And no wonder: it’s amazing.

So when we arrived in Amman, Jordan’s capital city, we were already pretty excited. I’ve been waiting to see Petra for years but the timing has just never been right and I’ve always been…somewhere else.

We spent a day exploring Amman’s topsy-turvy network of streets and skinny alleyways where the shops and restaurants all seem to be built one on top of the other.

Amman has more than its fair share of Roman ruins, too – like the massive Roman Theatre built in the 2nd century AD, which dominates the modern-day downtown.

It was time. The next day we caught a bus to Wadi Musa, the little town that grew up around Petra. Wadi Musa is one of those places that has really capitalised on its convenient location right next to a UNESCO protected wonder of the world. Visitors who aren’t day-tripping in can base themselves in hotels ranging from basic guesthouses all the way up to major resort chains. It’s basically one long strip of mediocre restaurants and mini-marts, including options like a fast-food joint selling camel burgers and a store called the ‘Indiana Jones Supermarket’. I think you can probably buy the Holy Grail there.

We checked into the Petra Moon hotel, dropped off our stuff and went straight to the main gates. We bought two-day passes and headed for the Siq – a narrow canyon that leads to the ancient city’s entrance.

The walk through the Siq is 1.2 kilometers of sheer rock walls and anticipation. A glimpse of the iconic Treasury ahead – and then we arrived in front of it. We knew what to expect – who hasn’t seen a photo of the Treasury – but it didn’t matter. We stood there and looked up in awe.

So called because legend has it that an Egyptian Pharaoh once hid treasure here, the Treasury is actually a 2000 year old tomb.

Most of Petra that we can see today was carved out of the pink sandstone massifs by a nomadic tribe called the Nabateans, over a span of about 500 years starting in the 6th century BC. At one point around 30 000 people lived there but as trade routes gradually shifted the city’s fortunes waned and by AD 106 the Romans took over. They made Petra a provincial capital and added their own touches like the Colonnaded Street, a thoroughfare originally lined with marble columns right through the center of town. But the Nabatean city suffered a few earthquakes and by the mid 500s it was abandoned. Drifting into obscurity Petra became a forgotten city in the desert, hidden amongst the canyons and known only to local Bedouins…Until one day in 1812 when a Swiss explorer discovered it and told the whole world.

We stood and stared at the Treasury wondering how something this impressive was ever lost for more than a millennium in the sands of time.

We hiked up to the High Place of Sacrifice, a smooth platform once used for religious sacrifice as its name suggests.

There’s a smooth stone altar here and niches for storing statues, and drains to channel sacrificial blood.

More recent additions to the site include carpets and a refrigerator.

By the time we got back down the sun was dipping low in the sky, so we walked along the Street of Facades to the Royal Tombs to watch the light slide down over them as the sun set.

We aren’t early risers but we were up and out at 6 am for our second visit. This was one of those few cases where getting up early is actually worth it: we had the Siq and the Treasury nearly to ourselves.

And then before it got too too hot, we climbed way up around the tombs for another look at the Treasury from a different angle. It’s magical.

By 9.30 am as the crowds were arriving at the site, we were starving and enjoying a huge and well-deserved breakfast back at the hotel.

On our third visit, we made the long walk to the Monastery, probably the second most famous of Petra’s legendary monuments.

Despite its name, it is in fact another massive tomb (those ancient Nabateans really liked tombs). It’s also a steep 40 minute trek from the main part of the city and surrounded by viewpoints from where you can see all the way to Israel and Palestine.

Of course, because it’s me we’re talking about here, I managed to find a cat slinking around the High Place of Sacrifice (presumably unaware of the spot’s bloody history).

And Oyv found Petra beer (later on though, not actually in a tomb or anything).

All in all, we walked about 55 000 steps. If only the ancient Nabateans could see us now, tracking our visit to their city on fitbits, maybe buying a refreshing smoothie at the High Place of Sacrifice.

All the walking and climbing in the heat left us exhausted and it was a bit of a relief to exit the site on the third visit.

Afterwards, we went to the famous Cave Bar for drinks. At 2000 years old it’s the oldest bar in the world.

Today you can order overpriced wine there and listen to Despacito but this bar was once – that’s right, you guessed it – a Nabatean tomb.

Both of us had really looked forward to Petra – for a long time – and the Nabateans did not let us down with their incredible city.

We made plans to move on in the morning. We wanted to do a little snorkelling in the Red Sea – after all, Petra’s not all there is to do around here. But it’s pretty amazing.

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Everybody’s heard of Petra (and if not, you have now). But 500 km to the south in Saudi Arabia, a country long closed to outsiders, lie the remains of the Nabateans’ much less famous second-city: Hegra. We’ve been there too, and you can read about it here.

For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Jordan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

The post Petra: One for the Bucket List appeared first on WhirledAway.

Now, Oyv’s no stranger to warped travel budget restrictions himself, but for this short trip he apparently thought he’d prance around the Middle East like some kind of Saudi sheik, staying at nice hotels and eating unlimited quantities of pricey hummus. Wrong.

