns featuring stripes and long curves, are very typically Uzbek.

Tally from the fashion show: a mere 1081 images totalling 44GB, and another large memory card filled. At this rate Uzbekistan, which was expected to be mainly monuments and portraits, could generate more than the 300GB from my wildlife shoot in Zimanga!

Our day starts with the long drive from Samarkand to Bukhara. As I now expect, it’s a modern, divided multi-lane highway. There are no craters (so a distinct notch up on Mongolia) although in places the surface has been repaired badly and bouncy progress means I have to abandon typing my blog. The road is open to all traffic, which means fast electric cars mixing with donkey carts. Direction of travel is observed, but not necessarily lane control and it’s a bit disconcerting to see the fast cars and large trucks all moving to the right to pass a donkey cart, or lad on a bike, in what would normally be the "fast" lane.

I am impressed how clean the road is. There are regular roadside bins, clearly both used and reliably emptied. If you look carefully you see the odd abandoned bottle or packet, but none of the dreadful rubbish you usually see roadside in countries both poor and richer.

What is noticeable is the number of abandoned or incomplete roadside services. This looks suspiciously like what happened as Britain’s road network expanded in the 1960s – a large number of people invested in facilities in the hope of a good profit, but the market became saturated, and stabilised only when competition drove out the excess capacity.

Along the way we stop at a caravanserai, think truck stop for 11th century camel trains. This is followed by my making the obligatory Santana purchase from Amazon Music. Yes, it’s still a great album.

On the way into Bukhara Ganisher talks about some of the famous citizens of the city. History teaching has moved on from the position when I was young that nothing much happened to human knowledge between the Romans leaving Britain and the Renaissance. We acknowledge the founding role of Islamic scholarship, but it’s often still vaguely credited to "Arabs" as if it must have happened somewhere around the Mediterranean. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ibn Sina was a native of Bukhara. He was a pre-eminent physician, who in many ways founded modern medicine. The "cine" in "medicine" comes from his name.

Mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi worked in Bagdhad, in Arabic, but was born in Khiva (our next stop). One of his most famous treatises was "Al-Jabr", from which we get the name for algebra, and his own name became the term we use for systematic solutions to mathematical problems, algorithms.

We get to Bukhara in time for lunch followed by exploration of the historical centre. We see some great market displays, and also get some architectural shots in the old madrassa and mosque. Later on we take an electric cart drive to the fort, and watch sundown over the city, although clouds mean the light isn’t ideal.

We then descend and rejoin our cart, which takes an interminable back street route to a restaurant situated both walking distance from our hotel, and probably only 5 minutes from the fort. Pedestrianisation of the centre has both upside and downsides!

We skip the dawn shoot because it’s raining again, albeit not as dramatically as the previous day. I got some stick over dinner from the non-Brits for my use of the BBC Weather App, but they then have to acknowledge it provided the most accurate forecast for the morning, so there!

It is amazing how quickly things dry out here. Even by the previous evening there was little evidence of the biblical conditions at lunchtime, and now even with further rain overnight there’s only the occasional puddle. The excellent draining provided for roads, paths and car parks has quietly done its work and retuned things to normal.

First stop of the day is the Shah-i-Zinda Necropolis, a mausoleum complex built on a hillside reached by a very steep stone staircase. While the individual buildings are not on the same scale as the Amur Timur mausoleum, there are a few with very beautiful decoration, and there’s the added dimension of shooting the spaces between the buildings, especially if you can find a gap with no people, or just locals in local dress.

The necropolis explored, we return to Registan Square, and this time enter the square to explore the buildings. Both interiors and exteriors provide a rich source of targets, and I also get a further opportunity to engage in some casual model stealing, with a young lady trying on another of the long-trained dresses, this time in a rich dark green which is again a great match for the buildings’ tiles.

On the way out of the square our attention is stolen by a fairground barker, and we spend 5 minutes watching an impressive performance by a young fakir/strongman/gymnast, whose primary skill appears to be lying on sharp stones while people stand on him.

It’s worth mentioning at this point the Uzbek Tourist Police. This is a distinct branch of the police force, whose primary role is to ensure the safety and security of visitors to the main tourist locations. They are deliberately visible, both in person and through clearly-marked cameras. The upshot is a feeling of absolute personal security when wandering around tourist centres, and a clear point of contact for any services. We discover a card left by a previous user of an ATM, and less than 100m away is the obvious place to hand it in. It’s also the Tourist Police who give me a chance to use my carefully-practiced "Wa’alaikum Assalam", most interactions being rather less formal!

We short-cut what would have been a long walk to lunch by taking an electric cart ride through the park. After lunch we get back to the road via a market and I find the perfect t-shirt for the trip, embroidered with the names and best known attractions at the four cities we are visiting. That’s a significant improvement on the wipe-out in Mongolia.

