I followed the legendary Silk Road into a golden world of ancient cities

In the courtyards of Bukhara, it's customary to grow a mulberry tree. Across the city, the trees stand old and gnarled, most notably around the Labi Hovuz pool - the city's cool heart - which is ringed with mulberries, including a tree planted almost 550 years ago.

They cast welcome shade over Bukhara's hot stone yards, especially on this 45-degree summer day, but they're also the most fitting of sights, providing living reminders of silk in this Uzbekistan city at the heart of the ancient Silk Road.

A network of trading routes that connected China to Europe through Central Asia for 15 centuries, the Silk Road was the epic shopping mall of its day. Almost 800 years on, a belt of ancient Uzbekistan cities provides the most evocative reminders of those trading days.

Arrive into Uzbekistan's capital, Tashkent, and the country's place in this history isn't immediately apparent. Tashkent is the largest and most modern of Central Asian cities, but step beyond the city and it's history that predominates.

In the region's silken heyday, it was a gruelling, months-long journey across the desert to the cities of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand, but today it's little more than an hour by plane to Urgench - far-flung Khiva's neighbouring city - plopping down into stark green irrigated lands encased in desert.

Urgench is a city that my guide, Takhir, describes as "new", being less than 200 years of age, but it's just a 45-minute drive to Khiva, which conversely celebrated its 2500-year anniversary in 1997.

Khiva is the most compact and immediately arresting of the ancient cities, with all of its historic sites squeezed into the 26-hectare World Heritage-listed old town known as Ichan-Kala.

I've arrived in the season known locally as "chilla", representing 40 days of heat through the middle of summer. It's like stepping into an oven, but it also means that Khiva feels all but deserted across much of the day. As I wander its lanes, I feel almost as though I'm at a private screening.

Inside the madrassas (places of learning), palaces and mosques, female caretakers unfailingly sit knitting socks and booties to sell to visitors, including at the foot of Khiva's tallest minaret, the 56-metre-high Islam Khoja.

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This minaret is a surprisingly new addition to the old town, added only in 1910 and banded with blue and green ceramic tiles. Legend says the tiles alter colour slightly with changing weather conditions, though in a city with more than 300 days of sunshine a year, it would be a rare (and almost certainly apocryphal) event.

Eschewing the socks and booties, I've come to the minaret for Khiva's highest view. Islam Khoja is the only minaret that visitors can climb, and it's a dizzying ascent to a terrace 45 metres above the streets.

From this height, Khiva's precarious place in the desert becomes apparent, with the city's green fringe encircled by sands. Khiva began its existence as an oasis, with a series of wells long providing its water source. Even 30 years ago, these wells produced clear, beautiful drinking water, though today, with the drying of the nearby Aral Sea, the soil suffers from salinity and the water is undrinkable.

Though Islam Khoja is the city's highest spot, it's a different vantage point that provides the best view. Khiva's sunset spot of choice is a watchtower on the city's 2600-metre-long walls, and it's here that I head in the fading light and falling heat of evening.

Slowly, other visitors emerge, like nocturnal animals leaving their burrows, and together we watch as the city turns to bronze in the sunset light. Madrassas seem to crouch among the homes, and the Kalta Minor minaret dominates the view. Though unfinished, it stands 29 metres high (well short of the planned 70 metres) and a chunky 14.5 metres wide at its base, and is the only minaret in Central Asia covered top to toe in glazed tiles. Less quixotically, it's now also the stand for a range of communication antennas.

"The 21st century," Takhir says with a shrug.

About 300 kilometres of desert separates Khiva from Bukhara. In Silk Road times, camel trains travelled between them, but today it's six hours on a slow sleeper train (with a European-style fast train due to launch next year).

On any given night in Bukhara, it's possible to believe the Silk Road's golden trading days are back. Crowds walk in the relief of the cooling evening temperatures, and the old town's traffic-free thoroughfares are lined with clothing stores, pottery, restaurants and silk scarves.

A key junction along the various strands of the Silk Road, Bukhara was also the location of an early silk factory, the bubble-like domes of which still stand in the old town, though it now houses a carpet store.

Bukhara's old town appears curiously new. When the Soviets rolled into town in 1920, Bukhara resisted and about 60 per cent of the city was destroyed. The buildings that survived are now surrounded by newer structures, so that it feels almost as though the ancient monuments have been randomly sprinkled through the city.

Prime among the old monuments is Kalon Minaret, the first minaret to be covered in the glazed blue tiles now so redolent of the Silk Road cities. Such is its simple beauty that Genghis Khan is said to have ordered the minaret's protection when he attacked the city in 1220, though its brickwork is now faintly scarred by the damage, and subsequent repairs, from Soviet cannonballs.

Even this minaret had a place in Silk Road history, functioning as a directional marker for camel trains heading for Bukhara - it's said that if you stood on a camel's back, you could see the minaret from 80 kilometres, or two days of travel, away.

More than Khiva and Samarkand, commerce remains at the heart of a Bukhara visit.

The old town was once dotted with 10 trading domes filled with stores, three of which still stand, housing a variety of traders. Silk is plentiful, from the large workshop of Bukhara Silk Carpet, a few steps from Kalon Minaret, to the silk-paper artworks in Toshev Davron's second-generation gallery of miniatures. Among the many designs are scenes from the Silk Road's trading days.

Bukhara's distinctive offerings extend well beyond silk, however. Outside the old jewellery trading dome, sixth-generation blacksmith Ikromov Samadjon makes knives from old car pistons, as well as Bukhara's signature scissors, shaped like the storks that used to nest across the city.

Master wood carvers chisel out rehals (Koran stands) in the shade of buildings, and opposite Labi Hovuz - one of 104 pools that dotted Bukhara before most were drained during a late-19th-century cholera epidemic - a store specialises in the manufacture of traditional Bukhara puppets. As I wander through the store, a puppet maker is tearing pages from a book to make the puppets' papier-mache faces.

"Communist books," he says with a laugh, holding up a Soviet-era text.

The final stop in my journey across Uzbekistan is Samarkand, the self-proclaimed "cultural capital of the Islamic world", which few world cities can rival for architectural magnificence.

Samarkand is often referred to as the Rome of the East, a reflection on the monumental scale of the constructions that fill the city. They are legacies of Samarkand's time as the capital of an empire, under the 14th-century rule of Timur, that once stretched from India (it was one of Timur's descendants who built the Taj Mahal) to Turkey.

Behind the Registan, Bibi-Khanym Mosque remains one of the world's largest mosques, despite the unrepaired earthquake damage, while even Timur's mausoleum is larger than many world cathedrals.

Though Timur built the Gur-e-Amir mausoleum for his dead grandson, he was also buried here, despite his wish to be interred elsewhere. Locally, there's still belief that the opening of Timur's tomb by Soviet anthropologists in 1941 cast a curse that resulted in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union the following day.

On my last morning in Samarkand, I leave behind its hard monuments for a softer reminder of its place in history. Accounts tell that Samarkand traders were taught the secret of making silk paper by Chinese prisoners of war in the 8th century, and by Soviet times there were about 40 silk-paper workshops operating in the city.

Today, only one remains - Konigil - and it's my final stop on this journey through the vestiges of one of the world's most evocative trading routes. As I watch the bark from mulberry trees stripped, boiled and pressed to create the finest of paper - cards, paper dolls, even bags and washable silk-paper dresses - it's like watching history linger in the silken folds of time.

It's a final reminder that the Silk Road might be gone, but its threads still linger across these desert lands.

The writer travelled courtesy of World Expeditions