The daily cost of travel in Jordan (and Lebanon before that) came as a bit of a shock to me. The Middle East in general is not a budget traveller’s dream destination. I had a can of Nescafé and some oatmeal in my backpack and I informed Oyv we’d be having it for breakfast; what’s more, we would take rooms without aircon despite the searing heat outside.

But the thing is, if you haven’t gone crazy like me, or if you can (also like me, under force from your husband) reign in the crazy before you find yourself living off instant oatmeal and complaining about the high cost of hummus these days, there is a lot of great stuff to do.

Just, like, so much. We didn’t realise this in advance. OK, mainly because we didn’t do any research. We really wanted to visit Petra, alright? We knew all about that and couldn’t wait to see it for ourselves. But we quickly found out that the ancient city is not all there is to Jordan (although it is pretty awesome).

No, as it turns out, there are plenty of totally diverse ways to entertain yourself around here. On that note – this is what five or six days in a row in Jordan looked like for us.

First things first, we made an excited beeline for Petra. It definitely is the country’s biggest draw.

And no wonder: it’s amazing.

The Nabateans built Petra over a span of about 500 years starting from the 6th century BC. Eventually falling into ruin it was a forgotten city until 1812 when it was discovered by a Swiss explorer.

We visited the site three times over two days (it’s huge, and it’s different in every light).

All the walking and climbing in the heat left us exhausted and it was a bit of a relief to exit the site on the third visit and go back to the hotel pool (yup, we had a pool, that was all Oyv).

So we were hot and dusty. But that was fine, since the very next day we found ourselves submerged in the cool Red Sea, snorkelling in some of the clearest, bluest water I’ve ever seen, floating over stunning reefs teeming with fish and gently wavering plants.

After snorkelling we returned to our hotel in Aqaba which coincidentally was next to a local restaurant where we ate to our hearts’ content (the hummus, in addition to being delicious was also really cheap. I was thrilled).

Magnificent ruins and the Red Sea behind us, it was obviously time to hit the desert so we went to Wadi Rum. Inhabited since prehistoric times and still home to local Bedouin, this desert’s most famous one-time resident is Lawrence of Arabia.

Our visit to Wadi Rum started at the village outskirts where we met a man named Shaker, who was waiting there to shake us down. We were with two friends who during the bargaining process observed that Oyv and I had a Good Cop/Bad Cop thing going on. (Those of you who know us both can guess who’s who).

Reaching an agreement about guides and activities with Shaker, we set off into the desert to explore. Riding in the open back of a 4WD we clung tightly to the sides as our guide drove at breakneck speed over the empty expanse of sand. It’s not safe….but it’s really, really fun.

We slogged up dunes under the relentless sun (and ran back down). We climbed on massive sandstone cliffs and we watched the sun set over ancient canyons.

When it got dark we went to camp, where the guides had been cooking vegetables and chicken in a pit.

We ate, and slept soundly in our tent surrounded by the total silence of the desert.

And after the desert, it stands to reason that we got back in the water.

First, we took a quick dip in the Dead Sea. Calling it a ‘dip’ is kind of a stretch, given that you literally cannot sink in this salt-saturated body of water.

Coated in salt – it’s itchy and it stings, you don’t want to do laps in the Dead Sea – we went to Wadi Mujib. There is no better way to almost lose your bikini bottoms rinse off all that salt, than to nearly drown in wade through torrents of rushing water in this beautiful biosphere reserve.

At some points you don’t wade anymore:

And there’s a waterfall awaiting you at the end.

I usually try to avoid cliches but sometimes I can’t help it: Jordan really does have something for everyone. And (here I go again) each day you spend there is in total contrast to the one before.

Scrambling over the ruins of an ancient civilisation; off-roading in the desert. Snorkelling in the Red Sea; bobbing like a cork in the Dead Sea. A combination hike/swim right up some rapids…all this, and you don’t even have to be a Saudi sheik to enjoy it.

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For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Jordan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

The post As It Turns Out, Jordan’s Got More Than Just Petra appeared first on WhirledAway.

It seems unnecessary to me – living just 40 km from the Syrian border you’d think the citizens of Baalbek, Lebanon would hear enough of that sort of thing echoing around the valley that divides the two countries.

And how did I suddenly end up in Lebanon, within earshot of somebody’s unique wedding reception? And where did Oyv come from?

I’d entered Turkey from the Georgian border in the east. A few busses and one long train trip later and I arrived in Goreme, a little town in the Cappadocia region.

I’d planned on spending a couple of days there and exploring but between my downcast mood after the Abkhazia-incident, the town’s overwhelming kitchiness and the numbers of tourists crawling like ants over every site in the area, I just spent one night.

That gave me enough time to check out the Open Air Museum, a vast honey-comb collection of rock-cut churches and monasteries dating from the 10th to 12th centuries. I also toiled up (seriously, it was 44 degrees out) to a viewpoint overlooking the famous fairy chimneys – also known to geologists as ‘hoodoos’ which personally I think is a cooler name.

These natural rock formations emerged from the landscape starting with volcanic erruptions millions of years ago. The ash solidified; wind and water eroded away the softer bits leaving the hardest parts behind to stick sharply out of the earth; and there you have it. Hoodoos.

