Believe it or not, Uzbekistan may be one of the next great tourist destinations. And a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal tells why.
Walking at dusk through the stone alleyways of this legendary Silk Road city, it's difficult to tell which country, or century, you're in. Minarets and 17th-century mosques tower overhead. Battered Soviet-era taxis wait for passengers. Signs in Russian hawk meat dumplings to men in robes and shaggy sheep's-hair hats. It could be an Arabian Nights caravan town-or the Soviet Union, circa 1962.
Since the break up of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan has been building tourism infrastructure. It's not the destination that Afghanistan was on the old hippie trail, but it does give visitors insight into the Islamic World of the Ottoman Empire and the Silk Road.
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© zongo69
July 28th, 2009 on 12:28 am
The fabled mosques and madrasas of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, with their marvellous design and colorful tile work, are just some of the sites in Uzbekistan linked to The Silk Road. This country also gave the world Tamerlane, one of the most legendary of the Central Asian warriors.
Other notables from history who knew Uzbekistan well were Marco Polo and Alexander the Great, whose armies smashed through the region on his way to India
For many centuries, the rulers of what is today Uzbekistan was a power to be reckoned with along The Silk Road.