I had been wandering the narrow streets of Khiva’s time-worn core when I spotted a soaring minaret, just outside the city’s mud-brick walls, that seemed like the perfect place for an aerial view. I searched for an entrance but found only a locked door.

In English, I asked a man who was gardening nearby if there was another way in. He answered in Russian, which I don’t speak, and motioned for me to follow him.

But instead of showing me the entrance, he took me across the street and into his home. He sat me down in the living room, handed me a hunk of bread slathered with yogurt and turned on the television. For the next 20 minutes, we watched a comedy and communicated via hand gestures. Then he brought me to the door, gave me two dates wrapped in a paper towel and sent me on my way. I never got his name.

I encountered similar acts of unexpected hospitality again and again during my trip to Uzbekistan in February. Like many younger travellers, I had chosen the country because I was seeking a destination with fewer crowds and tourist traps, and more spontaneity and adventure.

Those qualities, along with affordability relative to more popular destinations, have made Central Asia a major draw for millennial and Gen Z travellers in the last few years. Social media videos promoting horse treks and road trips through Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have racked up millions of views and likes, and record-breaking, albeit modest, numbers of tourists have flocked to the region.

But no Central Asian nation has gotten more attention, or better positioned itself to capitalize on it, than Uzbekistan.

Since the country’s longtime dictator died in 2016, Uzbekistan has steadily opened up to foreign visitors. The government has sponsored influencers and travel bloggers. The inaugural Bukhara Biennial, on The New York Times 52 Places to Go in 2025 list, shined a spotlight on the country’s art and culture. Last year, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev ordered the construction of hundreds of new hotels, and this year Uzbekistan stopped requiring visas for U.S. citizens visiting for up to 30 days.

Those efforts are paying off. Uzbekistan welcomed a record 11.7 million international visitors in 2025, up sharply from its prepandemic peak of 6.7 million in 2019, according to the country’s statistics agency. Fewer than 37,000 of last year’s visitors came from the United States, but that figure is more than double the 17,000 Americans who visited in 2019.

After watching countless Instagram reels singing Uzbekistan’s praises as the “dazzling heart of the Silk Road,” I decided it was time to see the place for myself. I booked a non-stop flight from New York to Tashkent on Uzbekistan Airways.=

Uzbekistan’s sprawling, modern capital weaves together Silk Road splendour and Soviet austerity, and I could hardly wait to begin exploring. After settling into my room at HL 309 (820,000 Uzbek som, or about $67), a cosy hotel in the city centre, I set out along the city’s broad boulevards for the Alisher Navoiy Theater, where I had ballet tickets.

Inside the lavish performance hall, I sat next to Zavqiya, 17, a high school student from Tashkent with a lot of questions about what I was doing there.

“How did you even hear about Uzbekistan?” she asked me, in English, while we waited for the show to start.

It was the first of many times I would hear variations of that sentiment, as many Uzbeks I met seemed to be grappling with their country’s booming international appeal.

Zavqiya had more questions, but we soon turned our attention to the stage, where an array of elaborately costumed ballerinas leaped and twirled in perfect sync, performing “The Lady of the Camellias.”

Another work of art, the Tashkent Metro, is one of the country’s grandest legacies of Soviet rule. Its picture-perfect stations are destinations in themselves — one honours cosmonauts; another features dozens of high, neatly painted domes. Photography in the metro was legalized in 2018, but police officers still repeatedly inspected my camera when I went to photograph the stations.

The high-speed Afrosiyob train whisked me two hours across the flatlands to Samarkand the next morning. To get to the city centre, I used the consistently cheap Russian ride-hailing app Yandex Go.

Samarkand features a dazzling array of art and architecture. At its core is the Registan, a triad of gleaming madrassas, or Islamic schools, built between the 15th and 17th centuries, which tower over a broad plaza.

At the nearby Shah-i-Zinda necropolis, visitors gazed quietly at the labyrinthine tiles adorning mausoleums built to honour Qutham ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad who brought Islam to the region in the seventh century.

Uzbekistan once had a sizable Jewish population, but most Jews left the country after the fall of the Soviet Union. Not far from the main attractions, the Gumbaz Synagogue, built in 1891, hosts one of the country’s last congregations.

The door was locked when I showed up, but a slip of paper pinned above the entrance displayed a handwritten phone number. I sent it a text, and the next day Rabbi Yesev Tilyaev gave me a private tour, mostly in Russian, during which he proudly showed me the sanctuary’s hand-carved bimah and venerable collection of Hebrew texts.

Bukhara is less flashy than Samarkand. Its blue-tiled mausoleums sag under the weight of the centuries. But it’s also bursting with creativity, and chief among its crafts is carpet weaving, a tradition that dates back hundreds of years.

Near the Labi Hovuz, a central square that’s home to a gnarled mulberry tree supposedly planted in 1477, I visited a half-dozen carpet shops and chatted with their owners.

One was Ulugbek Kosimov, 50, who has been making silk carpets since he was a teenager. When I asked how he created each rug’s intricate pattern, he led me downstairs to his studio, where one of his students was weaving colourful strands on a wooden loom. He sat me down alongside her, handed me a hooked tool and gently guided my fingers to pull and twist two threads together around the hook.

If I did that 100,000 more times, he said, I’d have a carpet.

Before leaving Bukhara, I stopped at the 16th-century Bozori Kord Bathhouse, where I experienced an exquisite ordeal of a massage (455,000 som). It involved a lot of knuckles, buckets of freezing water and a burning ginger scrub, but the domed ceilings and gentle sun shining through a skylight helped make it, somehow, worth the pain.

Khiva, the smallest city on Uzbekistan’s tourist circuit, is set to change more than perhaps anywhere else in the country as the tourism boom accelerates.

The arrival of high-speed rail in May cut the travel time from Tashkent to less than eight hours, from 14. New hotels are popping up even within the Itchan Kala, the city’s walled inner fortress. Khiva felt like a city on the brink, waiting for the crowds to arrive.

Khiva has a long history of puppetry, with roots in the Zoroastrianism practiced there 2,000 years ago. I walked to the Khorezm Regional Puppet Theater and, by chance, I showed up at the same time as a school field trip. In an instant, a teacher ushered me into the theatre with the children.

It was a spectacle: Onstage, actors sang, danced and manoeuvred their puppets. In the seats around me, 200 Uzbek fifth graders alternated between watching the show and wrestling one another to the floor.

Outside, the city’s ancient walls illustrated the overlapping layers of its past: fortified gates, patched-up bricks, stairs that led to nowhere.

Each told the stories of reinvention by the Arabs, Mongols, Persians, Soviets.