6th August – Bukhara, Uzbekistan

Colin and Chrissy made it to Bukhara - it was a long day sightseeing Merv and crossing the Karakum Desert with temperatures well over 40 degrees C. Bukhara is Uzbekistan’s fifth-largest city, it has a population of 263,400. The region around Bukhara has been inhabited for at least five millennia and the city itself has existed for half that time. Located on the Silk Road, the city has long been a center of trade, scholarship, culture, and religion. The historic center of Bukhara, which contains numerous mosques has been listed by UNESCO as one of the World Heritage Sites. Fitzroy Maclean, then a young diplomat in the British Embassy in Moscow, made a surreptitious visit to Bokhara in 1938, sight-seeing and sleeping in parks. In his memoir Eastern Appoaches, he judged it an "enchanted city", with buildings that rivalled "the finest architecture of the Italian Renaissance".

Ismail Samani mausoleum
The Ismail Samani mausoleium(9th-10th century), one of the most esteemed sights of Central Asian architecture, was built in the 9th century (between 892 and 943) as the resting-place of Ismail Samani - the founder of the Samanid dynasty, the last Persian dynasty to rule in Central Asia, which held the city in the 9th and 10th centuries. Although in the first instance the Samanids were Governors of Khorasan and Ma wara'u'n-nahr under the suzerainty of the Abbasid Caliphate, the dynasty soon established virtual independence from Baghdad.