A trip to the Silk Road in Central Asia had been on our bucket list for a long time. We finally achieved this in August-September 2023 when we took a 14-day group tour with Exodus followed by a 9-day private tour. The Exodus tour started in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgystan. Highlights of our five-night stay in Kyrgystan included a night in a yurt surrounded by snow-capped mountains and taking our turn to hold the eagle at an eagle-hunting demo.

Some photos from Kyrgystan are here. You should find captions on all the photos.

In and around Almaty in Kazakhstan we enjoyed more mountain scenery and an excellent museum about the Scythian civilisation.

Photos from Kazakhstan are here.

A spotlessly clean overnight train took us to Tashkent in Uzbekistan for a day of sightseeing before we travelled on a very modern bullet train to Samarkand to see the first of three major Silk Road cities. Both Samarkand and Bukhara have stunning architecture – there was just so much to see.

Photos from Tashkent and Samarkand are here.

The group tour finished in Bukhara where we stayed in a traditional boutique hotel and admired plenty of local craft work.

Photos from Bukhara are here.

On the first day of our private tour we were driven to Khiva where we stayed inside the old city. There are some very tall minarets in Khiva which were illuminated at night. Another long drive took us to Nukus in the far north-west of Uzbekistan where the Savitsky Museum has the most amazing collection of avant-garde Russian art. Seeing this was well worth the drive to get there.

Photos from Khiva and Nukus are here.

Turkmenistan was the last of the ‘Stans we visited and is almost certainly the oddest of the many countries we have ever visited. The centre of the capital Ashgabat consists of huge white marble buildings and the Dear Leader has decreed that you can only drive white cars here. His picture is on large screens everywhere and a whole floor in one Museum we visited is devoted to him and his family.

We stayed in a huge luxurious hotel in Ashgabat but were almost the only people there. One of the few main sights in Turkmenistan is a gas crater in the middle of the desert which has been burning methane ever since 1971. It was an 8-hour round trip from Ashgabat on a potholed road to have a barbecue by it at dusk.

Photos from the north of Turkmenistan and of Ashgabat are here

In the south-east of the country we stayed in a less salubrious hotel in the town of Mary where there were some real people out shopping etc. We were shown round the huge archaeological site at Gonor Depe by the author of the main book about it, but he only spoke Russian all of which had to be translated for us. We spent another half-day visiting several of the remaining buildings at Merv which was once a city of 300,000 people. There we were accosted by a lady who was convinced that I looked like her mother.

Getting about in Turkmenistan was interesting. We took two domestic flights on spotlessly clean modern planes but the roads outside Ashgabat were just awful.

Photos from in and around Mary

I intend to write some longer blogs about this trip – some time.

Updated 18 March 2024