The Village in Uzbekistan Everyone Passes, and We Didn’t!

That day, we planned to reach Katta Langar, a remote village that a couple of fellow travelers had discovered in their guidebooks. It's located deep in the mountains about 70 kilometers south of Shahrisabz, where we spent a few quiet days away from the exhausting tourist crowds of Samarkand. From our guesthouse in the center of town, we hitched a ride to the bazaar with a cheerful young man who drove an old, rattling Chevrolet. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to call a friend to take us farther into the mountains.

In Central Asia, markets are much more than colorful stalls and loud vendors. They also serve as primary transportation hubs, from which an intrepid traveler can access even the most obscure and secluded locations. As soon as we approached the entrance, a chorus of taxi drivers closed in on us. "Langar—only 300,000 sum!" one shouted. "The road there is awful!" Another contender, a red-faced, chubby man, leapt from his car. "Kyzyltepa for forty thousand sum!", he countered. We looked at each other, puzzled. Kyzyltepa? A quick check on our offline map revealed that it was a village at a crossroads leading into the mountains. We looked around and saw women with huge bags boarding minibuses nearby. A weary driver muttered, "Forty thousand sum to Kyzyltepa." "This isn't a taxi," I protested. "Let's make it twenty thousand." "Thirty thousand for two," he retorted. "Twenty-five," I replied. With that, we got into the grimy, narrow marshrutka. My older friend took the front seat, and I squeezed into the back. We waited half an hour for the van to fill up, and it eventually set off with six adults, three small children, and bulky sacks occupying every bit of free space. To our surprise, after a few meters, we stopped to pick up another woman. The bags quickly migrated onto the laps of anyone not holding a sleeping baby, freeing up half a seat for the new passenger.

The road was riddled with potholes. It was more of a patchwork of craters and bumps than an even surface, with only an occasional flat stretch in between. No matter how skillfully the driver maneuvered, I kept jumping toward the ceiling and hitting my head on the window. When we arrived in Kyzyltepa, it was scorching hot. The sun beat down mercilessly, and a layer of dust covered everything as far as the eye could see. After that nauseating ride, the shaded roadside market felt like the perfect place to rest and escape the heat. As we wandered past lively stalls piled with fruit and textiles, we quickly realized that we had become the main attraction. Women and men, old and young, vendors and buyers all paused to take photos and selfies with us. One seller even put us on a video call with her relatives. They spoke only Uzbek and bombarded us with questions that we couldn’t understand. This led to even more confusion, wild gesticulating, and bursts of laughter.

Overwhelmed by all the attention, we slipped away to explore the quieter streets of the village. Unlike the market, where people were warm and outgoing, the young women in the empty, sunbaked neighborhoods eyed us suspiciously and hurried into their homes. Before long, we drifted back to the main road and came upon a small eatery where a woman was baking samsas and bread in an outdoor tandoori. Simple plastic tables stood in a dim, uninviting basement, but it was cooler in there, and we were hungry. We ordered two fresh, crunchy potato samsas and a pot of green tea. Instead of paper napkins, each customer received a clean cloth that doubled as a rag to wipe the table after the meal.

We had had our fill and were about to leave, but it wasn't meant to be. Even in that gloomy basement with its grey walls, a full-blown photo shoot awaited us. Three generations of women—the owner, her daughters, and her granddaughter—armed with their phones, spent the next half hour photographing us from every angle while simultaneously uploading the exclusive content to TikTok. After our brief but intense stint as local celebrities, we slowly walked back to the crossroads. Our short parade clearly amused the people eating at the nearby samsa stalls, since foreigners usually just pass through this village on their way to Katta Langar, rarely lingering long enough to catch even a glimpse of local life.

Once again, we negotiated a shared marshrutka back to Shahrisabz. This time there were only five of us in the van, including three local women. When I jokingly offered to take a selfie with them, one of the women fearfully gestured that her husband would kill her if she appeared in the photo. I tried using Google Translate to keep the conversation going, but they could not read, and the app could not speak Uzbek.

The woman sitting next to me had bright hazel eyes and wore a black, glittering scarf that loosely covered her hair. She spoke a little Russian, and I learned that she was 34, with a Pakistani mother and an Uzbek father. She had six children—three boys and three girls,—and her husband worked in Moscow. She proudly showed me photos of her family on her phone. In her contacts, her husband appeared not by name, but with three flexed-biceps emojis and three broken hearts. There was also a video of the guest room in her house, its floor covered with carpets, colorful mats, and pillows lined up along the walls.

At one point, she asked if I had children. I said no. Just before she got out of the van, she looked at me sadly and said in broken Russian, “You are good, and I am bad.” When I asked why, she replied, “Because I have six small ones.” Then the three women paid the driver and got off. Sitting there, watching them disappear into the dust, I thought about how much insight and genuine connection a traveler can gain from a short detour to a place that is not even on Google Maps—and how easily we would have missed all of it if we had gone straight to the tourist magnet of Katta Langar.