This outstanding trip takes in four of the most important cities of the old Silk Road and is perfect if culture and history are your reasons for travel.Starting our trip in Uzbekistan, we will first visit the splendour of Samarkand and Bukhara before crossing the famous River Oxus and entering Turkmenistan. We then travel on to Merv, one of the great emporiums of the Silk Road (until a certain Genghis Khan flattened most of it) and Margush, where the bronze age archaeological site of Gonur Depe lies, believed by some to represent the capital of the fifth great civilisation of the ancient world. After this we will travel to the curiously named and totally weird modern capital of Ashgabat (the City of Love) before driving north through the Karakum Desert to see the amazing Darvaza gas crater. Continuing north to visit Konya Urgench, we then cross back into Uzbekistan and on to Khiva.The tour ends where it started amongst the leafy streets of Tashkent. This is an interesting and entirely original itinerary you will find nowhere else.