Samarkand is one of those names that sounds invented, and then you arrive and find it is a real city with real traffic. It sits in the fertile valley of the Zeravshan river, with the Pamir-Alay foothills to the south and the Kyzylkum desert to the west, and it has been a crossroads since before Alexander the Great marched through in 329 BC. The old settlement of Afrasiab, on a plateau at the edge of town, was razed by Genghis Khan's army in 1220. Timur, who made the city his capital in the 1370s, rebuilt it on a far grander scale, filling it with the craftsmen, scholars and stonemasons he dragged back from every conquest.
The blue-tiled results are what the label means by Timurid. The Registan, a square framed by three madrasas, is the famous one, with the oldest, built for Ulugh Beg, dating from the 1420s. Ulugh Beg was Timur's grandson, and he was as much an astronomer as a ruler; the ruins of his observatory lie on a hill nearby, and his star catalogue stayed the standard for two centuries. Timur himself lies in the Gur-e-Amir mausoleum, under a dark slab of jade, below a ribbed turquoise dome. Further along, the Shah-i-Zinda is a lane of tombs climbing a hillside, each faced in ceramic of a slightly different blue. The European part of the label is the tree-lined Russian quarter built after 1868, when the tsar's army took the city, and its wide avenues feel like a different century.
Riding in is easy; riding around is a game of patience. The highway from Tashkent is fast and well surfaced, though it has plenty of trucks, sudden speed bumps and police who like to flag down foreigners. In the city, expect dense traffic, taxis that stop without warning and heat, which in July and August can push past forty degrees. Spring and autumn are the right seasons, with apricot blossom in April and clear skies in October.
Fuel is available in town, but Uzbekistan has had patchy supplies, and many cars run on gas, so fill up whenever you see a station that sells petrol and do not assume the next one will. For food, nothing beats the hot samsa from a tandoor and a plate of plov. The round, stamped bread of Samarkand is considered the best in the country, and the locals will tell you so.