I’ve just spent 10 days in Uzbekistan and have come back with a wealth of photos and a lot of good memories.

Handing out the cleaning materials - Tashkent

One of the most noticeable things about the country – at least the places that we visited – was how clean it was. I should have realised why this was when we walked through a main square in Tashkent and saw a big cleaning exercise going on in preparation for the festival the next day. I also got one of my my most fortuitous photos – as the person cleaning the statue waved to friends and accidentally mirrored the pose of Amir Temur.

We saw one piece of litter in our entire holiday (an empty soft drink bottle). We clustered round it in amazement – assuming that this was left by a Western tourist and would soon be removed. Amazing.