Turkmenistan may have to be seen to be believed: on one hand the ancient sites conjure up images of caravans of traders making their way across Central Asia, on the other hand the capital's skyline makes you think that you are in some kind of strange fairytale wonderland. Merv was once known as "The Queen of the World" and was a bustling city along the Silk Road. Then Genghis Khan's son came along and razed it to the ground. Today it is a vast, imposing, bare expanse, with the occasional surviving building sticking out among endless foundations of what once was. [View Full Entry]

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If you ever consider crossing the border from Uzbekistan to Turkmenistan, bring a beer, you'll be in for a wait. Getting out of Uzbekistan is straight forward enough, and walking 2km to the next border control is relatively easy too, but Turkmenistan is a notoriously difficult country to enter, first getting all the right documents in advance and next physically getting in. You'll be in the good company of truckers from all over the region, ferrying goods from Turkey and Iran as far as Kazakhstan and China. You may then have the bad fortune of having two different letters of invitation, [View Full Entry]

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A word about transportation in central Asia. One of the most convenient and inexpensive ways to travel between cities is by shared taxi. Just head to one of the spots where taxi drivers congregate, explain where you want to go, wait for a few more passengers to fill up the car, and off you go. Except that the taxi you got on may not actually go all the way to where you want to go. Instead, the driver will drive a certain part of the way, negotiate with another driver, gesture to you to get out and move to another car [View Full Entry]

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Crossing the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border in three easy steps: 1. Walk up to the Kyrgyz border post and have your passport stamped by a friendly Kyrgyz 2. Walk down the road to the Uzbek border post and have your passport stamped by a friendly Uzbek 3. Heave a sigh of relief that there are no trucks, mountains or flat tyres involved in the process! [View Full Entry]

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Our extended stay in Kashgar and the delay in getting across the border has left us with little time to explore Kyrgyzstan. We don't manage to loop up to Bishkek and the lakes in the north east, but instead discover Osh, the second largest city of the country and centre point of the south in a country geographically and culturally divided by the Fergana mountain range. As we wander down the street we meet Bolot and Rinat, aka Bob and Rick (perhaps English names are as much of a requisite among the cool kids here as they are in China). They [View Full Entry]

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Crossing borders in central Asia might not be quite as simple as inside the Schengen area, but as long as you have your papers in order and transport sorted out, it should be straight forward enough. Or so we thought, until it took us almost 48 hours to cover the 400km between Kashgar in China and Osh in Kygyzstan: Day 1, 07:00 Our driver picks us up and we head essentially due west from Kashgar towards the Irkeshtam Pass. We're in for a stunning five hour drive past beautiful scenery into the Tian Shan mountains that takes us over 3000m above [View Full Entry]

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Xinjiang literally translates as the new frontier. And as soon as you step across the border you know how this province earned its name: it is home to the Uighur minority, with their own language, religion, food and dress that is much closer to that of its western neighbours than the rest of China. We may still be in the PRC, but this definitely already feels like central Asia. Our first stop is Turpan. We hire a driver to take us around the sights, from Huoyanshan, the flaming mountains, immortalised in the Chinese classic Journey to the West, to Jiaohe an [View Full Entry]

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If there was a contest for the most oddly shaped administrative region in the world, the Chinese province of Gansu would be a strong contender for the first prize. Stretching from Sichuan in the south to Xinjiang in the north-west, it contains both the geographical centre of China and a border with Mongolia. Chris and I managed to spend substantial amounts of time in Qingdao pondering on how the shape came about while we were probably supposed to be doing our homework. Lanzhou, the provincial capital, may not be a number one tourist destination, but it is here that we see [View Full Entry]

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Any trip along the Silk Road must begin at its starting point: Xi'an, modern day Chang'an, one of the great ancient capitals of China. Most famous today for being the home of the terracotta warriors, the silent army that has guarded the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, for over two thousand years. Qin Shi Huang was the first to unify China, build the Great Wall, standardise the writing and introduce common coins and measures. In his spare time he prepared for his afterlife by building a mighty tomb complex, complete with underground halls and corridors and [View Full Entry]

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Dear all - For months I have been going on about my grand plans to travel overland from China to Europe. It's now April 2009, the time has finally come to tear myself away from Beijing and embark on my voyage home. Previously my trips between Europe and Beijing have involved a couple of hours waiting in an airport lounge, ten hours on a plane being fed and entertained, and a short car ride to my house. Swift, comfortable and generally not much to write home about. Time for a more interesting way to get home, I thought, as a final [View Full Entry]

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