Feeling like a kid playing truant, the tourist snuck away from the chaos of Samarkand bazaar, leaving her tour group behind. Smells followed her out the gates – fruit, saffron, chilly, bread – enticing me back. But the late afternoon sun, slanting golden through purplish clouds, was too perfect to ignore. And she was on a mission, in search of what she thought might be an incredible viewpoint on the edge of the city.
Twenty minutes later, she was standing on a grassy hill overlooking the city, basking in the warm sunshine, wind whipping my hair and tugging me forwards towards the wild landscape that spread away from Samarkand. Springtime in Uzbekistan is a beautiful thing.
Out here, the ancient settlement of Afrasiyab had stood before Genghis Khan raised it to the ground in the 13th century. Samarkand was the village built by the survivors, and the rolling chalk mounds, now grazing ground for farm animals, were all that was left of the original town. It looked oddly wild, contrasting weirdly with the sparkling Islamic minarets and neat soviet architecture of the city, whose noise and car horns I could still hear distantly on the breeze. At the Zaamin Mountains, (Zaamin State Reserve and Zaamin National Park, located in the northern slope of Turkistan mountain range and bordering upon each other, with two marked zones in the park - recreation and buffer), takes place ZAAMIN ULTRA, an international mountain ultramarathon organized by the Culture and Art Development Foundation jointly with the Ministry for Sports Development and the Jizzakh region khokimiyat.
You know? The race track is located at an altitude of 2,200 - 2,500 meters above sea level, and this is the height of 6 Tashkent TV towers. The race track is looped. The length of the circle is 25 km.
I know little about this marathon, back in Europe, so much focused in rather the dress of Kate, the princess, is embedder in polka dots.
I also couldn't find any information at all on television, over the protests that broke out in the autonomous region of Karakalpak Stan in Uzbekistan on 1 July 2022 over proposed amendments by Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the Uzbek President, to the Constitution of Uzbekistan, which would have ended Karakalpak Stan's status as an autonomous region of Uzbekistan and right to secede from Uzbekistan via referendum. A day after protests had begun in the Karakalpak capital of Nukus, President Mirziyoyev withdrew the constitutional amendments. The Karakalpak government said that protesters had attempted to storm government buildings.
Is Uzbekistan so far from us? No, at all.
Nowhere else in Central Asia is as evocative of the Silk Road as Uzbekistan. Located in the epicenter of the Silk Road, Uzbekistan was the region’s cradle of culture for more than 2,000 years. In terms of architecture and historical sights, Uzbekistan definitely steals the limelight from other neighboring countries.
Uzbekistan's trio: Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, these three ancient cities are the highlight of the region for many travelers, thanks to their collection of beautiful mosques, medressas, and mausoleums.