The Stans

Some of the travel guidebooks or websites I’d read called Nukus “The Most Depressing City in the World” or “The City at the End of the Earth.” I found it to be neither during my brief time there.  After the Soviets had consolidated their control over Uzbekistan, they introduced cotton to the region. What had […]

The journey from Samarkand to Bukhara by shared taxi was my first experience with refueling a vehicle in Uzbekistan. Because the country has extensive natural gas reserves but relatively little oil, many cars have either been converted or designed to run on gas instead of gasoline or petrol. Fueling cars with combustible gas is potentially […]

In a rather belated post, I’d like to share a few stories about my time in Uzbekistan. My visa for Uzbekistan finally in hand, I hopped on an overnight bus from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan across the border to Shymkent, Kazakhstan. Because it had taken me so long to get this visa, it would have to be […]

The end of the Pamir Highway brought me back to Osh, the second-largest city in Kyrgyzstan (see previous post). Now I had no plan. I had failed to get a visa for Uzbekistan back in Dushanbe, and I’d already been to the major cities in Kyrgyzstan. But it seemed that all my options led to […]

I have some catching up on blog posts to do. Travel on the road got too hectic to write much, and life got busy quickly once my feet hit the ground again in the States.  I’ve already written about my time in Tajikistan, which was interrupted by a brief trip across the border to Afghanistan. […]

Dushanbe, formerly Stalinabad, is the capital and largest city of Tajikistan. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of independence from the Soviet Union in 2011, the government embarked on a monumental building program that included a new presidential palace and a giant flagpole 165 m (541 ft.) tall. The shiny new center of the city is largely empty, […]

From the Kyrgyzstan-China border to the city of Osh, I shared a rather expensive taxi with two Chinese tourists. The road follows a wide valley adjacent to the border with Tajikistan, with picturesque views of nomads tending their flocks in green pastures. Jagged, snow-capped peaks form the backdrop for this picture of traditional life. A […]

Xinjiang is the largest and most westerly province of China. It’s also one of the strangest. The majority ethnic group here are the Uighurs (pronounced wee-ghurs), who are Muslims. Culturally and genetically, they are much closer relatives of Tajiks and Turks than of the Han Chinese who rule the country from Beijing. They aren’t the […]

Further up from the Hunza Valley is a region called Gojal. The elevation here means that it has had no permanent residents until the past few centuries. The Karakoram Highway continues to wind its way through the mountains here. From Karimabad, my base for exploring Hunza, I took a minibus to a town called Gumit, […]

My minibus wound its way north from Gilgit, passing through rocky valleys flanked by snowy peaks. The summit of Rakaposhi (7788 m/25551 ft.) was draped in clouds for much of the journey, but still dominated the landscape. After a right turn around the base of the mountain, I was now in the Hunza Valley. Here […]