If you don’t have a few months to spend in the region, let your theme of choice (e.g, Silk Road cities, desert, mountain adventures and trekking) guide you. Or, combine a few together like a bit of history in Silk Road cities in Uzbekistan paired with some trekking our nomadic culture in Kyrgyzstan.
Then, find a country (or two or three) that suits your needs. You can cross over from country to country by flight or land transport. For more ideas on where and what to do and see in Central Asia, read: Golden Camel Awards: Sights, People and Scenery. You can also see the (mostly) overland route we took from Turkmenistan to Tajikistan on the Google Map below.
If you are hesitant to travel independently because of the logistical arrangements required, or you prefer to travel with a small group and local guide, check out the new G Adventures Central Asia tour that covers many of the same sites mentioned above. We’ve taken more than a dozen tours with G Adventures. We can recommend their style of tours, and we also commend how they invest in the local communities and work with local partners where they operate.
We began our journey in Central Asia by taking a boat across the Caspian Sea into Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan and crossed into China from Kyrgyzstan over the Torugart Pass just over three months later. You can see the route we took in our three-month journey across Central Asia in the Google MyMap below.
Since then, we’ve traveled extensively in Kyrgyzstan on a tourism development project. Despite the relatively significant amount of time and depth of our travel in this region, a long list of places we’d like to visit “next time” in Central Asia remains.
Author: Daniel Noll, travel and life evangelist, www.uncorneredmarket.com