Exploring Uzbekistan — Three Days in Tashkent

And why you should embrace time spent in cities most travelers skip

Freshly baked bread at the Central Asian Plov Center, Tashkent. Photo by Andrew Mullikin.

“We respect the guests,” my taxi driver says into the translation app on his phone. He looks up just in time to swerve around two pedestrians crossing the street and lays on his horn in frustration.

Welcome to Tashkent.

This is a somewhat overlooked city in a country most people probably couldn’t find on a map. According to the Uzbek tourism board, 6.6 million people visited here in 2023, which seems like a lot until you consider the numbers for more popular tourist hotspots, like Japan (25 million), Italy (68 million), and Portugal (30 million).

Of those 6.6 million visitors, chances are very few of them spent more than a day in Tashkent before traveling on to the more prominent tourism-focused cities of Samarkand, Khiva, or Bukhara. And, honestly, that makes sense — those cities’ beautiful architecture and Silk Road history make them far more appealing to the average visitor. In a world where social media so often drives our curiosity, and given our limited time away from work, it only makes sense to focus our travel on the most prominent attractions in each country we visit.