Global Wanderer

2/7/2022 – 3/7/2022

The trolleybus to Urgench (the last of its kind in Uzbekistan!) took around an hour to reach the city centre. Following this, it was another 20 minute walk to my accommodation for the night. Urgench is an incredibly Soviet city, with large, tree-lined boulevards, and colossal concrete buildings dotting the landscape. As a fan of Soviet architecture, I spent much of the afternoon walked down the central street, taking in the various buildings, statues, monuments, and memorials that made up the city.

Urgench, being the capital of the Khorezm region, was the home to a great many government buildings, which were built in a very similar style to those in Tashkent. It was incredible to see the contrast between Urgench and Khiva, which were separated by both 38kms and a few hundred years. I ate somsa from a local street vendor, who seemed incredibly surprised to see someone who wasn’t a local (Urgench is not exactly a tourist destination), before I headed to my accommodation for my final night in Uzbekistan!

I woke up the next morning, double checked my bag for everything (and made sure I was prepared for my 48 hour journey home), and had dumplings and coffee in the apartment’s communal kitchen. I then caught a taxi to the tiny Urgench airport, which confusingly appeared to have two minuscule terminals, and flew from Urgench to Tashkent.

Tashkent’s airport also has two terminals, an international and a domestic one, located on opposite sides of the airport’s runway. There is no real transport link between them, save for a few local buses that stop nearby, so the options were limited to taxi/Yandex, or a roughly 1.5h walk in 41º. Given that I had around 5 hours to kill in Tashkent before my flight to Istanbul, I opted for the latter, and given my recent experiences of heat in Bukhara and Khiva, felt that 41º was just about bearable. I finally made it to the international terminal, checked in, and proceeded through the rather-ominous passport control, where my time in Uzbekistan finally came to an end with a stamp in my passport. I felt a little sad, but was also relieved to be finally on my way home. I absolutely adored Uzbekistan, and felt that I had only just scratched the surface, leaving me with plenty more to visit and explore when I hopefully return!