I’d last seen Oyv two months ago in Kyrgyzstan, and now we were meeting again in Istanbul, so I took a nightbus to get there from Goreme (the fanciest, comfiest bus I’ve seen in months, by the way).

We both really like Istanbul. There’s so much to see and do and if you don’t want to see and do anything, you can just eat.

And eat some more.

It’s fabulous.

And the city is full of ridiculously adorable stray cats and the locals who love them. There are little cathouses, and bowls of food and water set out on the pavements everywhere. I can usually only make it a block or so before I have to stop and pet one.

But meeting and eating in fabulous cat-friendly Istanbul was only the starting point for us – we had a flight to catch to Beirut. Incidentally this disrupted my overland travel-streak all the way from Kyrgyzstan to Turkey (just so you know, that’s pretty far) – but crossing Syria by bus isn’t really an option.

We walked around different neighborhoods in Beirut – little Armenia, Gemmayzeh, the waterfront. We saw this beautful Catholic church wedged into a street with a couple of cool cafes and old buildings (damage from Lebanon’s 15 year long civil war is still visible everywhere in the city).

The mix of churches and mosques in the city surprised me.

What I didn’t know is that Lebanon is the most religiously diverse country in the Middle East.

Lebanon is easy to get around. It’s tiny, first of all. Distances are short and if you want you can cover the stuff you want to see in a series of day trips from Beirut. There always seems to be a minibus zipping by. Crazy drivers of the Middle East notwithstanding, the busses are pretty safe too and never overcrowded. But don’t get carried away and expect any extras, like seatbelts.

Ready to move, we lurked at a crowded intersection for a short while in Beirut and then hopped on a bus going to Baalbek. We were also Baalbek-bound but first we jumped out in the street in a town called Zahle and walked a kilometer or so to Chateau Ksara.

Ksara is one of the oldest wineries in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley wine region, founded by Jesuit priests in 1857. Together with its long history there’s also a long Roman-dug tunnel and natural caves underneath the chateau. These were only stumbled on by accident in the 1890s when some chickens went missing. The priests followed a fox who’d been absconding with the birds, and found his hiding place. Now the tunnels function as a wine cellar for the three million bottles the estate produces every year.

The estate also runs great free tours and (generous) tastings.

Baalbek is particularly famous for two things: it’s a Hezbollah stronghold; and, it’s home to some of the most intact and impressive Roman ruins I’ve ever seen.

The Romans built three massive temples for Jupiter, Bacchus and Venus 2000 years ago on top of the ruins of an even more ancient complex dedicated to the worship of the Phonecian sky-god Baal and his consort Astarte, the goddess of heaven.

Baalbek is right next to the Syrian border so as I mentioned earlier, there’s the possibility that your visit to the ruins will be accompanied by the sounds of shooting and shelling echoing from across the valley. There aren’t a lot of visitors, coincidentally. But this doesn’t mean Baalbek is not safe: Lebanon apparently has good control over the border and the fighting is far away – and less frequent these days too.

So we just listened to celebratory gunfire from our room and wondered why the concept hasn’t caught on at home yet.

Then we headed to Tripoli, Lebanon’s second city. It has a long and pretty dirty waterfront area (to be honest Lebanon in general is really pretty dirty) and tangled electric wires strung crazily from pole to house to roof to pole again form dark webs over the crooked narrow streets. Men sit in the leafy square in front of the clocktower playing checkers and drinking coffee; there is a long palm-studded boulevard leading to the ocean; it’s famous for syrupy-sweet honey dripping little pastries. We ate a few times at the same place where the owner Mohammed introduced us to all his homemade local specialties and vowed to assist us with anything we might possibly need. We loved it.

And if you need a break from sweltering city heat – then go to Bcharre. We took a share-taxi there from Tripoli (true to his word, Mohammed forced one of his waitstaff to arrange it for us). In Bcharre you might forget you’re in the Middle East altogether – cool fresh air, rolling green hills, and a church on every mountaintop.

Returning to Beirut for a day or two before carrying onto Jordan, we lounged around a big open air garden bar smoking shisha. We were really happy with our experience in Lebanon. What’s not to love about it? It may be a bit misunderstood; it’s got some unstable neighbors (maybe it’s not a model of stability itself); it’s not at all friends with Israel. It’s smack in the middle of one of the most volatile areas in the world. Lebanon’s full of Syrian refugees and there’s a lot of tension simmering about this. There’s a huge military presence – there are armed soldiers literally everywhere you go.

But visit Lebanon anyway and you’re rewarded with so much friendliness, chatty and helpful locals, great city-vibes, and history that spans centuries of civilisation.

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For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in the area, check out my stories from the road in Jordan.

The post One Week in Lebanon appeared first on WhirledAway.

I needed to get moving towards Turkey but I wasn’t feeling up to it. I’d stayed in Abkhazia longer than I meant to. At first because I wanted to, and then an extra ‘unplanned’ night because I’d been robbed and was temporarily stranded while I picked up the pieces.

