Years ago, Doris and a friend attended a long slide show about a trip to India. When it ended, the friend turned to Doris and declared, “Wow! I’m so glad we came! Now I never need to go there!” To which Doris replied, “Now I want to go.”
In the same spirit, if your take on visiting the Stans after following our adventure in Central Asia is “Shoot me!”, this Partout is not for you.
If you are in the “Sign me up!” camp, we have three illustrated pieces of advice
#1 – Don’t wait
Central Asia hasn’t been off the beaten path for several thousand years, but now the path is getting more beaten by the day. Nothing felt overrun to us, but things are changing fast. Every guide told us tourism has exploded since covid. In Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, we were told nine 5-star hotels are under construction. In barely open Turkmenistan, our guide said the number of travel agencies in the country has ballooned from 10 to 90 in the last five years.
We mostly were spared crowds because we went at the very end of the season (we were several guides’ last guests until spring), but friends who went a month before we did were surprised by how “discovered” places like Samarkand and Bukhara already feel. Now that National Geographic has included Khiva in its top destinations for 2026, the ranks of discoverers are bound to abound even more.
There’s also an age factor. Surprise! None of us is as young as we once were! We would not by any stretch call the Stans hardship travel (Louis traveling Afghanistan in old Russian jeeps during the 2001 war was hardship travel), but it still felt more exhausting than travel did five years ago.
Our age-mate friends were on a shorter organized tour. They loved their visit, too, but said they would have gotten more out of it 10 years younger when they could have walked farther and climbed higher with more ease. We didn’t opt out of anything or get trampled by crowds anywhere, but we felt we didn’t get to the Stans a minute too soon.
#2 – Consider your limits.
If you are alarmed by fellow car passengers who refuse to wear seat belts, this isn’t road-trip country for you. (Rejecting seatbelts is a point of national pride in every Stan.)
If the idea of traveling a highway that passes through a “tunnel of death” freaks you out, Tajikistan’s magnificent mountains probably don’t belong on your bucket list.
If you get the wobblies from heights, skip the mountain highs, where you share with trucks dirt roads that are unpaved, barely one lane wide and have never seen a guardrail.
If you don’t have the knees (or stomach) for squat toilets, don’t even consider leaving the cities.
And if you eat no meat, be sure you really really REALLY like lentil soup and Greek salad for dinner.
We would not have missed a minute of the trip we took (okay, there was one day we could have passed on), but we are travelers who don’t require luxury, who almost never ask “Is it safe?” before booking a trip and who have no mobility issues and no (known) medical conditions that could erupt any minute. Doris mastered scoop-poop-stoop in her camping days so “natural toilets” are not a deal-breaker.
But everyone has different limits. The key thing when heading to the Stans is knowing what yours are and planning the dream trip that matches them.
#3 – Don’t do this on your own unless you visit only cities (and maybe not even then)
Except in Turkmenistan (where it is not allowed), independent travel is certainly an option in Central Asia.
This is a couple of happy campers who shipped their 4WD across the Caspian Sea from their home in Azerbaijan to self-tour Kazakhstan.
These are some Brits on their own biking from London to Australia.
More pedestrian travelers visit the Stans on their own, too. But the best advice we got before going — from an American who lived in Almaty for three years — was “Don’t do this on your own.”
We know people who can’t imagine anything more fun than spending a hundred hours mapping out a trip with attractions scattered over 1.5 million square miles of rugged terrain and rough roads (you know who you are), but we’re glad we didn’t do that.
There was too much to see in too little time to waste a minute fumbling with translator apps, taking wrong turns, being led by mediocre guides or making bad choices.
We were grateful for our experienced drivers on hazardous roads. We were extra grateful our Turkmen guide could effortlessly steer us around tedious immigration hoops we saw other visitors go through. We loved getting insider tips for everything from to-die-for somsas in Samarkand to the gulag museum in Tashkent.
Most of all, we adored traveling with our own personal locals to grill for hours every day and drivers to screech to a halt whenever Louis cried, “Stop!” because he spotted a good shot.
Partout would not exist without them.
We turned our trip over to Asia Highlights, a Chinese agency that specializes in private tours, to organize our trip from first landing to final takeoff. For those who want to self-plan, our advice would be to engage long-established local travel agencies to completely handle any travel outside cities and to allow extra time within cities for the fumbling-around factor. We could pack a lot into our days because we didn’t waste a minute on navigation, transit or making time-consuming mistakes (like not knowing what time a border crossing closed for lunch). And, in the end, the trip was plenty of adventure enough without going DIY.
Your Questions Answered
Marguerite asked: Think there is any benefit to joining it up with any or all of Armenia / Azerbaijan/ Georgia? It would that be just too much?
Provided you allow yourselves enough time (6-8 weeks?) or limit the Stans to cities or only some Stans, this is not only doable but even desirable, especially for people like you who like longer trips. As former Soviet republics still shadowed by the bear, the Caucuses share significant chunks of their histories with the Stans countries along with ethnic, religious and cultural roots. Heck, the Uzbek language is so close to Azeri, Uzbeks consider the countries siblings. Seeing them all in one go would make even more sense of the region than seeing only the five Stans, which makes good sense of it. Peter Hopkirk’s “The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia” is a riveting primer on the subject.
Another option would be adding the Stans onto a trip to Turkey. Though the countries lack the shared historical shaping, it would vastly simplify travel in and out of the Stans.
COMING SOON! Potty Talk Goes Wild
Partout with Louis & Doris 