Kashgar is predominantly an Uigur town/city, with people of ‘true’ Chinese heritage making up only a small portion of the population. It’s sometimes hard to believe that you’re actually in China. This is especially true when walking through Kashgar’s old quarter. It’s the place we liked most when we visited 3 years ago and it’s [...]

The road from Osh to Sary Tash (184km) is a work in progress. There are some good patches of asphalt, but mostly it’s a long and frustratingly bumpy ride. We didn’t want to do it a second time, so opted to take an alternate route which loops away from Osh to the west and then [...]

Our stay in Tashkent could be considered a success, in that we obtained both the Kyrgyz and China visa we needed. However, not all was smooth sailing…
The Kyrgyz visa, although expensive at US$110, was easily obtained. Even taking into consideration the hassle of paying for the visa via a beaurocratic nightmare at one of the [...]

Dushanbe is very typical of a large (capital) Central Asian city. It has wide tree-lined promenades, many public parks, fountains… and police on every corner ‘maintaining the peace’
Everything seems orderly (even the traffic).
This is more than we can say for the Uzbekistan embassy. Here chaos reigns. Locals push, shove and use every trick in [...]

The “Pamir Highway” is a stretch of road between Osh in Kyrgyzstan and Khorog in Tajikistan. It was built by the Russian military in the 1930’s and cuts through the majestic Pamir mountain range, with some peaks well over 7,000m. It’s a ‘highway’ only by name, with many sections nothing more than one lane dirt [...]