Looking Ahead

Some of the early feedback has made me think it would make sense to map out where we're going and how we plan to get there.

Our original plan was a Stan-focused tour, starting in Baku, Azerbaijan, and taking the ferry across to the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan, then traveling across the rest of Central Asia in a counter-clockwise direction. But this plan was foiled because I never got an Uzbek visa - they didn't reject me, it seems that they're just holding on to the application until it's no longer valid - which means we couldn't get a Turkmen transit visa, which means the plan was shot. The reason for the Uzbek troubles is my status as a foreign journalist, a type currently unwelcome in Uzbekistan due to the bad press the country gets, even though I applied as a tourist and was not planning to write anything about the place. And even if I did, what negative words could I have to say about such a progressive, enlightened, prosperous nation? (Hope you're reading this, Gulnora.)

Instead, we flew to Yerevan to go around the Caucasus, and now we're starting our Central Asia tour in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, which we have to fly to via Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. The detour spoils the narrative cohesion of a purely Silk-Road/former-USSR/peoples-of-the-Turkic-world-themed trip, but at least the beaches are supposed to be nice.

In Tajikistan, we're going to visit some ruins and take the scenic Pamir highway through the mountains to Kyrgyzstan, where we will ride horseback and stay in yurts. Then there's a stop in Almaty, Kazakhstan's Soviet-era capital and biggest city, en route to China, where we plan to take in a Tibetan monastery that's not in Tibet and the army of terra cotta warriors in Xian en route to Beijing. From there, Liz heads back to the US to start her job, but I'll keep going, to Moscow on the train via Mongolia and Siberia.