Three days in Khiva: a walled desert town you can sleep inside

Enter through Ota Darvoza, the western gate, because everything is arranged to be seen from that direction. The first thing inside, and the thing on every photograph of Khiva, is Kalta Minor. It is a squat cylinder about 29 metres high and 14 across at the base, glazed from the ground to the top in bands of blue, green and white, and it looks wrong because it is unfinished. Muhammad Amin Khan started it in 1851 intending a tower tall enough to see Bukhara from. He was killed on campaign four years later, nobody continued it, and what stands is the stump of an ambition.

The madrasa attached to it went up at the same time and did get finished. It is the largest in Khiva, a two storey courtyard building of more than a hundred students' cells with a facade of coloured brick and mosaic, and it now operates as a hotel, which means you can walk into the courtyard and look at it over a pot of tea.

Then do nothing in particular. Walk the main street, get the geography, and climb onto the western rampart at sunset for a small extra ticket. From up there Ichan Kala is a field of flat roofs and turquoise domes on one side and flat desert on the other, and the mud goes orange for about twenty minutes.

Be at the Kuhna Ark at nine. This was the citadel and the seat of government, in use from the twelfth century and rebuilt and extended repeatedly, with a throne court, a harem, a mint, a mosque and a jail behind its own inner wall. Two things justify the ticket. The summer mosque is a small open court with two walls entirely faced in blue and white majolica under a painted wooden ceiling, and it is arguably the finest interior in Khiva. The watchtower above it, reached by an awkward flight of steps, gives you the whole walled town from above, which is worth the extra fee and the queue.

Then east to Tosh-Hovli, the stone house, which Allakuli Khan built in the 1830s as a residence grander than the old citadel. It has nine courtyards and more than 160 rooms, and the reception and harem courts are the point: carved wooden columns on stone bases, painted ceilings, and every wall panelled to head height in blue and white tile in which almost no two designs repeat. Two architects were reportedly executed for saying it could not be built in the time the khan wanted.

Finish at the mausoleum of Pahlavan Mahmud, who was a furrier, a poet and an undefeated wrestler, died in the early fourteenth century and became the patron saint of Khiva. The complex was rebuilt in the early nineteenth century around his grave and carries the largest turquoise dome in the town. It is a working shrine rather than a museum: pilgrims, a courtyard, a well, and an interior of blue and white tile with poetry worked into it. Take your shoes off and sit down.

Save the Juma Mosque for the last morning, because it is unlike everything else here. There is no dome, no portal and no tile. It is a low flat-roofed hall in the middle of the town carried on more than two hundred carved wooden columns set in rows, lit only by two square openings in the ceiling, and a handful of the columns were reused from a much earlier building a thousand years ago. An Arab geographer mentioned a mosque on this site in the tenth century; the present hall is eighteenth. In summer it is the coolest place in Khiva and in any season it is the quietest.

Its minaret is next door and climbable. If you would rather have height, the Islam Khoja minaret a few streets south is the taller one, about 45 metres, built in 1908 with tapering bands of blue and white tile, and the stair inside is narrow, unlit and not for anybody who dislikes enclosed spaces. Those who go up get the best view in Khorezm.

Then it is half an hour by road to Urgench for a flight or a train. If you are heading east to Bukhara, the day train is about six hours and leaves in the morning, so this is a morning that has to start early.