It was very interesting. I was living in the UK at the time and the two-week tour was all-inclusive - air, hotels, meals - for a ridiculously cheap price - around £300 all in, from Gatwick. We flew from London to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) for a couple of days, then to Tashkent via a memorable overnight flight that stopped in Kuybyshev (KUF, now Samara) on an amazing Aeroflot Tu-114 eggbeater with counter-rotating props. We spent a couple of nights at said Hotel Uzbekistan, then we were off to Dushanbe in Tajikistan for one night, then Samarkand for a couple, Bukhara for a couple more, then Urgench for supposedly two nights but ended up being 3 because we were bumped by a bunch or Party bigwigs who commandeered our Yak-40 back to Tashkent. (We stayed in Urgench - rhymes with stench - because there weren't yet any acceptable tourist hotels in Khiva, which was being renovated as something of a "museum city.") Then it was back to Tashkent, then on to Moscow for 2 or 3 nights, then back to London.

I had been in Leningrad the previous summer and was interested in how the central Asian cities would compare to European Russia in terms of quality of life, etc. - at least as much as I could determine as a tourist. It was pretty fascinating - a combination of modernity and seriously traditional - maybe even medieval - scenes. The local people were wonderfully friendly, the bazaars and markets stunning, and honestly it seemed like life wasn't so bad - undoubtedly better than life under the likes of the Emir of Bukhara who threw opponents off the top of the big minaret in the town square, and who created the "bug pit" - full of scorpions etc. - in which prisoners were tossed. Yow.

But it was also a colonial scene. For every place where the workforce was Asian and brown, there was a blond person in the management office. You couldn't miss it. The distance between Uzbekistan and Moscow was a lot more than 1800 miles.

Some pictures -

"Showplace" textile factory, Dushanbe



Roadside repairs, Bukhara



Squatters, Bukhara Great Minaret



Samarkand market



Melon men, Samarkand market



Barter, Bukhara market



Spice seller, Samarkand