Khorezm & the Desert Fortresses

Your driver meets you at Tashkent International Airport and takes you to the hotel, with check-in from early afternoon. You then set out with your guide through the capital, starting at the Courage Monument and continuing into the old city for the Khast-Imam Complex, where one of the world's oldest Qurans is kept, and the Mausoleum of Kaffal Shashi. You browse Chorsu Bazaar, ride the tiled Tashkent Metro into the modern centre and end the afternoon at Amir Timur Square. Overnight in Tashkent.

An early transfer takes you to the domestic terminal for the morning flight to Urgench, about an hour and forty minutes across the desert. Your driver meets you and it is a short 30 km run to Khiva. After checking in you begin a walking tour of Itchan Kala, the walled inner town and a UNESCO World Heritage site: the Mukhammad Aminkhan and Mukhammad Rahimkhan madrasahs, the stubby turquoise drum of Kalta-Minor, and the Juma Mosque with its 213 carved wooden columns. Overnight in Khiva.

A second day inside the walls, at a slower pace. You visit the Kunya-Ark citadel and climb to its watchtower for a rooftop panorama of the whole town, then explore the Tash-Khovli Palace with its aivans and carved doors, and the Mausoleum of Pakhlavan Makhmud, the poet and wrestler who is Khiva's patron saint. If you have a head for heights you can climb the Islam-Khoja Minaret, the highest in Uzbekistan. The afternoon is free for the workshops and silk-carpet weavers inside the old town.

Today you cross into the desert of ancient Khorezm. You visit Toprak-Kala, the capital of Khorezm in the third century AD and the only one of these sites to have been fully excavated, then Kyzyl-Kala, a compact Kushan-Afrigid fort that legend links to Toprak-Kala by a tunnel. In the late afternoon you reach Ayaz-Kala, three fortresses on and around a rocky hill, and check in to the yurt camp below. Dinner around the fire and a night under a very large sky.

You climb Ayaz-Kala in the morning light, when the walls throw the longest shadows, then drive north towards Nukus, stopping at Chilpyk, the great ring-shaped Zoroastrian dakhma standing on a hill above the Amu Darya. In Nukus you visit the Savitsky Karakalpakstan Art Museum, which holds the world's second largest collection of Russian avant-garde painting, and drive through the centre past the Berdakh statue and the drama theatre. An evening flight returns you to Tashkent.

Check-out is at noon and the morning is yours. If your flight is late you might see the State Museum of Applied Arts, walk past the Alisher Navoi Opera and Ballet Theatre or pick up Rishtan ceramics at a craft gallery near the old city. Your driver then collects you and takes you to Tashkent International Airport for your onward flight, ending your journey through Khorezm and the desert fortresses.