We take a short diversion to Konigil Village, a "heritage village" where they practice a number of crafts including the making of "silk paper" (it’s actually made from the bark of mulberry trees). After that we return to the centre.

When we get back to the complex including Amur Timur’s Mausoleum the buildings are bathed in beautiful golden afternoon light, and we can do proper justice to buildings we previously only saw under dark clouds, or through bucketing rain.

We then wander around the site to the small but wonderful Ak-Saray (White Palace) Mausoleum. We have this jewel to ourselves. The warden is well-organised for photographic visitors, including a thick mat on the floor directly under the apex of the roof, and a small shield he can hold up to help manage flare from beams of sunlight reaching the sides of a wide-angle lens. Unfortunately his well-meaning efforts prove unable to match the lighting conditions we encounter, and we have to press my well-documented width and opacity into service, acting as possibly the largest lens hood in history, but it’s very effective.

A longs day’s shooting complete, it’s back to the first restaurant for a well-deserved and now fully-illuminated dinner!

We have an early start to catch the train to Samarkand. The name romantically conjures an elderly steam train, or maybe an elegant Pullman service along the lines of the Orient Express, but of course it’s actually a modern electric "bullet" train. It’s officially called the "high speed train", but the maximum commercial speed of the line is 130mph, only 4mph faster than The Mallard, powered by steam, achieved in 1938. Plus ca change…

The ride is quick and smooth, and by 11am we are in Samarkand. The drive across the city confirms a suspicion about Uzbek drivers. If you listen to an elderly soldier talking about firing an anti-aircraft gun, they say something like "you don’t aim at the plane, you aim at where the plane is going to be". Uzbek drivers use a variant, they don’t aim for where a gap is , they aim for where a space will be. Sometimes it isn’t.

It doesn’t help that the minibus’ seatbelts are clearly regarded as a low-value decoration. Each row of 3 seats only has one belt, and only one of them with a working reel. Brace!

We start at the tomb of Amir Timur (also known as Tamurlane). It’s a rather magnificent edifice both inside and out, but the exterior shots are somewhat marred by the enormous black clouds gathering overhead, which render all the colours a dark grey. A few minutes after we go in the heavens open with a dramatic thunderstorm and borderline monsoon rain.

We therefore spend quite a lot of time photographing the mausoleum interior. Fortunately it’s absolutely spectacular, and rewards both wide views and zooming into the details. I have decided to carry both camera systems, the full-frame one with its high-ISO capability and ultra-wide 14-28mm lens works well for the wider view. In the interests of keeping overall weight down I’m only carrying the ageing and diminutive 45-175mm telephoto lens for the micro four thirds system, but it performs beautifully for the details. It’s not an obvious choice up against the longer lenses, but sometimes, like Goldilocks, it’s "just right".

We exhaust the subject matter and emerge into the lobby of the mausoleum. It’s still bucketing rain. There’s a young chap with a handful of plastic macs. I buy one, for 75 000 Soms (about £4.50). Then he realises that he has control of limited supply in a seller’s market, and attempts to put the price for Charlotte and Ingrid up to 100 000! We get him down to 150 000 for two, but seems to be getting the higher price from other visitors. Something about right place at the right time….

The roads and pavements are all engineered with big storm drains, but the rain has been so heavy and prolonged that they are being overwhelmed, and we drive through deep standing water to lunch. This turns out to be by candle light as the power is out.

Although the weather has settled down, after lunch progress around Samarkand is still impeded by standing water. It takes us an hour to drive a distance we are told could be walked in about 15 mins. However we do get to the hotel and have a chance to settle in before the next adventure.

Our guide, Garnisher, is also manager of a recently-revamped theatre, currently being used for a nightly dance show, Marokand, showcasing both the local dance talent, and the culture and history of Samarkand. We have a special back-stage pass and are invited into the room where the female dancers are doing their make-up and hair. The young ladies are remarkably good natured and tolerant of being photographed in such an intimate setting, and we get some great shots. At the end I give a little thank-you speech on behalf of the two older men.

Then we have the show. The dancing and costumes are stunning, and we have front-row VIP seats, and no constraints on photography. Unfortunately there’s a technical challenge: the various backdrops are projected digital video, and all the lighting is LED. This means that the fastest possible shutter speed is 1/60s, otherwise your image contains blotchy, stripy backgrounds and odd lighting effects. 1/60s is not really fast enough to capture dance movements. However you may be lucky and capture a moment where the dancer is momentarily still, or maybe facing forward through a turn so her head is not moving even if the rest is. I leave you to judge how well this works.

