Khiva is located around 500km north-west of Bukara and situated almost on the Turkmenistan border. To get there from Bukara we caught a shared taxi, shared taxis are a great form of transport, the only negative is you need to wait for all four seats to fill up, and this time we waited over two hours for two passengers to fill the car.

A former capital of the Khwarezmian civilization in the ancient Khwarezmia region, the Itchan Kala is the main former walled city of Khiva and contains over fifty monuments, most tiled with blue mosaics.

One of the nicest of these monuments is the unfinished Kalta Minor Minaret, a beautiful fifteen metres in diameter and twenty-nine metres high. The one-third complete minaret is covered in blue mosaics.

We spent a day wandering the Itchan Kala before catching an overnight sleeper train to Samarkand.