Samarkand & Bukhara Highlights

You are met at Tashkent International Airport and transferred to your hotel. After check-in your guide begins the city tour at the Courage Monument, raised after the earthquake of 1966, then continues into the Old City to the Khast-Imam Complex, where one of the world's oldest Qurans is kept, and the Mausoleum of Kaffal Shashi. You will walk through Chorsu Bazaar, ride the tiled Tashkent Metro to the modern centre, see the State Museum of Applied Arts and the facade of the Alisher Navoi Opera and Ballet Theatre, and finish at Amir Timur Square.

You transfer to Tashkent railway station in the morning for the Afrosiyob high-speed train, which covers the distance to Samarkand in about two hours ten minutes. Your guide and driver meet you at the station. You begin at the Gur-Emir Mausoleum, the shrine of Timur beneath its ribbed turquoise dome, then walk to Registan Square, where the Ulugbek, Sher-Dor and Tillya-Kori madrasahs face one another across the old market ground. You check in to your hotel in the afternoon and return to the square after dark. Overnight in Samarkand.

A full day in the city. You start at the remains of the Bibi-Khanum Mosque, once the largest in the Islamic world, then cross into the noise of Siab Bazaar for bread, dried fruit and sweets. You continue up the stepped avenue of the Shakhi-Zinda necropolis, tomb after tomb faced in blue and green tile, and on to the Ulugbek Observatory, where the buried arc of the fifteenth-century sextant survives. The day ends at the Afrasiab Museum on the site of the pre-Mongol city, with its seventh-century ambassadors' fresco.

After breakfast you drive south over the mountain pass to Shakhrisabz, about an hour and a half away, where Timur was born and where he built on a scale he never attempted elsewhere. You see the vast surviving portal of the Ak-Saray Palace, the Kok-Gumbaz mosque, the Dor-ut Tilovat complex where Timur's father and his spiritual teacher are buried, and the mausoleum of Jakhongir and Omar-Shaykh. You stop for lunch on the pass on the way back, where tandoor-baked lamb is the local speciality, and return to Samarkand.

In the morning you visit Konigil village on the edge of Samarkand, where mulberry bark is still beaten into paper by a water-driven mill, and the tomb of Saint Daniel above the Siab river. You then take the Afrosiyob train on to Bukhara, covering roughly 300 kilometres in about an hour and a half. Your driver meets you and takes you to your hotel in the old town. The evening is free around the Lyabi-Hauz ensemble, where the plane trees and the pool are the social centre of Bukhara after dark.

A full walking day through the historic centre, a UNESCO World Heritage site. You visit the Ismail Samani Mausoleum with its woven brickwork, the Chashma-Ayub Mausoleum and the Bolo-Khauz Mosque with its painted wooden columns, then the Ark Fortress opposite. You continue to the Kalyan ensemble, standing beneath the twelfth-century minaret between the Kalyan Mosque and the Miri-Arab Madrasah, and on through the trading domes to the Magoki-Attori Mosque, the Ulugbek and Abdulazizkhan madrasahs and the four-towered Chor-Minor.

You check out and drive to the edge of the city to see Sitorai Mokhi-Khosa, the summer palace of the last emir, where Russian and Bukharan decoration sit side by side, and the Bakhouddin Naqshbandi memorial complex, an important Sufi pilgrimage site. After lunch you travel back to Tashkent by high-speed train or by air, depending on your departure time, and are transferred to Tashkent International Airport. This is the end of the seven-day Samarkand and Bukhara Highlights tour.