If I ever again hear anyone complain about how Canberra is a planned and dead city, my response is going to be: “Go to Ashgabat”! The capital of Turkmenistan is a truly bizarre experience. Completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1948 that killed a large fraction of the population (though the Soviets denied this…
I remember first coming across a picture of the Darvaza Crater a few years ago and desperately wanting to go see it for myself. So you can imagine how excited I was that it was on our itinerary for this Silk Road overland trip! The story goes that the crater was formed after a natural…
Turkmenistan is, in a similar fashion to North Korea, a very closed country, which can make it quite difficult to visit. We needed Letters of Invitation (one of our group was refused this because in his photo he wasn’t clean-shaven and yet didn’t have a full beard … just a 5-day growth) and Visas, both…
Uzbekistan does not make it easy for most nationalities to visit. My Letter of Invitation and Visa cost AUD$650 and took a month to obtain (my passport had to be sent to Washington in the USA). I’m guessing this must be easier for French and Germans, as they seem to make up the largest number…
The Uzbek Som is a crazy currency. At the time of writing, the official exchange rate was USD$1 = 3790 Som, which is not necessarily problematic, until you realise that the most commonly used note is 1000 Som. And although Uzbekistan is quite a cheap country to travel in, even something that costs $5 suddenly…
The road from Bukhara to Khiva was an interesting one. For the first hour out of Bukhara, we were travelling through more farmland, once again playing with potholes and making slow progress. Then, as soon as the green fields and ubiquitous civilization suddenly gave way to the Kyzylkum desert, the road magically transformed into a 4-lane,…
Although the old city of Bukhara is full of Madrasahs, Minarets, Mosques and Mausoleums, it is also famous for its 3 surviving undercover bazaars, or trade domes – Taki-Sarrafon (dome of money changers), Taki-Telpakfurushon (dome of hat makers) and Taki-Zargaron (dome of jewelers). Those who have been reading along for a while can imagine why…
The drive from Samarkand to Bukhara is a seemingly never-ending display of agriculture and what would appear to be Russian commission houses (all identical). Along both sides of the road, an irrigated, green region fans out to a width of a few kilometres, but look a little further and you can see the arid hills…
After dire predictions about how strict the Uzbek border guards would be and long it would take us to get across the border, in the end only took 4.5 hours to cross from Tajikistan to Uzbekistan with the truck, the guards only interested in what medications we were carrying. This meant we easily made it…
From Dushanbe, we had to travel a long way north to a very specific border crossing that could process the truck. The scenery continued to be very impressive for several hours Including lots of avalanche/rockfall shelters And several very long tunnels, including the Anzob tunnel, which runs for over 5km and is the modern link…