IanDoesAsia

It’s back - better and longer than before. I've also attached some of my favourite photos from the trip, including many which haven't been published online before. See if you can make it to the bottom - I dare you! Looking back Indie and I finished our trip one week ago in Krakow, Poland. Since then we’ve both been spending time with family and friends, enjoying home life once again. Bizarrely, the day we came back to the UK was exactly 13 weeks since I left this country, and 13 months since Indie departed. Now that I’ve had time to organise photos etc, and to reflect on the best parts of our journey across Asia, here is the final blog of ‘Ian Does Asia’. Read on to uncover: Our final days Dorming with Desi (it ... read more

I promised I would write about our adventures in picturesque St. Petersburg. This is followed by one of Indie’s funniest entries yet… Let’s go! Indie, the resourceful desi Russia has been quite an expensive country to travel across, certainly compared to other countries we’ve visited in Asia. Train tickets have eaten up most of our budget, but fortunately we have had a secret weapon - Indie’s devious zeal for saving money. His own brother has defined him as a ‘hippy freeloader’. This unscrupulous trait manifests itself in a constant search for ‘something for nothing’. For a start, a few times in Asia we’ve received very good service in restaurants and I’ve been tempted to tip (normally not done in many Asian cultures) but Indie has steadfastly refused to do so. He has also reduced me to ... read more

For the last four days we have been enjoying Moscow in the September sun. What we’ve seen and done since arriving here is worthy of a blog entry in itself, so I’ll save it for later… For the moment, here’s how we spent almost four days travelling here by train; during which time we witnessed Central Asia unfold into Siberia; we saw miles and miles of Siberian nothingness; and we finally felt that we are back in Europe after two and a half months in Asia. We also experienced the humour and warmth of Russian hospitality, and the notoriously unfriendly face of the Russian service sector. The long road to Moscow Part One - The Turkestan-Siberian Journey Almaty to Novosibirsk Indie and I purchased platskart (3rd class) tickets for this two-night, 40-hour journey. The platskart ... read more

Where the hell is Kyrgyzstan? “Where the hell is Kyrgyzstan?” That’s what a mate asked me in the travel literature section of Borders last year. The guy who asked me this is a well-informed, well-read Joint Honours graduate (for the Strathclyde-grads contingent, the guy was Michael Collins). He was by no means the only person who gave me a blank look when I said I’d be travelling through Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan is the MAN Kyrgyzstan is a relatively small, landlocked former Soviet republic in Central Asia. It has the population of Scotland. It’s also an intriguing mix of peoples, languages and ideas. Our seemingly endless car journeys here have shown that this is a country of astounding natural beauty. Most of the local people we’ve met in Kyrgyzstan (excluding shared-car ‘taxi’ drivers, who are subhuman, money-grabbing scum!) ... read more

Kashgar - when did Central Asian become ‘Chinese’? For the last five days we have been in Kashgar, an exotic city - the westernmost in China. The region we are in - Xin Jiang - is predominantly Muslim, and in very sense it is more Central Asian than Chinese. As Indie highlighted in his last political opinion piece (some of you may call it a rant), Kashgar represents a land that has been gradually usurped by the Chinese. Nevertheless, even in spite of increasing numbers of Han Chinese migrants here, the place feels like a far-flung Arabian Nights setting. The local language, Uighur, uses Arabic script; the mosque is literally the center of the city; and metalworkers, jewelers, cobblers and carpet-makers fill the dusty streets of the old town. We are in the desert here, ... read more