I’d been travelling in Abkhazia with three friends originally – two had left and we remaining two thought we’d head back to Georgia together – safety in numbers, and all that. But we didn’t feel unsafe in Abkhazia anyway, despite a couple warnings online. Certainly not in the Russian-packed beach resort towns like Sukhumi, or riding a jeep in the mountains around Gagra with all the Russian tourist families enjoying themselves doing the same thing.

But other parts of Abkhazia, particularly the south which we needed to pass through on our way back to the border, feel different. Not least when we were driven into the woods there by three men and robbed.

Tkvarcheli, a semi-abandoned former mining town in the south has a depressed sense of hopelessness which pervades the surrounding district, and it’s nothing like Sukhumi.

Tkvarcheli was hit hard during the war with Georgia. The power plant was bombed out early on, and under seige for a year the town lived without electricity. With the collapse of the mining industry and general devastation of war Tkvarcheli and the surrounding area has never recovered. For almost any intact building there’s a derelict ruin nearby, empty, overgrown and slowly crumbling.

There isn’t any public transport running to Tkvarcheli, and that’s where our troubles began. Ben and I hitched a ride from the main road with a group of happy locals (three women and two men) who were on their way to picnic at a waterfall nearby, a popular daytrip.

Everything was fine and we hopped out of their jeep in the centre of Tkvarcheli.

They drove off and it wasn’t long before we felt the town’s sketchy vibe sinking in. We wandered the deserted streets and walked some distance out of town to see the abandoned power plant.

Ready to leave we went out to the road to catch a ride to the junction about twenty kilometers away, from where we knew we could get the next bus to Gali, the border-town.

We got into a passing car with one man. We’d seen him earlier in town, but didn’t think much of it. There’s a very fine line between hitchhiking and taxis in some parts of the world, and other people getting in and out of the car you’re riding in along the way is often normal. However in this case, when he pulled over and picked up two more men neither one of us liked it much – but we ignored our gut feelings, which turned out to be a huge mistake. Driving fast, the car swerved off the road and into the forest. We asked, then demanded, then pleaded to get out, and banged on the doors – but they wouldn’t open and the men sitting next to us grabbed my arms and pulled Ben back by the shirt, all the while continuing this detour into the woods.

They pulled over in a clearing and made Ben get out. One of them pushed me back into the car but I wouldn’t stay there and got out anyway. Now we saw that the other one had a knife in his hand. They patted us both down and made us unpack our bags, examining every item we took out.

Although things like this can happen anywhere in the world the problem is that in a place like Abkhazia all bets are off.

Firstly, although we’d seen some warnings that the southern part of Abkhazia wasn’t safe – they were old, and we felt secure in the rest of the unofficial country and weren’t very worried about it. We only intended to take a quick look around Tkvarcheli in the middle of the day and leave. It was a spontaneous decision we made on the bus, based on a recommendation from some Russian visitors who liked the place (and made it sound a lot more cheerful than it turned out to be). Hindsight is 20/20, but it is always better to do research first and check on the situation before going ahead.

Secondly, Abkhazia is an unrecognized and only self-proclaimed country and there are no foreign embassies present to assist their citizens in an emergency. If anything happens to your passport – you’ve got a problem. According to our own governments we aren’t really even supposed to be there and this means that regular travel insurance is also pretty much void too.

So during the robbery in the forest, together with all the other thoughts running through my mind – the fear I felt when they made us put our hands on our heads and our heads down on the trunk of the car; when they ransacked our bags and felt our pockets; when they opened the trunk and for a panicky split second I was afraid they wanted us in it – I was very conscious of our passports and of how much trouble we’d be in if anything happened to them in the course of this incident.

The men spoke to us in Russian. The only words we understood were ‘narcotica’ and ‘politsiya’, which they shouted often and to which our emphatically repeated response was ‘Nyet (no), narcotica nyet’. We think they were pretending to be police searching us for drugs, but why they even felt the need for the pretense we don’t know. Two of them periodically kicked or hit the driver, who groaned and cried in an effort to keep up the appearance that he wasn’t in on it, which we’re certain he was. They made us repack everything and get back in the car. Then we drove further into the forest, and repeated the entire frightening scene again.

In the end they took our cash and our electronics and handing back around 1500 roubles (about 23 USD), they left us in the forest surrounded by the rest of our belongings, and drove off. They gave back that bit of cash, we understood, because they wanted us to get a taxi to the border and leave Abkhazia immediately.

In a daze we pulled ourselves together and walked back out to the road. Eventually we arrived at a shop and barely managed with Google Translate to explain what had happened.

The police who turned up a long time after the shop owner finally contacted them wore camouflage pants with guns stuck in the back, driving an unmarked car with the entire front bumper torn right off and frayed wires ripped out of the steering wheel. We went with them and spent the next seven hours answering the same pointless questions over and over, going in circles, literally – they drove us from the station in Ochamchire to the one in Tkvarcheli and back, supposedly with the intent of looking for the three robbers. They left us in a dark and deserted intersection at around eleven pm with one officer to wait for another man – I have no idea who he was – to pick us up and bring us back to the station in Ochamchire.