Between the make-up session and the show I shoot 2104 images, a total of 81GB more than filling one of my fast memory cards. Based on a very quick scan to select the above samples, I’ll probably delete 95% and keep around 100 worth processing. Let’s see.

Finally, as if all that wasn’t enough, we go to Registan Square, one of Samarkand’s classic vistas, for the blue hour. We focus on the view from the road straight down to the three madrassas. There’s little trace now of the apocalyptic earlier weather, and we’re treated to a clear blue sky balancing the well-lit buildings. A great end to an "entertaining" day.

Over breakfast I meet Mehmet, the tour leader, and then Ingrid, the final guest in this rather select tour. After breakfast I decide to go out and explore the park in the centre of Tashkent, which isn’t far from our hotel.

Exiting the hotel and walking to the end of the block is uneventful, but then I get caught up in what feels like a major security operation with dozens of police holding the traffic, shouting at people, blowing whistles, marshalling pedestrians and so forth. Of course I don’t have enough common language to be sure what’s going on, but it becomes fairly apparent when an enormous number of police vehicles come through the junction at high speed. Now I’ve seen The Queen drive down The Strand (one Rolls Royce and a couple of police bikes), and when we were in Washington DC we saw President Obama’s motorcade (about 20 vehicles), but this one has that topped. The central characters are either very important, or very naughty, or possibly both! Based on the absence of limousines and presence of a couple of armoured vans I’m tending toward the "naughty" theory. Unfortunately I don’t get photos – when it’s apparent that I’m not going anywhere for a few minutes I take out my camera and long lens, but a very large and stern-looking policeman makes me put it away again…

Drama over I wander up to the park, which has at its centre an enormous statue of a bloke on a horse (Amur Timur, distant relative of Ghengis Khan, who’s Wikipeida entry can be summarised as "brutal and deadly patron of the arts"). The park is beautifully laid out and coiffed, and around it are a number of rather spectacular municipal edifices. Tashkent suffered a major earthquake in 1966, and in its wake the Soviets rebuilt with a large number of grandiose structures. The habit appears to have extended into the modern era.

So far my impression of food and drink prices is "quite cheap", but I discover that those are the inflated tourist prices! For lunch I grab a pasty and a bottle of coke from a café in the shopping centre. Total is 20 000 Uzbek Soms, which equates to about £1.20. My cash should go a long way here,

Back at the hotel we meet the final member of our party, local guide Ganisher. We head out for an afternoon’s shooting. First stop, the Chorus Bazar, a market area centred around an enormous domed structure. We have a happy hour photographing the fruits, nuts, spices and their vendors, and then a working bakery corner producing the delicious local "Non" bread.

After that, we head to the Khast Imam religious complex. This is built around two large squares, one of which houses an ancient mosque and madrassa, the other of which hosts a brand new (and not yet officially open) cultural centre. Both are dramatic, but difficult to photograph well. Both are full of other tourists. The madrassa complex is laid out in such a way that the old mosque to some extent obscures the other buildings. The cultural centre has slightly odd proportions, making it difficult to capture both the dramatic portals and the blue dome. However with a bit of effort I get acceptable results.

I have more success with a bit of brazen "model stealing". In front of the madrassa two attractive middle-aged Uzbek ladies are posing for photos in dresses with very long trains. They seem happy to include us in the photographic experience, and their official photographer tolerates it without complaint. We discover later that the two models are twin sisters, and the other lady managing the costumes, hair and makeup is a third sister, so it’s quite possible they paid the photographer rather than the other way around. Regardless we all have a nice chat and I come away with some great shots.

We take dinner just down the road, then return to the complex to make more photographs at blue hour, which has materialised in spite of the cloudy weather for much of the day. With fewer people around, and a bit of expert guidance from Mehmet, I capture a couple of my "must do shots" and retire happy.

To read more, please use the next/previous links or visit www.andrewj.com/blog/uzbekistan

I’m off on my travels again, this time in the footsteps of Marco Polo, visiting Uzbekistan and four cities along the Silk Road.

Uzbekistan is a former Soviet republic, independent since the 1990s, south of Russia and North of Iran and Afghanistan. It’s one of only two "double land-locked" countries in the world – completely surrounded by countries which are themselves also land-locked. If you need it for a pub quiz the only other is Lichtenstein, a principality within Switzerland about the size of Guildford…

Uzbekistan is famous for its spectacular architecture. You probably have a mental picture of "somewhere in central Asia" with large Islamic buildings covered in blue tiles. That’s Uzbekistan. I’m sure there will also be people and activities, but I’ll confess it’s the blue tiled buildings which were the initial draw.

Over 8 days we will visit 4 cities along Uzbekistan’s section of the Silk Road: Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva:

After a gap of almost 10 years, I’ve returned to Light and Land as tour organisers, and the excellent Hayley Greenall of Travel Counsellors has organised the travel.

