Desert and yurts

Kyzylkum means red sand, and for much of the year the name is accurate: low dunes the colour of fired clay, saxaul scrub, a horizon that hardly moves. The desert fills the middle of Uzbekistan, between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, and every journey between Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand crosses some part of it. Most travellers see it through a car window. We think it deserves a night.

The way in is through Nurata, a small town on the desert’s southern edge, where a spring rises at the foot of a ruined fortress and fills a clear pool of fish that have been fed and left in peace for centuries. An hour further north the sand ends at Aydarkul, a long, shallow lake that did not exist until the 1960s, when floodwater from the Syr Darya was let into a low basin and stayed. Birds found it long before travellers did. The yurt camps stand on the sand a short walk from the water: a ring of felt tents with carpets on the floor and a fire in the middle of the circle. Towards dusk you ride a two-humped camel out into the scrub while the light turns long and gold, and come back to dinner cooked over the fire. In many camps a singer arrives after dark with a dombra.

Then the sky. There is no town for many kilometres, and once the fire has burned down the Milky Way stands as a solid band from one edge of the desert to the other. The yurts are warm and plain, felt and quilts rather than corridors and keys, and the morning comes early and cool enough to want tea first. We place this night between Samarkand and Bukhara, on The Grand Journey across Uzbekistan, on Uzbekistan in Depth and on the two-day route through Nurata, and we will tell you plainly which camps are best kept and when, between April and October, the nights turn cold. On Khorezm and the Aral Sea the night is spent in a camp of the same kind below the fortress of Ayaz-Kala, in Karakalpakstan. Your travel designer arranges the drive, the camp and the camel. You need only bring something warm.