After a while there were so many of them I started to wonder who was actually a police officer and who may have just been an interested onlooker. One of them played casually with a knife; another waved a big bundle of weed around. At one point during what was starting to feel like an interrogation, they actually threatened to keep us several days in Abkhazia – over our visa-mandated permission. Adding to the mess and stress was the fact that we had to do everything via Google Translate – it was hours before they located Olga, an old English teacher who came down to the station to act as translator.

The silver living in all of this is Oleg, a local man we’d met earlier who with his wife, had invited us to a picnic at the beach. We hadn’t even exchanged names – but I had his number and he answered the phone when I called late that night from the police station:

‘This is the girl from the bus. Do you remember me?’
‘Of course’ said Oleg (why wouldn’t he, it was that very afternoon and how many foreigners does he meet on the bus in one day).
‘We need your help, can you help us?’ I asked, and told him what happened.
‘Yes, of course I will’ said Oleg promptly, and he got in his car and drove an hour from his home to pick us up, for which I am eternally grateful. One of the officers had offered us his place but honestly I wanted to get as far away from all of them as possible.

Interestingly, at around midnight right before Oleg turned up to save the day – the two officers who’d left us at the intersection suddenly reappeared with my computer and iPad in hand. It seemed like they knew exactly where to look. There was no sign of Ben’s electronics or, unsurprisingly, any of our cash. There was no explanation for this mysterious recovery, absolutely no police report, and we left with a lot of unanswered questions.

Oleg and his wife Ludmilla fed us, gave us beds for the night and after breakfast in the morning they drove us all the way to Gali. I’d been worried about the border crossing – worried that the police had alerted the authorities there and for some reason, any reason, who knows – we’d have a problem leaving Abkhazia.

But the solider barely paid any attention to us at all and we passed through. It was with a huge sense of relief that I found myself on the Georgian side of the checkpoint – but irrationally afraid of the car and driver waiting there to carry on back to town.

Ever since we met these men and realised their intentions I’d been thinking in steps. Get out of the car. Hand over the money and electronics. Get away from the police.
At Oleg’s my mantra became, Let’s get out of Abkhazia. Then, Get to Zugdidi, find a guesthouse and chill the fuck out. But back in Zugdidi over drinks that night, neither of us was feeling good. We tried to analyse everything that had happened. And we were angry – who were these people, who not just stole from us but threatened and frightened us as well? I wished those three men all sorts of ill, and felt they deserved it too.

Worst of all, my previous inclination to trust people and assume their good intentions had been somewhat damaged. I certainly felt less-than-good about riding in cars with strangers (a regular part of a travel day). Trusting that others want to help you or at the very least, are not interested in harming you, is pretty important. If was afraid of strangers how would I go on travelling alone?

I had to get back on the horse. It was even worse than the other time on this trip when I had to literally get back on the horse in Kyrgyzstan after the one I was riding threw me and dragged me a hundred meters (yes, there have been some ups and downs, this trip).

Ben and I said goodbye at the bus station in Zugdidi and wished each other safe travels. I took a bus to Batumi and the next day I crossed the border into Turkey on a series of minibusses and boarded a train to Kayseri.

I’d had a great time exploring this unusual corner of the world, right up until the last day and I decided not to let a bad incident ruin it for me. I thought about Oleg and his wife who’d invited us to a picnic and then got a lot more than they bargained for when I called them late at night and they’d ended up with two unexpected and edgy foreign houseguests. The main thing here is that in the end we only lost money and things, which we can live without, and that the two of us are both are OK.

The train was late arriving in Kayseri. I knew I’d missed my connection and any hope of carrying on to Goreme where I’d planned to stay that night. It was 2.30 am when I disembarked in an unknown town in a country I’d only got to the day before, just days after a frightening and stressful incident that had left me in a jittery state of mind. I didn’t have a lot of options other than spreading out my sarong on the station floor and sleeping there till daylight.

I looked at this as one way to work on getting past my new, recently developed paranoia.

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For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Georgia, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

The post Then This Happened: Robbery in Abkhazia appeared first on WhirledAway.

I was with two friends, Matt and Sherry. The very same Matt and Sherry I spent a week with at a truckstop hotel in Kazakhstan, waiting for a cargo ferry to arrive on some indefinite day and take us across the Caspian Sea. Now we were waiting together again, this time for the entry permits we’d applied for from the Abkhazian de-facto government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, permits we needed to have if we were going to visit Abkhazia at all.

Disembarking the train in Zugdidi we went straight to the city center.  McDonald’s was shut but the wifi was open and we got online and checked our email. We needed to cross the ‘administrative boundary line’ between Georgia and its lost territory before it got very late in the day, because southern Abkhazia isn’t the place to be after dark.

But the permit letters didn’t come that morning so we checked into a guesthouse to wait it out some more. We’re good at that; waiting around for weird stuff to happen seems to have become our thing.

The permits arrived late that afternoon and the next morning we went straight to the Georgian checkpoint. The officials there took our passports and made calls to Tbilisi and generally ignored us for about three hours, while we sat outside a little shop on the edge of the border drinking Nescafe, and waited until they said we could go.

