Chimgan at dawn

You leave Tashkent at four in the morning. An hour and a half on the road, the last twenty minutes of it hairpin bends, and at the car park below the mountain it is still dark. From there you walk, head torches on. For the first half-hour the path goes through forest, and there is nothing to see but the patch of light under your feet and the back of the person ahead.

Chimgan is the range closest to Tashkent, and by day it is busy: cable car, cafés, tour buses. The whole point of the dawn start is to be up there before any of that. The climb goes to the ridge of Lesser Chimgan: around 400 metres of ascent, an hour and a half to two hours up. The trail is not difficult, but it steepens in two places, and there you want boots with a proper sole.

Day breaks along the way. First the sky turns grey, then the slope opposite comes out of the dark, then far below are the lights of Tashkent, going out as it grows brighter. You are on top by seven. The sun comes up behind the ridge on the right, and its shadow runs off down the valley until it reaches you.

There is wind on the ridge, so the tea from the thermos gets drunk fast. From here you can see Greater Chimgan, 3,309 metres, the Charvak reservoir as a turquoise patch, and rank after rank of ridges running all the way to Kazakhstan. The guide will tell you which is which.

You go down by a different path, in the sun. By nine you are back at the car park, and that is exactly when the cable car opens and the first bus pulls up to it. You have already seen everything they came for, and you saw it alone.