Nuratau Villages & Sentob Homestay

You are met at Tashkent International Airport and driven to your hotel. Once you have rested, your guide takes you through the Old City to the Khast-Imam complex and the Mausoleum of Kaffal Shashi, then into Chorsu Bazaar, where the bread stalls and the spice rows sit under the big turquoise dome. You ride the tiled Tashkent metro into the modern centre and finish at Amir Timur Square. There is time for an early dinner on Taras Shevchenko Street before turning in, as tomorrow starts with a train. Overnight in Tashkent.

An early transfer to the railway station for the Afrosiyob high-speed train, which leaves at 07:00 and reaches Samarkand at 09:10. Your guide and driver meet you at the platform and the day begins immediately at Registan Square, framed by the Ulugbek, Sher-Dor and Tilya-Kori madrasahs. You continue to the Bibi-Khanum Mosque and neighbouring Siab Bazaar, climb through the tiled alley of the Shakhi-Zinda necropolis, and end at the Gur-Emir Mausoleum, Timur's tomb. Overnight in Samarkand.

After breakfast you leave the city and drive north-west into the Nuratau Mountains, roughly 220 km and four hours, the last stretch on a track that climbs between bare ridges into a valley of walnut and apricot trees. Sentob has been inhabited for more than two thousand years and the rhythm has not changed much: women bake bread in clay ovens and spin yarn, men herd and build in stone and clay. You walk round the village with your host family and help make plov for supper. Overnight in the guesthouse.

A whole day with no driving. You set out on foot up the valley with a local guide, six or seven kilometres each way, passing rock carvings of ibex and hunters pecked into the dark boulders on the way to a waterfall in the upper gorge. It is a good half-day walk, and there is a donkey available if you would rather ride part of it. Back in the village you can sit in the orchards, watch the bee-eaters, or call in at the school for a chat with the children in English. Overnight in the guesthouse.

You come down out of the hills to the town of Nurata, where you visit the Chashma complex, a mosque built beside a holy spring whose pool is full of fish, and look up at the earth ramparts of the fortress traditionally credited to Alexander the Great. From there the road runs out into the Kyzylkum to a yurt camp on the edge of the steppe. You ride a camel in the late afternoon, then eat around the fire while a Kazakh akyn sings. Overnight in a yurt under a very full sky.

After breakfast you go down to Aydarkul, the long shallow lake that filled a steppe depression in the 1960s and is now fringed with tamarisk and reeds. There is time to swim in warm weather, or to take the camel track out across the sand to the shore. In the afternoon you drive to Samarkand, about 270 km and five hours, and take the Afrosiyob high-speed train on to Tashkent for your transfer to the airport. End of your Nuratau and Aydarkul journey.