KAZAKHSTAN + UZBEKISTAN.

Morning at Big Almaty Lake, 2,511 metres up a valley road through the Ile-Alatau, where the water is a glacier-fed turquoise that looks edited and is not. Coffee on the way down. The afternoon is the Green Bazaar, three floors of dried fruit, spice, smoked fish and barrels of fermented kymyz, where you will be handed kurt, the sour dried cheese ball, and we will watch your face. Back to the hotel by five to repack, dinner at nine, and then the overnight drive east to Sati.

A nap in Sati, then up to Kolsai Lake 1, where lunch is at a cafe looking straight down the water and the walk around the shoreline takes as long as you want it to. In the evening the group splits up and moves into village homestays with Kazakh families, so you sleep in somebody's actual house and eat at somebody's actual table. Campfire after, with the local group, and by the time the fire dies you will not be a group of strangers any more. This is on Day 3 for a reason.

Morning at Kaindy, the drowned forest, where an earthquake in 1911 dammed a valley and the spruce trees kept standing as the water rose. The trunks still spear out of the surface, bleached white. Lunch back in Sati, then Charyn Canyon, where we walk down off the rim into the riverbed and sit by cold water at the bottom of red sandstone walls. By three we point east to Zharkent, a small town nobody puts on an itinerary, which is exactly why it is on ours.

Out after breakfast into Altyn Emel National Park, carrying our own food because there is nothing out here to buy. The Singing Dunes are 150 metres high and three kilometres long, and when the sand slides down the face they hum, a low note you feel through your feet before you hear it. Local legend blames spirits, buried cities and underground rivers. The physics is duller and less fun. The afternoon is Ak-Tau, mountains striped in white, red and ochre like somebody poured them, then steppe roads back.

West across the steppe to Almaty, with a stop on the Kapchagay shore to see the strangest coastline in a landlocked country, casinos and dead Soviet factories on an artificial sea. In the afternoon the gondola climbs to Shymbulak at 2,200 metres, the largest ski resort in Central Asia, where you get the whole Ile-Alatau range down one side and Almaty down the other. Kazakh farewell dinner, and an early one. We are on a morning flight.

A 90-minute hop over the border and you are in a different country and a different century. We go straight from the airport to the Central Asian Plov Centre, arriving at noon because that is when they lift the lids on kazans the width of a small car, and the plov is gone by two. Afternoon at Chorsu Bazaar under its turquoise dome, and you will compare it to the Green Bazaar yourself. We finish underground, riding the Tashkent metro from station to station, marble and chandeliers and mosaics, built as a nuclear shelter and kept a state secret so completely that photographing it was illegal until 2018.

Morning on the Afrosiyob, the high-speed train, 250 kilometres an hour across cotton country with a restaurant car and a window seat. Two and a quarter hours later you are in Samarkand. We start at Gur-e-Amir, Timur's tomb, because nothing else in this city makes sense until you know who he was. Late afternoon at the Registan, three madrasas facing each other across a square, and after dark the facades light up and the whole thing is projected onto.

Up early for Shah-i-Zinda at opening, a narrow corridor of tiled mausoleums climbing a hillside, because by ten it is a queue and at half past seven it is yours. Then Bibi-Khanym and straight into Siab Bazaar next door for stamped Samarkand bread while it is still warm. Midday we drive fifteen minutes out to Konigil, the only place left in Uzbekistan making paper the way the 8th century made it, mulberry bark stripped, boiled and pounded under a water wheel, pressed, dried, polished flat with a stone. You do the stages and you keep your sheet. Evening is at a family home in a village outside the city, where you buy the ingredients, cook plov in a qozon over a wood fire with the family, and then sit on the floor and eat it with your hands.

A short train down the line and Bukhara is a different animal to Samarkand, lower, older, browner, and lived in rather than looked at. We walk the trading domes on foot, the jewellers' dome, the cap makers' dome, the money changers' dome, all built as Silk Road crossroads in the 1500s and all still full of people trading. Poi Kalyan in the afternoon and the minaret Genghis Khan is said to have refused to knock down. Then, at half five, we sit at Lyab-i-Hauz, a stone pool from 1620 under four-hundred-year-old mulberry trees, with the old men and the backgammon boards, and we do nothing at all for an hour. Dinner is in the courtyard of a madrasa with the Bukhara Philharmonic playing and dancers from four regions of the country.

The last morning in Bukhara splits the group. Half go to Bozori Kord, a bathhouse built in the 1500s and still heated the same way, where you steam, then lie on a hot stone slab and get soaped, scrubbed with a rough mitt, massaged and finally covered in ginger and honey. The other half go to a workshop, suzani embroidery with a family five generations into it, or knife makers who finish steel like jewellery, or Bukhara miniature painting with a brush made of a few hairs. Late morning flight back to Tashkent, an afternoon at the Hast Imam complex, and then the last night, so bring the good shirt.

Early transfer for the morning flight home. You leave having crossed two countries by plane, train and a very long night drive, with a sheet of handmade paper in your bag, sand in one pair of shoes and the taste of somebody's family plov still on you. Khayr, and sau bolyngyz.