The way I’m traveling at the minute is not my typical style. Usually I spend a fair amount of time in a place before moving onto the next, and I rarely have a set schedule for doing so – if I like a place, I’ll stay longer. If I don’t like a place, then I’ll move on.
So I’ve had to really change the way I think in order to deal with the rapid pace and set schedule of the current trip. I actually chose to do an overland tour precisely because I wanted to travel along the Silk Road, and that is how I’ve come to think of it – I’m on my “mechanical camel” plodding (the roads have been really bad for much of it, and even on the rare occasion they have been decent we are speed limited to 90km/hr) along the Silk Road. It’s not about the destinations so much (they are an added bonus), it is about the journey.
Which means that I spend a heck of a lot of time sitting in the overland truck staring out the window.
And I’m loving it!
One thing these endless hours of quiet contemplation reveals is patterns within the country we are traveling through. I don’t often know the reason behind some of these things – lacking a person to ask – and I don’t have a picture for all of them (it’s unbelievably difficult to take pictures out of a moving truck when you are being bounced around like you are on a kid’s jumping castle), but here they are anyway 🙂
Kyrgyzstan is a land of:
- Mountains
- Transformers at ground level
- Blue painted decorative windows
- Decorative woodwork
- This fence
- Re-purposed rail cars
- Cherry blossoms
- Abandoned buildings
- Half finished buildings that don’t look like they will ever be completed
