We usually plan our own journeys and travel alone, but this time we booked an arranged tour through an Uzbek travel agency, Advantour, a small group excursion they call the Essentials of the Silk Road.

The tour is scheduled to begin on Friday morning, April 18. We arrived a few days early to have time to recover from jet lag and insure against the possibility of a missed connection in Dubai.

The morning after our arrival, tired but anxious to stretch our legs after the long flight, we went for a walk through the city park we saw the night before while having dinner. There weren’t many people out yet, but we did run into a group of babushkas out for an early stroll.

After walking the perimeter of the park, Dale opted to drop out at the hotel, so I continued the walk alone. Just southeast of the city park is Tashkent City Hall, a very modern-looking complex:

The city center is filled with greenspaces, well-maintained walkways and wide, bustling boulevards. On this day, it was surprisingly uncrowded.

My destination was the “White House,” a monument to Uzbekistan’s first president, Islam Karimov (1938-2016), about two miles from our hotel. The complex was established by Karimov’s successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev (b. 1957), Uzbekistan’s current president.

That’s President Karimov on the pedestal. The building behind him is the White House, formerly Karimov’s executive office, today his presidential library and record repository. Around the corner to the right is a museum and art gallery dedicated to the former president.

While most of the paintings and photographs there depict him as a beloved leader, greeting children and adoring fans, I suspect the statue and portrait with a tiger, below, are probably better representations of the man’s character.

Uzbekistan, like all of the six countries we will visit, was a republic of the U.S.S.R. and Karimov was president of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991.

Uzbekistan was the second soviet republic to declare independence and Karimov was its first democratically elected president, although since there was effectively only one political party at the time, he was kind of a shoe-in. He was reelected three times (supposedly nearly unanimously each time) and served as president for 25 years, dying in office in 2016.

Most Western sources describing Karimov’s reign characterize him as an authoritarian leader who repressed his people and maintained his office through stolen elections. But I’m going to give Karimov the benefit of the doubt and assume he was doing the best he could for his country during what was undoubtedly a very tumultuous time.

At any rate, I was the only adult in the museum this day (and probably the only American to visit in a long time), although there were several groups of school children with their teachers, out on a field trip to the museum. Everyone was very respectful of their former leader.

After about an hour wandering the grounds and the museum, I took a round-about route back to the hotel, passing by the Tashkent State University of Economics. The sidewalk here was filled with students, most of whom were dressed as you see in the photo below, although about a third of the young women wore typical muslim dresses and scarves.

They of course speak Uzbek in Uzbekistan, but most people also speak Russian, although Cyrillic is not generally used here; they use the Latin script, just like we do in the United States. You can see a translation from Uzbek to English in the sign below. I loved the name of this obviously bureaucratic institution.

I discovered, to my dismay, that there are only a few crossings over or under the major thoroughfares and I was on the wrong side of Islam Karimov Street as it runs along the front of the University. Consequently, I had to walk several miles to get to an intersection that allowed me to cross over to the side of the street where our hotel is located.

But those extra miles gave me the opportunity to see the locals in their daily attire and manner away from the city center.

I had planned on just walking a couple miles, but ultimately clocked eight miles, returning to the hotel in the late afternoon. It was an enjoyable, but tiring, day.