Tashkent: the city Moscow rebuilt from scratch
Tashkent's Soviet modernism and ornate metro reward three days on foot — but the 1966 rebuild left a centre with little pre-Soviet fabric.
City Break
Cities worth three days and a walkable centre.
Karakol: A Garrison Town Under the Peaks
A Russian-built grid town below the Tian Shan, with a nail-free mosque and a Sunday market that still runs on livestock, not souvenirs.
Bukhara in two days, without treating it as a checklist
The old city is small enough to cross in twenty minutes. The mistake is trying to see everything on the first day.
Almaty is the easiest place to start in Central Asia
A green city under three-thousand-metre mountains, with a metro, good coffee and a gondola out of the centre.