Alisher Navoi never saw Tashkent, or at least no record says he did, yet his name hangs over half the city. Born in Herat in 1441, a courtier and poet at the Timurid court, he argued passionately that Turkic could be as fine a literary language as Persian, and he wrote a vast body of verse and prose in the Chagatai Turkic that Uzbeks consider the ancestor of their own tongue. Streets, a theatre, a library and a national park carry his name, and so does this cinema palace, a monument to the idea that a city should have a hall of dreams named after its poet.
Cinema was serious business in Soviet Tashkent. The city had its own film studio, which turned out comedies, historical epics and the odd adventure film set on the steppe, and it hosted a festival of Asian and African films that drew directors from across the world. The cinema palace belongs to that culture of big, public places for entertainment, where families dressed up for an evening show. The building stands in a city that was reshaped after the 1966 earthquake, with wide boulevards, fountains and a taste for large, symmetrical forms.
Your day on the bike heads north-east, away from the capital, to the Chatkal range on the border with Kyrgyzstan. The road leaves the suburbs, runs through orchards and along the Chirchik river, then climbs into the foothills, where the air cools and the villages cluster on the slopes. The mountains of the western Tien Shan stand up like a wall, with snow on the peaks until early summer, and the valleys are full of walnut and apple trees. The road is smooth in places and patched in others, and in spring, rockfalls and mud can slip onto the asphalt. Bring warm clothes: even in July, the passes are cold in the evening.
In the city, the usual rules apply. Traffic is fast, lane discipline is loose, and police stand at many junctions, sometimes waving riders aside for document checks, so keep your papers and licence handy. Petrol is not always on sale at every station, and many cars run on gas, so do not let your tank run low, and fill up before leaving town. Food is easy to find: plov at lunchtime, kebabs in the evening, and fresh bread from a clay oven, with green tea poured into small bowls. The best seasons for the mountain ride are May, June and September.