Uzbekistan tours from the UK: the Heathrow flight, visa-free entry and Ulugh Beg in Oxford

Uzbekistan Airways flies nonstop between London and Tashkent. In the winter timetable 2026/27, flight HY 202 leaves Heathrow on Tuesdays and Fridays at 18:00 and lands at 05:55 local time, 6 h 55 min later. The return, HY 201, leaves Tashkent on the same days at 13:45 and reaches Heathrow at 16:25. On Sundays from 25 October to 21 March, HY 204 flies from Gatwick at the same times, and HY 203 comes back at 13:50, landing at 16:30.

From 30 March 2027, in the summer timetable, the Heathrow flight leaves earlier, at 16:20, and lands at 03:10; the return leaves Tashkent at 11:10 and lands at 14:50. Check the days for your dates when you book.

From other UK airports the usual route is one connection, most often in Istanbul: Turkish Airlines flies from there to Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Urgench, the airport for Khiva. More routes are in our guide to flights to Uzbekistan.

A landing before six in the morning means the first day starts early. We book your first hotel night from the evening before, so you can go straight to bed, and we arrange fast-track passport control and a car to your hotel.

Tashkent is on UTC+5 all year, with no summer time: five hours ahead of London in winter, four while the UK is on British Summer Time.

The British thread starts with the stars. In the fifteenth century Ulugh Beg, Timur’s grandson, built an observatory on a hill outside Samarkand, and his astronomers charted 992 stars. Europe met their catalogue in 1665, when Thomas Hyde published it in Oxford; in 1843 the astronomer Francis Baily edited it again. The arc of the great sextant is still there, dug out of the hill in 1908, and our guide to the Ulugh Beg Observatory tells its story.

British travellers wrote about these cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1903 Annette Meakin, a writer born in Bristol, published In Russian Turkestan: A Garden of Asia and Its People, the fruit of two journeys, the second of which ended in March 1902. She wrote about the irrigation canals and the trees and fruit they water, about silk, and about the tea-shop in the bazaar.

In 1907 Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born archaeologist who had become a British subject in 1904, found a bundle of letters in a watchtower west of Dunhuang, on the old road between China and Central Asia. They were written around 313 in Sogdian, the language of Samarkand, by merchants far from home, and one of them was addressed to Samarkand. Stein’s Sogdian documents are kept today at the British Library.

And from late September 2024 to 23 February 2025, Samarkand came to Bloomsbury. For the British Museum’s Silk Roads exhibition, Uzbekistan lent a six-metre wall painting from the Hall of the Ambassadors at Afrasiyab, the ancient site of Samarkand, together with the chess pieces the exhibition presented as the oldest group ever found. The Afrasiyab Museum, which keeps the murals of the hall, is on our Ambassadors of Afrasiyab tour.

For travellers who like to see a country at walking pace, we have made a private tour around the London flights: The Silk Road on Foot and by Rail, ten days from Wednesday to Friday.

You book the flight, and we arrange everything on the ground: hotels, train tickets, guides and transfers. With Heathrow flights on Tuesdays and Fridays, you land on a Wednesday or a Saturday morning and fly home on a Tuesday or a Friday afternoon; we fit the route to those days.

On foot and by rail, 10 days. The Silk Road on Foot and by Rail walks the old towns of Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva and rides the high-speed trains in between, with a day in the mountains above Tashkent and a morning under the ancient plane trees of Chor-Chinor. Both can also be booked on their own: a one-day mountain hike with a guide and a picnic and a trip to Chor-Chinor from Samarkand.

The classic route, 8 or 11 days. Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva on the 8-day classic tour, or at an easier pace on the 11-day classic tour. How we lay out such trips is in Uzbekistan in 7 days and Uzbekistan in 10 days.

Trains, a gentler pace or the hills. Uzbekistan by Train, Classic Uzbekistan at a Gentle Pace and Hiking Uzbekistan; walking regions and seasons are in our guide to hiking in Uzbekistan.

Your guide speaks English, and the guide is included in the price of our tours. What applies to all of Europe is in our guide to Uzbekistan tours from Europe; not sure which route fits, try our tour finder.

Easter. Good Friday falls on 26 March 2027 and Easter Monday, in England and Wales, on 29 March, a week after Navruz, the spring new year, which Uzbekistan celebrates on 21 March: see Navruz in Uzbekistan. Late March is fresh rather than warm, with afternoons of 14–17 °C; April and May are the best months in the cities.

May. The early May bank holiday is Monday 3 May, and the spring bank holiday is Monday 31 May, which in many council areas opens the May half-term: in Wolverhampton, for example, schools are off from 31 May to 4 June. Nine days away then cost you four days of leave. In Tashkent and Samarkand the average May afternoon is 27–28 °C.

Summer. Schools break up in late July (in Wolverhampton on 21 July), and the summer bank holiday is 30 August in England and Wales and 2 August in Scotland. From June to August afternoons reach 35–37 °C, so if summer is your only window, we plan sightseeing for the mornings and evenings and add a day in the mountains, where July afternoons at Chimgan average about 26 °C.

Autumn. September and October are among the best months, with October afternoons in Tashkent around 22 °C. The October half-term of 2027 is the week of 25–29 October in many areas, Wolverhampton among them. School dates are set locally and vary across the UK, so check your council’s calendar before you book. Month by month: April, May, October and when to go.

Winter. The Christmas bank holidays of 2027 move to 27 and 28 December. January is the quiet season, around 7 °C in Tashkent in the afternoon; see New Year in Uzbekistan.

The tea will feel familiar. Green tea is the national drink, poured all day into small bowls called piala, but in Tashkent most people drink black. In a teahouse, the choyxona, you often sit on a tapchan, a raised wooden platform with cushions, and in Bukhara the teahouse tables stand along the pond of Lyabi-Hauz.

Plov, the national dish, is rice cooked in a cauldron with meat, carrots and onions, and it is a midday dish: by evening the best cauldrons are empty. Our guides to Uzbek cuisine, food city by city and plov explain what is on the table.

Tell us about allergies, diets and what you would rather not eat, and we take it into account when we plan your meals. In Bukhara we can also book dinner with a local family.