Kyzylkum Desert: red sand, yurt camps and the road from Bukhara to Khiva

The name means “Red Sand” in the Turkic languages. The desert is a plain up to 300 m above sea level and covers about 298,000 km², which makes it the 15th largest desert in the world. Uzbekistan shares it with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

Do not expect bare dunes from horizon to horizon. Much of the sand is held in place by saxaul, a shrub or small tree from 1 to 8 m tall that nomads have always burned as firewood. Between the bushes lives the Central Asian tortoise, which can spend up to nine months of the year dormant, and the desert monitor, a large lizard. About 40 km from Bukhara the Jeyran ecocentre, set up in 1977, breeds goitered gazelles. We write more about the wildlife in our guide to nature reserves.

Under the sand there is gold, uranium and gas. The open pit at Muruntau is one of the largest gold mines in the world, and the desert towns of Navoi, Zarafshan and Uchkuduk grew up around mining. They are working industrial towns, and our routes pass them by.

Most of our guests meet the Kyzylkum here. By road it is about 450 km between the two cities, and the drive takes 6 to 7 hours with short stops. For hours there are no towns at all. Then the Amu Darya appears, and beyond the river the sand gives way to the canals, cotton fields and melon plots of Khorezm.

We do not send guests across the desert on their own. They go by car with our driver, on a private transfer between Khiva and Bukhara: he fills up before the empty stretch and knows where to stop. If you are short of time, the fast train covers the same distance in about three and a half hours, and we buy the tickets for you. The details are in our article on getting from Khiva to Bukhara.

Aydarkul is a lake that did not exist before 1969. That year flood water from the Syr Darya was let into a lowland on the edge of the Kyzylkum, and it never drained away. Today the lake is nearly 250 km long and up to 15 km wide. The yurt camps stand about 60 km beyond Nurata, and Nurata is about 180 km from Samarkand and 175 km from Bukhara, so the lake is a natural overnight stop between the two cities.

A typical evening in the camp is a camel ride on the sand, dinner by the fire, folk music and a night in a felt yurt, with the morning by the water. The camps do not work in winter. We book the camp and the car with a driver (a private transfer from Samarkand), and the Nuratau Mountains extension adds two days in the villages of the ridge south of the lake. For the darkest sky we plan the Stars of Uzbekistan tour close to the new moon. What the camp is like inside, we describe in the Aydarkul guide.

On its western side the Kyzylkum stops at the fields of ancient Khorezm. To guard that farmland, the rulers of Khorezm built a chain of clay forts along the edge of the sand. The best known, Ayaz-Kala, is about 100 km from Khiva. From its walls you see the salt lake Ayazkul and the desert running to the horizon, and a yurt camp stands on a hill close by.

From Khiva we arrange it as a day trip to Ayaz-Kala by car. In our five-day Karakalpakstan and desert fortresses tour you stay the night in the yurt camp and see the walls at sunset and again at dawn. The forts themselves are the subject of our article on the desert fortresses of Khorezm.