Uzbekistan. Khiva
The car door opens, a sauna-style heat hits our face. On the way from Bukhara to Khiva, there was almost no vegetation around, just a barren sandy desert with very few, mostly dry, plants. The ground is so hot that you could cook on it, and don’t even try walking bare feet. My phone suggests that it is 40°C in the shade (what shade?), locals raise their shoulders, maybe it is 50°C, maybe 60°C, nobody has a track on such things. Water, please!!!
The city
I can feel the excitement of ancient caravan traders, walking through the desert on camels for days, and finally seeing this beautiful city wall. There is water; there is food; there is life happening inside. Even today, it feels like a miracle inside of nowhere. This miracle was established 1500 years ago and later was the capital of the ancient Khanate (Central Asian term for Kingdom) of Khiva, and one of the first inscribed in the World Heritage list, suggest Wikipedia.
We get through the gate and, for one of the first of many times during this World Tour, we sigh with a surprise: how beautiful this place is, and how on earth so few tourists have found it so far. For us, these are the best news. Of course, we visited Khiva in the middle of July in 2018 and, honestly, it is way too hot in July, you’d better try in a different period. The heat is dry and becomes more bearable in mornings and evenings, but the most challenging part is the midday hours when the temperature easily reaches 50° and there is no shade at all.
The Madrasah of Mukhammad Amin-khan
It is the largest madrasah in Central Asia. Madrasah means Islamic school.
Ah, by the way, there is zero to worry about religious matters when travelling in Uzbekistan, people are very tolerant, local women’s dress styles are hugely variated – long summer dresses are the most popular, not all women are wearing scarfs, and their scarfs are a different style to other Islamic countries. In some Uzbek cities, a good percentage of the population is Russian (hence, Christian), and even in the less “Russified” places, such as Khiva or Bukhara, local people come from a lot of different backgrounds and ethnicities, each of them interpreting Islam in different ways and with different traditions. As a tourist, you can dress as you like. We did not even hear calls for prayer in the early mornings, unlike it happens in other Islamic countries.
The minaret Kalta-Minor
It had to become the highest minaret (a decorated brick tower used for Muslim call for prayer) in the Islamic world, but it has never been finished.
It is massive at the base, and it is difficult to imagine what a monster it was supposed to be.
The Harem
The only one harem we saw in Uzbekistan belonged to the ruler of Khiva Tash-Khovli in the 19th century. He was said to have four official wives.
Juma Mosque
When you think that head is spinning already from all the beauty of mosaics and city architecture, here is another piece of (wooden) gem protected by Unesco.
Early morning walks
There are very few places on Earth where I could tell how life looks like at 5 am. In Khiva, because of tremendous July heat, this was a peak hour for city sightseeing for us.
The wall
It is fantastic to walk on the city’s wall in the early morning and observe the waking up city under your feet.
Hotels and local houses from above
Here and there, there are a few good basic hotels.
It is not rear to see local people sleeping outside. During this heat, hotels are cooled by air conditioners, but not every local house has such modern gadgets.
Local home yard
Watchtower
Here we got up to the watchtower to watch the sunset.
It was not an easy task to accomplish. My legs remembered about those super steep stairs for some days.
Handcraft
Bread stamps. It is an old tradition to decorate the local bread. Every city, every region in Central Asia has its own different style (we seeing remember similar tools in the market in Kashgar a few months before), but they all use such stamps. The most popular Central Asian bread looks like a thick pizza base, I have done some photos of this bread in the bazaar in Samarkand).
Beautifully decorated wooden doors.
They are not very convenient for the tall guys, though 🙂
This is where hand made carpets are made. A cosy yard with a handcrafts shop was hidden behind the beautiful doors and protected from the aggressive midday sun.
It is hot in summer, but it can get cold in winter in the desert, so you can shop and wear such handmade wool house shoes.
Food
Food is great in Uzbekistan as long as you eat meat. For vegetarians, there are lots of juicy fruits (if you like melons and watermelons, consider Uzbekistan your personal heaven), but it can be a bit more tricky to find something in restaurant menus. Anyways, in Khiva, even though it’s not very touristic, has hotels and some foreign-oriented restaurants (as always, such places are double priced) and these restaurants, for sure, have something for the guests on particular diets.
Genuine local cuisine and local small restaurants are all about meat dishes. If you want to try some of them in Khiva, we found a lot of adjacent kiosks and shashlik grills, just outside the city walls on the north-eastern corner of the town.
The following picture if of traditional Uzbekistan shashlik (grilled meat seasoned with local spices) in a simple local restaurant outside the centre.
Drinks
Local souvenir shops inside the centre sell mostly foreign sodas and drinks; but trust me, even if they are cold, those sparkling liquids full of sugar are REALLY not good to refresh your body during that kind of serious heat.
During our Uzbek summer experience, we found that to stay hydrated and fresh nothing is better than the good, old kvas: to find it in Khiva, you have to get out of the city walls and enter in a normal supermarket.
When we finally found our supermarket in the evening, we made the mistake of buying only one 1.5lt bottle of kvas, that was obviously already empty by the following morning. We cherished cold kvas during the whole early morning tour of the old town, and finally, at 11 am, Adriano offered to walk the 700mt distance that separated us from the supermarket, to fetch more of it, along with other valuable liquids; when he came back he was completely covered by sweat, he had four huge bottles of water and two of cold kvas, one full, the other one empty: he had to consume a full 1.5lt of kvas on his way back to the hotel!
Leaving Khiva
Khiva is quite small and compact. You can see it all in one day. We stayed there for two days and in the late afternoon took a flight back to Tashkent. I remember us reaching the airport with hours of advance, with the big bag of water bottles bought by Adriano. We were bored and needed hydration, so we made up a contest about who could drink more water. If I remember correctly, we drank 5 litres of water per person during that day. The funniest part was that even with such quantities of water, the bathroom was not necessary – all that water seemed to have evaporated through our skin (or maybe we were a bit dehydrated after all). My honest recommendation is to visit a beautiful Khiva definitely, but better to avoid July heat.
_____________________________________
Photo album
