Khiva

Khiva (population 50,000) is the most intact and most remote of Central Asia's Silk Road cities, the final destination of a trip back through the centuries from socialist Tashkent to medieval slave town. Where Samarkand leaves the imagination exhausted, Khiva's khanate romance is plain to see and where Urgench lies restricted to two dimensions, Khiva revels in all four, as visions of the past float through its narrow streets like superimposed film.

Khiva is one of the largest and most ancient city centres of the Khoresm agricultural oasis, located in the southern delta of the Amu Darya River, south of the Aral Sea, in the west of the Central Asia. The Kyzyl-Kum desert begins here.