This interesting monument is the last thing we saw when leaving Georgia-proper:

That, and the Georgian soldier who ran out of a tent when he spotted our cameras. ‘You’re going over there?’ he said, pointing vaguely down the road towards Abkhazia.

He made us delete the photos we’d already taken of the checkpoint and we carried on through the barricades. Crossing the bridge over the Inguri river we arrived on the edge of one of the world’s most hotly disputed territories.

The long fenced corridor leading to immigration was full of mostly older people laden down with shopping bags and trolleys and jostling to get ahead. As it turns out the last day of a month is the worst day to cross: the Abkhazians all go to Georgia to collect pensions, shop, and return.

And so we waited in the intense heat for another two hours.

Although the pensioners could sail right through the checkpoint, it wasn’t so easy for us foreigners. The soldier scrutinising my passport and entry permit had a lot of questions and frowned at every single answer I gave him, but finally waved me through.

Picking up a taxi we rode to the closest town and then caught a marshrutka to Abkhazia’s capital, Sukhumi.

Abkhazia broke away from Georgia and proclaimed independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union and a war in the 90s. Today the tiny republic is recognised only by Russia and a few other nations (for example, Nauru. I’m not convinced Nauru’s opinion carries much weight internationally. After they established relations with Abkhazia, Nauru received 9 million USD from Russia for ‘unrelated’ reasons. Impoverished Nauru also recognised Taiwan’s independence in exchange for financial aid; then when China offered more they withdrew their recognition – only to re-recognise Taiwan yet again for another, better offer. And so on).

But back to Abkhazia: Georgia, and the rest of the world governments considers it Georgian territory illegally occupied by Russia, who strongly backs the separatist movement and controls the borders. Abkhazians are fiercely independent. They don’t want to be a part of Georgia, and many of them don’t want to be a part of Russia either. It’s a frozen conflict with no particular end in sight.

For foreigners there are a few things to consider on the way in and out. It’s illegal to enter Georgia from Russia via Abkhazia or vice versa, meaning you need to go back the way you came. As an unrecognised and unofficial country, there are no foreign embassies present to assist their own citizens and since most governments advise against all travel to the region for reasons ranging from landmines to lawlessness, it also means your regular travel insurance probably won’t cover you in the event of an emergency.

Sherry, Matt and I moved into a room at a guesthouse in a building holding three family-run hotels. The friendly proprietors Roma and John liked to sit outside at all hours in the courtyard drinking chacha or local wine and they made us feel right at home. Another friend of ours, Ben, whose entry permit arrived a day after the rest turned up later and moved in too.

So, what to do, in a country that doesn’t really exist?

Some paperwork for starters. The entry permit is just that – permission to enter Abkhazia – but it’s not a visa. On arrival foreigners have three days to show up at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sukhumi with permit and passport, and pay 400 roubles (about 6 USD) to get the visa. It’s important not to lose this – it isn’t stuck into your passport like any other visa and it will be confiscated upon exit, but you need it to leave again.

Perched right on the Black Sea, Abkhazia was once a soviet summer playground with beautiful mountainous landscapes and pretty resort towns. The pebbly beaches aren’t that special but Russians, who are pretty much the only tourists who visit Abkhazia, seem to love them.

Along Sukhumi’s beachfront promenade there’s a fun-fair atmosphere with carnival games, and beer and homemade wine available on tap.

Although the parents probably shouldn’t be driving, the kids do: the street is busy until late at night with kids zipping around in hired Power-Wheels jeeps. For more aggressive kids there’s another option: little tanks, complete with swivelling guns on the front.

Your average every-day comrades weren’t the only ones who loved a holiday in Abkhazia: Josef Stalin himself had five dachas (summer homes) here, where he entertained everyone from party officials to mistresses. Famously paranoid, Stalin never revealed in advance which dacha he was headed for and all were constantly kept ready. We visited one of them near a small town called New Athos.

New Athos is an easy daytrip from Sukhumi, where in addition to Stalin’s dacha there’s a monastery with an impressive Orthodox cathedral.

But in case visitors are distracted by beaches and beautiful views, there is always a reminder of past conflict. Like a roadside memorial at the site of a significant battle or this monument of a bayonet in Sukhumi, dedicated to lives lost in the fighting.

The war is frozen in time, visible today in the shells of countless destroyed and abandoned buildings. These empty relics are more or less accessible to curious visitors who don’t mind climbing over the odd fence or through a twisted gate.

Some of the fiercest fighting took place in and around the Council of Ministries building in the centre of the capital.

Treading carefully – there’s broken glass; rusty metal rods hanging from ceilings; crumbling staircases; empty elevator shafts and questionable floors – the four of us climbed to the roof.

Watching the sunset over palm-filled green gardens from the roof of a bullet-riddled ruin is kind of surreal.

Abkhazia had plenty of train stations, also now defunct and overgrown:

And life goes on, all around the ruins as if they weren’t even there. At this train station the passage under the platforms serves as a shortcut to the other side of the block.

Vendors sell inflatable unicorns and beach towels out front.

In some cases entire villages were abandoned, or nearly so. Tkvarcheli was once a prosperous soviet coal mining town but after a year under siege during the war the industry collapsed, the population plummeted, and it’s now little more than a desolate ghost town with a bombed-out power plant and quiet, depressive atmosphere.