As always I’ll operate modified Vegas Rules: what goes on on the photo trip … is all material for Andrew’s blog!

I Like Going Places, But Not So Much the Going

Planning started with a strong sense of déjà vu, as there’s no such thing as a premium economy service between the UK and Uzbekistan, and the simplest solution (at least on paper) is to use Turkish Airlines via Istanbul, just like last year’s Mongolia trip. Chastened by my experiences on that trip I deliberately chose flights with a generous transfer window in each direction.

The first sign of trouble came about 6 weeks out, when Turkish emailed me to say that they were moving me onto an earlier flight from Gatwick to Istanbul. The reason was never given, but it smacked of consolidation to reduce their jet fuel use. The new flight timing wasn’t a big problem, but my "generous" layover had just become a long one.

I was prepared to accept the new timing, but it quickly emerged that in the process my booking had entered some sort of zombie state where I couldn’t manage it properly. It took Travel Counsellors 2 weeks to get it back into a usable state, and a further three to restore my paid-for seat bookings.

Setting aside my taxi deciding to take a very weird back-roads route to Gatwick, when there are perfectly good, straight main roads which do the same thing, travelling from Gatwick was much better than Heathrow T2, where the airport and airlines are conducting a social experiment on "can you run an airport without any people to help the travellers". Boarding and the flight were uneventful, but the plane took a whole half an hour taxiing around the Istanbul airport perimeter including at one point a full 360 circuit of the apron parking area!

Unless you are someone who can shop for 8 hours solid, a long layover in Istanbul presents a few challenges. There is almost no seating in the main departure lounge area unless you pay a restaurant to sit while you eat their food. Above there’s the IGA Premium Lounge which promises a relaxing environment in which to eat, drink, work if you want and sleep if you don’t.

They are not lying about the food and beer. The rest is somewhat misleading. When I arrive there’s a queue around the block to pay to get in, so bang goes my chance of getting my over-65 discount. Instead I use my pre-paid voucher which at least skips the queue. Inside I discover that there are precisely 2 chairs (already occupied) which are comfortable enough to sleep in and not in a main thoroughfare or under an enormous video wall large enough to illuminate the whole lounge. I didn’t get any sleep.

About midnight I left the lounge. For some reason, the gate for my flight would be announced 90 minutes before flight time instead of the customary 60. I soon found out why. The allocated gate was right at the end of the furthest branch of the terminal, and it took most of the extra 30 minutes to walk it. According to my Fitbit I walked nearly 10km at Istanbul Airport!

The Turkish word for airport gate is Kapilari. A capillary is a tiny blood vessel at the end of a long chain of other larger vessels. That sounds about right.

Boarding was the usual Turkish Airlines disorganised melee. First the gate has no visible indication of flight number. There’s a video screen above the desk showing a rolling promotional video rather than something useful like, say, the flight number and destination? You have to go and present your documents, at which point I found out that yet again my seat allocation had been changed under me, and then go back to sit in a seating area shared with other boarding flights and where you can only just hear the announcements. It’s a miracle no-one gets on the wrong plane. When they did call us forward it was everyone together and the token "by row" queueing system rapidly broke down into a bar-room brawl. I decide to take no prisoners and pushed through, but I really shouldn’t have to.

The flight took off at 01.40. You’d think that with such a start time they’d leave us alone to try and sleep but no, at 3am all the cabin lights came on and they served a meal! English canon rightly has no word for such a meal, at least not a polite one. I didn’t sleep much on the flight, either.

</rant>

On a positive note, the arrival in Tashkent was hopeful. In the arrivals hall I got money and a local SIM in straightforward transactions much simpler than the Mongolian equivalents, then my luggage arrived, and I had a friendly taxi driver. We’re staying at a very posh hotel in a smart, leafy area of the city, which looks suspiciously like where they keep the embassies. Promising.

They Also Do A Large One!

It turns out this is going to be a very exclusive tour. A family of four had to cancel at short notice for medical reasons, which leaves a grand total of three paying punters, including yours truly, plus tour leader Mehmet and the local guides.

Charlotte had also arrived early. We didn’t like the look of the hotel restaurant, and were advised to try a renowned Tashkent restaurant called Khan Chapan. Although reached down a slightly dingy side street, it has a delightful frontage on a small river, and we were able to sit outside (although without a blanket I was starting to get a bit chilly by the end of the evening).

The menu is generic Eastern Mediterranean / Central Asian fare, but beautifully cooked and presented with a twist. I went for "Khan’s Sword", and deliberately chose the smaller portion. Epic fail, as you can see. It easily fed both of us and provided extra meat for breakfast. And they also do a large one!

Tomorrow I start photographing Tashkent.