Our Accidental Road Trip

Someone asked us en route to Bishkek how we decided to visit the Stans. We startled ourselves by answering, “We can’t remember!” 

Was it the romance of the Silk Road? The allure of a region essentially shut off to the Western world for 400 years? The siren call of a place that was a black hole in our knowledge?

The candidates were many. Taking a month-long road trip over bad roads was not one of them.

Yet that’s what we seem to be doing. Central Asia is IMMENSE. If you laid the whole region over the US starting at San Francisco, it would end somewhere between the Mississippi and Appalachia. 

Our first stop, Kyrgyzstan, is just a sliver of the pie, about the size of Utah. With 90% of its territory covered by mountains, and the mountains averaging 9,000 feet, it is known as the Switzerland of Central Asia. For us, it felt more like a mashup of Colorado’s Rockies and Utah’s geology.

There are different plans of attack for Kyrgyzstan and its fellow Stans (Persian for “lands,” btw).

1. Limit your Stans. There are five; pick one or two. 
2. Extend your trip. Instead of a week or a month, spend a year.
3. Fly most everywhere. Parachute into one fabled city after another, at least where there are flights. Sprinkle in high-speed trains where they exist.

Or do what we’ve done — blithely tell your travel advisor, “We want to see the iconic sights of the Silk Road AND the gobsmacking terrain! We want it all!” Then climb into a car with a driver and … drive. 

And drive and drive and drive. 

Drive through villages, drive past yurts.

Drive on dirt. Drive over boulders. Kyrgyzstan being Kyrgyzstan  in a rush to the 21st century, drive on roadways that were scraped to roadbed five years ago and haven’t yet been paved. 

Drive through chaotic construction zones. Drive through herds of cows. Drive through tree tunnels of poplars, then drive past miles of stumps where previous tree tunnels were leveled to widen the road … eventually. 

Brake for horses strolling across the dirt road. Honk to pass through a flock of sheep.

Drive, drive, drive.

And the payoff?

Gape at snow-smothered mountains soaring into the clouds. Wind for miles through sandstone gorges to reach trails to sights we never imagined.

Scramble amid red rock hoodoos.

Meet a fifth-generation eagle hunter in the middle of nowhere and gasp at the speed of the great birds rocketing to a lure pulled by a thundering horseman. 

Hike beside pristine rivers. Eat hearty Kyrgyz meals in the homes of villagers capitalizing on emerging tourism by laying out huge spreads of local food in their dining rooms. Soak in simple hot springs. 

And out there, miles from pavement, hours from anything that qualifies even as a village, living off ibuprofen to battle the potholes, find timelessness — the hills and valleys, peaks and steppes unchanged since nomads criss-crossed, caravans plodded, invaders rampaged and Marco Polo popularized more than a thousand years ago.

Then fall into bed, exhausted, sleep hard and wake up to another spectacular day of accidental road tripping.

COMING SOON! Not Borat’s Kazakhstan