Aral Sea & Karakalpakstan Expedition

You are met at Tashkent International Airport and transferred to your hotel. Once you have settled in you meet your guide for a first look at the capital, beginning at the Courage Monument, which commemorates the earthquake of 1966. You continue into the old city to the Mausoleum of Kaffal Shashi and the Khast-Imam Complex, then browse the domed halls of Chorsu Bazaar. From there you ride the beautifully decorated Tashkent Metro into the modern centre, visit the Museum of Applied Arts and end the afternoon at Amir Timur Square. Overnight in Tashkent.

After an early transfer to the domestic terminal you take the morning flight west to Nukus, a hop of some 810 km that takes about an hour and forty minutes. On arrival you go straight to the Savitsky Karakalpakstan Art Museum, where Igor Savitsky assembled a collection of banned Soviet avant-garde painting alongside Karakalpak applied arts. Afterwards you take a short drive around the centre of Nukus to see the statue of the poet Berdakh, the city hall and the drama theatre. The evening is free before an early start tomorrow.

You leave Nukus at about nine and drive north to Muynak. Here you walk out onto what was once the seabed to the famous cemetery of ships, where fishing trawlers lie rusting in the sand, and visit the local history museum with its photographs of the vanished port. After lunch at a guesthouse you continue onto the vast, empty Ustyurt Plateau, reaching the present shoreline of the Aral Sea in the late afternoon. You stop to photograph the canyons and collapsed land, then settle into a yurt camp for a camp-style dinner and a night under an enormous sky.

You wake early for sunrise over the water. After breakfast you visit the thirteenth-century settlement of Kurgancha-Kala, then the small Soviet-era village of Kubla-Ustyurt, where an old airstrip and a lone building stand against the steppe. Driving south you pass the remains of a lighthouse and the abandoned settlement of Urga, and stop for photographs at Lake Sudochie. Lunch is taken on the road. Closer to Nukus you stop at the Mizdakhan memorial complex and the ruined walls of Gyaur-Kala before checking in for the night.

This morning you drive south towards Khiva, a distance of about 200 km that takes four to five hours with stops. Along the way you explore the archaeological monuments of ancient Khorezm: Chilpyk, the Zoroastrian dakhma raised on a hill above the Amu Darya, and Toprak-Kala, capital of Khorezm in the third century AD, whose mud-brick walls still rise from the desert. If time allows you also climb to Ayaz-Kala. You arrive in Khiva in the late afternoon and check in to your hotel inside or beside the old town.

The whole day is given to Ichan-Kala, the walled inner town of Khiva and a UNESCO World Heritage site that works as a living open-air museum. On a walking tour with your guide you visit the Kunya-Ark citadel and its viewing platform, the Tash-Khovli Palace, the Muhammad Aminkhan and Muhammad Rahimkhan madrasahs, the stumpy turquoise Kalta Minor, the many-columned Juma Mosque, and the Pakhlavan Makhmud Mausoleum. Those with a head for heights can climb the Islam-Khoja minaret, the tallest in Uzbekistan. The afternoon is yours.

After breakfast and check-out you have a little free time for last photographs in the old town or for the craft shops around the Kalta Minor. You are then transferred the short distance to Urgench airport, about 35 minutes away, for the flight back to Tashkent. Depending on your onward connection you are taken either directly to Tashkent International Airport for your flight home, or to a hotel for a few hours' rest. This marks the end of your Aral Sea and Karakalpakstan expedition.