Reflections on 30 Years of Uzbekistan Travel
Bradley Mayhew has been travelling and writing guidebooks to Central Asia for 30 years. In this post he remembers the early days of travel in Uzbekistan and reflects on the recent changes that have transformed the country.
I first went to Uzbekistan in 1995 to research the first dedicated guidebook to the country, the Odyssey Guide to Uzbekistan. Just three years after Uzbekistan’s somewhat reluctant declaration of independence, the young country still felt like a forgotten corner of the Soviet Union. Most of the shops were former state-run stores with empty shelves stocking a few cans of condensed milk, Lithuanian canned fish or something worryingly called ‘beef in its own juice’. Private restaurants were almost unheard of and come dusk it was a serious challenge to find anywhere at all to eat. For days at a time I survived off bazaar-bought honey and nan bread. I both starved and gained weight at the same time.
Fiddly-to-obtain letters of invitation were required to get tourist visas from the few embassies that existed and there was still an atmosphere of mistrust towards foreigners. The very last people you would ever consider contacting in an emergency were the police, who were on a constant prowl for bribes and shakedowns. I remember being detained four times one morning in Tashkent, technically for changing money on the black market and crossing the street outside of a pedestrian crossing, but really just in the hope of an easy bribe.
Researching the depth of information that a guidebook requires was a real challenge in the 1990s. Information was hard to come by in this pre-Internet age, and the only source maps were a few dusty Soviet-era city plans and some Cyrillic topo maps used by hardy Russian climbers. I made several trips to the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to hunt down obscure Soviet books on Central Asian archaeology in a desperate attempt to unearth some (any) information on this hitherto neglected corner of the world. There were no specialist websites, no blogs, no translation apps, no travel forums.
Fast forward to my latest research trip in 2025 and writing a guidebook couldn’t be more different. Mapping software has made navigating obscure sights, creating maps and measuring distances a breeze. Specialist social media feeds and travel blogs offer a level of detail unimagined just a few years ago. There’s even an app for tracking down Soviet-era mosaics in Tashkent. The job of writing a travel guide has fundamentally changed; it’s no longer about tracking down scraps of information, it’s about filtering out the noise, using years of knowledge to curate and recommend places based on hard-earned experience, rather than the need to add social media followers or cash in on affiliate links.
Travel in Uzbekistan is a breeze these days. Gone are the rickety rural Soviet buses that were hot as a sauna in summer and would break down multiple times on a single two-hour ride of 50km. The introduction of high-speed trains in particular has made getting around the main cities of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan a delight, and Uzbekistan-made American and Korean taxis have upgraded ancient Soviet-era Ladas and Nivas.
The restaurant and accommodation scenes are, of course, unrecognisable from the late 1990s, when the only places to stay were a few fledgling homestays offering a mattress on the floor, or dilapidated Soviet hotel blocks run by surly reception staff and grumpy floor ladies. The first private B&Bs appeared in Bukhara, converted from merchant’s houses bought cheaply as their Jewish owners emigrated to Israel. Today Bukhara boasts dozens of guesthouses, stunningly decorated with traditional painted alabaster and carved wood, some in converted former madrassas, and all instantly bookable using accommodation apps.
And yet, for better or worse, all this ease has drained some of the quirkiness from Central Asian travel. I remember a bus ride in Kyrgyzstan in which a solitary sheep boarded the bus at a rural bus stop, only to get off, alone, several stops later. Without paying. On another ride in Tajikistan my elderly seat mate handed me a single light bulb and resolutely refused to take it back until the end of the ride – eight hours later. There is little space for such trip-defining curiosities in the tightly scheduled modern landscape of pre-booked itineraries, app-ordered taxis and high-speed trains, and Central Asian travel is both better, and worse, for it.
It’s not just tourism of course that has changed. The relaxing of travel red tape, the cleaning up of the police and the easing of freedom of expression in Uzbekistan has left it a much more open place since the death of Islom Karimov in 2016. It’s like someone opened the windows in a suffocatingly hot room; finally locals can breathe again.
Today there are hundreds of stylish B&Bs in Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand, as well as family homestays, cafes and restaurants blooming everywhere under President Mirziyoyev’s economic reforms. Most travellers don’t require a visa, cheap sim cards are available at the arrivals hall, and Yandex Go taxi apps allow travellers to neatly sidestep Tashkent airport’s intimidating scrum of taxi mafia. I miss having Bukhara’s backstreets to myself but, honestly, travel in Uzbekistan these days is so much better than the bad old, good old days.
About the author
Bradley Mayhew has written guides on Central Asia for Horizon Guides, is the co-author of nine editions of the Odyssey Guide to Uzbekistan, as well as seven editions of Lonely Planet’s Central Asia guide and the Central Asia sections of the Insight Guide to the Silk Road.