On The Far Side of the Earth – Details, episodes & analysis

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On The Far Side of the Earth

Farside

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/7d. Total Eps: 4

A literary travel journal. One place a week — written, narrated, layered with the sounds of where it was made. Mahale chimpanzees in the dawn canopy. Monastery bells in Bhutanese fog. The call to prayer rising over Old Jeddah at dusk. For people who've already been to the obvious places, and want to go further. From Tanzania to Bhutan, Saudi Arabia to Uzbekistan.
If a story lands, the link in show notes connects you to the operator who lives there — the people we'd send our friends to.
farside.earth · Sundays.

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🇬🇧 Great Britain - Places & Travel
27/05/2026
#72

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Score global : 58%

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The Blue at the Centre of the World — Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Season 1 · Episode 4

Sunday, May 24, 2026 • Duration 19:08

There is no adequate preparation for the Registan at dawn. You know it from photographs — the three madrasas arranged around the square, the blue and gold tilework — but photographs cannot tell you about the scale, or the silence, or the way the mosaics change colour as the sun moves.

This week's issue: four days in Samarkand at the moment of its reopening. Uzbekistan opened to general visa-free Western tourism in 2018, after twenty-seven years of effective closure under Islam Karimov. The country I walked is unrecognisable from the country a foreign traveller would have seen in 2010 — not because the buildings changed, but because the stance toward visitors did.

Five mausoleums in five days — Rukhobod, Gur-i-Amir, Hazrat Khizr, Bibi-Khanym, and the long avenue of Shah-i-Zinda. The buried pre-Islamic city of Afrasiyab on a hill at the edge of town, where seventh-century wall paintings still show the Sogdian merchants and Chinese envoys and Korean delegations who met here before the Mongols came. Bread that lasts a month, baked to a durability the people who eat it have used for centuries. Pomegranate juice every day. A wedding in deep ruby, turquoise, apple green and saffron, the bridesmaids' dresses against the white-gravel star paths of the park. And a tea house on a wooden platform under carpets, where an Asian sitting in a Central Asian shaded courtyard recognises the furniture.

This episode is read by the editor, layered with the field sounds of Samarkand: the open square at dawn, the vaulted brick of the mausoleums, the lanes of Shah-i-Zinda, the Sogdian wind at Afrasiyab, a market at lunch, the bulvar at six in the evening, the platform tea house, and the hill at Hazrat Khizr looking down at the city.

The Farside Pick for Uzbekistan is the operator we'd send our friends to — a small team that started off in the Nuratau Mountains who recently won international the TO DO! Award for Socially Responsible Tourism by ITB Berlin. Submit an enquiry through the journal entry below and we'll make the introduction directly.

If you enjoy this and want to help us keep going:buymeacoffee.com/farside

Read the full journal: farside.earth/journal/004-samarqand-uzbekistan.html

On The Far Side of the Earth – Details, episodes & analysis

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On The Far Side of the Earth – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

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Freesound3

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Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

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