I have traveled solo for more than twenty-five years, making my way through a country on my own, grappling with language, customs, and logistics, stumbling into serendipity. But for this trip to Uzbekistan, since I knew nothing of the Uzbek and Russian languages or their alien alphabet, I reluctantly surrendered independence and spontaneity for a car, a driver, and a guide in each city.

          I had spent months researching and planning. I wanted to explore the ancient cities of the Silk Road—a fantasy left over from my reading of Marco Polo’s journeys when I was ten years old—and spend a few days hiking among Shakhimardan’s mountain lakes. There had been moments when it seemed this trip would not happen. Just after I purchased the plane ticket, my travel agent, who specializes in Asian trips, called with bad news.

          “Because of terrorist activity in the Fergana Valley, it’s not possible to go there,” she said. “This means you can’t do the trekking in Shakhimardan. You would have to pass through Kyrgyz territory—not a good idea.” I knew she referred to news reports about the kidnapping of Japanese geologists in Kyrgyzstan. Declaring the Fergana Valley off limits dealt a body blow to my itinerary. A good part of my trip centered on Fergana’s silk factories and artisans.

           “You might be able to go hiking in Tadjikistan. The border’s not far from Samarkand, which is still on your itinerary,” suggested the travel agent. “Apply for a visa and check the situation when you get there.”

            I had never traveled so close to this kind of “situation”—kidnappings by Islamic militants, village attacks, border incursions—and, as I filled out the visa application, I began to have misgivings about the entire trip.

            A month later, exhausted after the long flight from Frankfurt, I landed at the Tashkent airport—a chaos of customs and immigration desks and baggage retrieval. On the other side of this pandemonium, in the chill hush of a late September night, waited my own reception committee.

            His name was Nail, pronounced Na-eel. He had been waiting several hours in a drafty midnight corridor outside the arrivals hall, yet he greeted me with a smile and seemed unperturbed as he tossed my two small bags into the rear of a black Toyota SUV. He stood about five feet nine, appeared to be close to forty years of age, and carried as much extra weight as a huggable teddy bear. He wore a shapeless tan parka inhabited by a faint tang of tobacco and baggy black pants scrunched up over his Adida knock-offs. Straight black hair stuck out from under his doppe, a round pillbox hat embroidered in blue and red cross-stitch. Lively dark eyes under straight dashes of black eyebrows, a large nose, and a wide mouth in a round, rosy-cheeked face—he looked more European than I had expected in this land locked in the center of Asia. I didn’t know then that I was going to spend at least twelve hours a day for the next three weeks with this man.

           As our driver maneuvered out of the dim airport parking lot, Nail leaned over the front seat and ticked off my itinerary: Samarkand, Shakhrisabz, Bukhara, Khiva, and return to Tashkent, three weeks. I had expected to have a different guide in each city, but he assured me, “I will be your guide while you are in this country.”

           While you are in this country. Finally. As the Toyota threaded through the deserted, dreamlike streets to my hotel, I leaned back into the stiff leather seat and felt the tension flow out of me.

           The next morning I stood in front of an amazing suzani, a bed-sized wall hanging embroidered with swirling flowers and foliage of red, blue, and green silk on a snowy cotton background. Suzanis were stitched for a bride by her female relatives—each example unique and artlessly elegant, with a small, unfinished passage for the bride to complete in her new life.

            “Nail,” I called across the deserted museum hall. “This is what I came here for. Can we find more of these?”

            He ambled over to the suzani. After a moment he nodded slowly and said, “It’s possible.”

            This became our mantra. My requests to see this or do that met with “it’s possible,” and it almost always was. Nail advised on the possibilities of the menu versus my stomach, arranged visits to schools and textile factories, and introduced me to architects, master dyers, and backstreet moneychangers.

            Our visit to the Museum of Applied Arts on my first day proved to be an inspired beginning. In the intimate rooms of a former diplomatic residence, the best of Uzbekistan’s crafts were laid before me—metalwork, ceramics, Oriental carpets and other handweaving in silk and wool, embroidered hangings and clothing, silver jewelry and amulet cases, leather-bound books handwritten in swooping Arabic calligraphy. I led Nail to what interested me most—old textiles and old jewelry—and we built my journey around these treasures.

            The rest of that first morning we searched for an open bank to cash some traveler’s checks. Then we left the city and sped through the tawny autumn afternoon past the vineyards, apple orchards, and cotton fields that punctuate two hundred miles of desert between Tashkent and Samarkand.

            “If you need to stop, please tell me,” said Nail. “You know, what you Americans call a rest stop, the French call arrêt technical.” Technical stop, that sounded charming, so arrêt technical it would be; however, I didn’t see any promising venues for an a.t. since the land was flat with few trees or shrubs and no buildings near the roadside.

            Nail pointed to the mountain range that had begun to rise out of the southern horizon. “I usually take trekkers from France and Germany into those mountains, just across the border in Tadjikistan.”

            “Then surely we can fit in at least one day there,” I said. I pulled out my passport with the visa attached, but I didn’t hear “it’s possible.”

            “Trekking is quite safe, but getting there . . . well, there are many checkpoints along the highway. The police make you wait hours. This takes longer than your hike.”      

            Privately, I thought it was possible and would have liked to try—my age and gray hair would surely disarm the border guards. But for Nail the issue was closed. Perhaps he held back further details because he didn’t want to frighten me—I couldn’t forget the news stories and the travel agent’s qualms.

            As it was, whenever we entered a new province, we had to run a gauntlet of guards in formal military dress. Nail and our driver pulled out their identity papers and I produced my passport. Nail also handed over a document that gave us permission to drive in the area.