Ben and I visited Tkvarcheli on the spur of the moment – Sherry and Matt had left Abkhazia the day before. We were on the bus to Gali heading to the border when we got off to explore.

But that area of Abkhazia isn’t very stable and our spontaneous change in plans ended with us being robbed in the forest by three men, followed by seven hours of questions from the local police who were distinctly unlike any police I have ever seen before.

Stranded, we spent the night at the home of a local family we’d met earlier in the day – when I called from the police station that night, Oleg drove an hour from his house at 11 pm to pick us up and bring us back.

The next morning Oleg and and his wife drove us all the way to Gali and saw us into a taxi to the border. We crossed back into Georgia and returned to Zugdidi feeling both relieved and very depressed. My time in Abkhazia was an interesting eye-opener, fun and unusual. I met some really bad people; but I also met some really good people.

Once a part of the Soviet Union but now just a forgotten corner of the world, this tiny state would be my 91st country – if it actually existed. Urban ruins standing still in time, against a backdrop of Black Sea beach resorts and beautiful nature – nothing much changes in a country that never was.

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For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Georgia, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

The post Abkhazia: The Country That Never Was appeared first on WhirledAway.

And now here I was right in the neighborhood so to speak, having disembarked the Professor Gul in Azerbaijan after crossing the Caspian Sea.

I hadn’t been in Baku and online for ten minutes when Oyv WhatsApped me. It seems my friends and I weren’t the only ones obsessed with the Professor Gul and its location on the Caspian – Oyv had been monitoring our position during the crossing on a marine traffic website and he knew I should be back on land. It’s nice when someone’s looking out for you, across all those miles and even the sea.

After a week of traversing Azerbaijan I arrived at the Georgian border in another of the mini-busses on which I seem to spend inordinate amounts of time these days. Passport checks and baggage xrays, a quick walk through a tunnel-like path from one country into the next, and I was back in Georgia.

I’ve travelled a lot lately, and a long way. I was ready to relax for a while without any plans to hike up something steep or organise weird modes of transport or navigate incomprehensible cultural nuances or undertake 30 hour long train-and-ship rides: in other words, I was looking for some normal vacation time and I felt like Georgia was the  place to find it.

And I was right. Let me sum up my time in Georgia with two words: Wine and Food. Actually Sulphur and Stalin both come to mind as well, but not in such excessive amounts as the first two things.

As my next marshrutka (mini-bus) climbed high into the hills towards Sighnaghi, my expectations climbed with it. I remembered Sighnaghi; it’s an adorable little town with twisty cobbled streets, ancient fortifications and orthodox churches,  and panoramic views of the Caucausus mountains.

I moved into a family guesthouse where the owners Nika and Luisa continually placed pitchers of wine and plates of salty cheese and pastries on the table in the garden and encouraged me to consume both in large amounts. This made me pretty happy after weeks of either not drinking anything at all, or drinking shots of vodka.

Moving on to Telavi I stayed at another guesthouse with a hospitable owner. Giorgi is 70 years old and usually hosts Russians – he doesn’t speak English.

‘My Dad is really nervous’ said Giorgi’s daughter over the phone when he called her to translate.  ‘He wants to know if your room is comfortable and he’s worried that you are hungry’, she went on, and added that her Dad wanted to make sure I had a good meal. Sure enough, Giorgi disappeared into the house and when he emerged again in a buttoned shirt tucked into khaki trousers we went out for dinner and a walk in the park.

Georgia is one of the world’s oldest wine regions: people have been cultivating grapevines here for at least 8000 years. Of course, if drinking wine in the afternoon at your guesthouse or at sunset in a little restaurant clinging to the old city walls doesn’t do it for you, you can always go straight to the source. Telavi is at the heart of Georgia’s wine industry and there are plenty of vineyards to visit.

I checked out two, Shumi and Schuchmann, sampling their chacha – a local spirit made from grapes – while I was at it.

And then there’s Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi. The Old Town is just as I remembered it, all skinny winding streets and ramshackle buildings tumbling down an impossibly steep hillside.

My friends Matt and Sherry from the Caspian crossing were already there, in an apartment they’d booked. There was space for me too so I moved right in.

A popular legend has it that in the 5th century the King was out hunting in the forest when his favourite falcon fell into a hotspring and was boiled alive.  Either in honour of the bird or out of a real liking for hotsprings, the King cut down the forest and founded a city, calling it Tbilisi which literally means ‘warm place’. The sulphurous thermal waters gave rise to plenty of bathhouses and the tradition survives and thrives today – taking a bath is high on the list of things to do in Tbilisi, so one evening we went to check out a few bathhouses.

There are different options: you can use the public baths or you can book a private room for yourself and your friends and that’s what we did, once we settled on Orbeliani bathhouse. These rooms usually include a sitting area and washroom, showers, a sauna (if you pay extra), both a hot and a cold pool, and a marble slab for scrubbing and massage.