            The guidebooks had mentioned that authorities often hassle tourists, but that seemed a warning for young men backpacking, unshaven and dirty. Certainly not for me, a clean, well-behaved grandmother. My passport always received a thorough inspection—one guard would flip through the pages and look meaningfully at the other guard. Then the word americanski would leap out of their conversation. I sat small and alone in the back seat, feeling far from home.

             As we drove away from our first checkpoint, Nail gave me a lesson in Uzbek history.

            “About ten years ago we were plagued by the violence of Islamic militants. Remember the big bank we went to in Tashkent? Bombed. That’s why we saw soldiers everywhere and had to wait at the security office for someone to take us up to the tellers’ floor. Road blocks between provinces prevent would-be terrorists from moving easily around the country.”

            He was telling me I had to be content with the towns—and I was—those former Silk Road oases where we traipsed through palaces, fortresses, tombs, and mosques—most of them more than five hundred years old and recently restored by Russian archaeologists. The twining blue tile work rivaled the monuments of India and Iran—not surprisingly, since the original tiles had been laid by captives of war brought from those countries to the south. Now, in the drowsy courtyards, twenty-first-century artisans and shopkeepers sold traditional gold embroideries and books of Arabic poetry, silver ornaments and old textiles.

            At a small gem of a tomb in Bukhara, the custom was to circle the stone building three times for luck. As I walked around it to earn my good fortune, a bicycle shot past me—Nail. He had grabbed the wheels from a startled young man and he tore around three times, at moments with no hands—perhaps confident he had already acquired plenty of luck.

             Despite the beauty and romance of ancient monuments, the bustling outdoor markets—realms of endless possibility—became my favorite hangouts, and Nail seemed to enjoy them as much as I did. He pointed out the piles of golden grapes, white pyramids of fresh yoghurt, tiny orange “mountain fruit” with no English name. I was captivated by the women whose outrageous sense of color and pattern shone forth in dresses that hung loose to the ankles like Victorian nightgowns. Surrounded by their stacks of flat, round bread or piles of embroidered hats, or shopping for honey, pomegranates, and rice, these Muslim ladies shunned black, favoring shoddy printed velvet wild with fuchsia, red, and yellow flowers floating on a background of dark blue, red, or black. Trousers of a different pattern peeked out under the gold-embroidered hems.

             The sprawling food markets, redolent of apples, onions, straw brooms, and fresh bread, morphed into the sellers of clothing, housewares, tools, all kinds of junk, and—amulets.

              I travel to find out what people believe and how it plays out in their daily life, so I usually found my way to the stalls displaying amulets—plastic, glass, metal, or cloth medallions that protect their wearers from the evil eye. Nail quickly caught on. He would discreetly steer me toward that section of every market, but he seemed to regard amulets with a certain amusement. I secretly suspected he might have had one pinned to the inside of his coat, as many people do.

            He did, however, take a serious interest in the embroidered hats we saw everywhere. Uzbek men usually wear black skullcaps embroidered in white. Women wear pillbox hats embroidered in satin stitch or cross-stitch with brightly dyed cotton or gold-wrapped thread, often embellished with glass beads, sequins, and tassels. Men sometimes favor a conservative version of this type of hat. Each town has its own patterns and Nail searched for a fine example at every stop on our itinerary. Evenings he would come to the dinner table wearing his latest purchase.

            In the main Samarkand market I spotted Nail bargaining with a woman at a hat stall and caught them on film. When I returned home I was astounded when I saw the photograph. The woman, probably in her thirties, looked as if she had just fallen in love. Her beautiful black eyes were fastened on Nail in his tan coat and baggy black pants, double chin smudged with a two-day beard, and her smile was so big I thought it would pop right off her face. I realized then that most of the women we met had looked at him the same way. Did I look at him that way too? Perhaps . . . , if I had been twenty years younger.

            I never saw Nail flirting. He didn’t have to—he possessed a gentle flame to which the multicolored Uzbek female moths were drawn. A wife and a sixteen-year-old son existed, but he didn’t live with them. I pictured him as a perpetual trekker without even a base camp. Wherever he did live, the cabinets, shelves, and closets must have overflowed with hats.

            On our last day in Bukhara, Nail took me to a museum that had originally been the house of a wealthy merchant. We wandered through rooms furnished as in the late nineteenth century. The curator offered us tea. As we relaxed, sprawled over cushions on the floor, she asked if we would like to see what the merchant and his wives would have worn. In an adjoining room racks held garments of filmy white, richly patterned yellow and red, and dense, dark blue.

            “Go ahead, try them on,” she said. “That’s why we have them here.”

            The curator helped me with the many layers, from simple white cotton shift to multicolored silk coat. As she adjusted the heavy, gold-embroidered, velvet overcoat worn, incredibly, on top of my head, I understood why these old garments had such tiny armholes and sleeves—they were impossibilities, fakes, not meant for arms at all. Lastly, she fitted me with a loosely woven tentlike mantle made of horsehair. My face was completely hidden and I could barely walk.

            Nail had no trouble donning wide black pants, a gold-striped tunic, and a tall hat wrapped with a yellow silk scarf.

            Barely suppressing a grin, he looked at me and pointed at the floor. “Walk five paces behind me, woman,” he ordered. It’s possible I would have. In another time. In another incarnation.

            For two weeks I had been walking behind Nail, and he behind me, in an intricate dance through oasis and desert, market and monument. Underneath my horsehair screen I smiled, big, much like any woman who might be selling hats in an Uzbek market.