A private booking is typically for an hour and we spent the time going between the two pools and the sauna. We’d also each paid extra for a scrub. I’d been to the baths before and hadn’t forgotten this experience. ‘There goes my tan’ I thought to myself when it was my turn to lie on the marble slab and a woman approached me wearing what appeared to be a mitten made of steel wool.

If you’re curious about Tbilisi bathhouses in general and scrubs in particular, here are some things you should know:

You can of course wear a swim suit but being naked makes more sense – after all, it’s a bath. Having sloughed off the top layer of your skin with the scrubbing mitt, your attendant will fill something like a pillowcase with soapsuds and slap you with that for a while, intermittently pouring buckets of hot water over you to rinse while you cling to the end of the marble slab with your fingertips in an effort not to slide right off with all the suds and the next tidal wave. The finale usually involves the attendant slinging a bucket of cold water at you, just in case you got too comfortable.

And there you are! – slithering off the marble slab all clean and pink and shiny and showing off a new layer of skin you didn’t even know you had underneath the weight of all that dead skin you’ve unwittingly been carrying around for perhaps years or at least, your current trip.

As well as taking baths with your friends or strangers, you can also learn (almost nothing more) about Josef Stalin – his home town, Gori, is an easy day-trip from Tbilisi. So one morning I left the apartment and took the metro to Didube, a chaotic bus-station-and-market, where I caught a marshrutka to the town whose only claim to fame is being the birthplace of one of the twentieth century’s most infamous tyrants.

As the marshrutka cruised down Gori’s main drag, Stalin Avenue, we passed Stalin Park (I’m not making this up) and I got out near City Hall.

A six meter high statue of Stalin once stood in front. It was finally removed in 2010 in the middle of the night to avoid protest – many residents of Gori still see the soviet dictator as a legendary Georgian first and foremost.

The museum at the other end of the park contains an extensive array of portraits and photographs from Stalin’s lifetime.

They also have many of his belongings – the furniture from his first office at the Kremlin, a dress uniform and so on.

And there’s the museum’s showstopper – ensconced in a shrine-like display, his deathmask cast in bronze.

The English tour I went on explained a lot about the photos and the people in them, and Stalin’s early years and family life, but didn’t really touch on the atrocities he has gone down in history for.

The house Stalin was born in in 1878 stands in the grounds with original furniture inside donated by his mother.

Since he was afraid of flying Stalin travelled around Europe by train – his personal carriage is now parked outside the museum too.

I climbed aboard and walked the length of it, peering into each room – it gave me a strange feeling.

For those visitors seeking a conversation piece (or actively looking for trouble), the museum even has a gift shop selling souvenirs like T-shirts and coasters.

The last time I was here there was a bottle of sparkling wine available with Stalin’s face on the label but someone must have bought it between then and now.

Back in Tbilisi I picked up deli snacks for dinner – things like grilled peppers and baked aubergine rolls filled with walnut paste and spicy bean salads. I sampled some wine while I was at it – even supermarkets hold free wine-tastings here.

So far I’d pretty much retraced my steps in Georgia – that’s something I don’t usually do. It was fun, revisiting these places I’d been only once before but remembered so warmly. Now I’ll go back to thinking about it sentimentally and eyeing weekend flights to Tbilisi, until the next time I’m in the neighborhood.

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For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Georgia, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

The post Retracing Steps: Feeling Sentimental in Georgia appeared first on WhirledAway.

One of them (my ideas, I mean) was to travel up into Russia from Kazakhstan. Visa policies in Central Asia have loosened up lately. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are even visa-free for many nationalities – something the officer at airport immigration in Bishkek seemed unaware of since he demanded to see mine. But when I told him I didn’t need one he just shrugged, stamped my passport and waved me past.

Russia is another story and I’d read conflicting reports about whether it’s actually possible to pick up a Russian visa on the road.  I thought I’d give it a go so I dropped by the Russian Embassy in Tashkent with my application, photos, and the addresses of some hotels I’d pretend to stay at, ready to hand over.

At the Embassy a police officer pulled me to the front of the line. A little drawer in the wall under a tinted window slid open and the officer indicated that I should drop my passport in. The drawer snapped shut and my passport disappeared into the Russian Embassy.

A speaker crackled to life and a voice asked me for my residency permit. Since I haven’t moved to Uzbekistan, I tried pointing out that I’d read about travellers receiving their visa at this very Embassy. The voice was not convinced and the drawer screetched open again. My passport lay forlorn at the bottom – in other words, a big fat ‘nyet’.

But Russia seemed awfully far away so I put it out of my mind and went back to my Silk Road-tripping.

When I reached western Uzbekistan, I was literally running out of space on the map. It was time to move to Plan B – or at least, to make a Plan B.

I opened a map and stared at the blue outline of the Caspian Sea and the countries on the other side of it. Azerbaijan’s prohibitive visa process had kept me away years ago when I was travelling ‘in the neighbourhood’. But things had changed in 2017 and the new e-visa procedure is fast and easy. I thought ‘why not?’

Of course there are plenty of ways to get to Azerbaijan. Flying, like a normal person, comes to mind for starters. But it’s also possible to cross the Caspian on old cargo ships that ply routes between Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan. And even more than actually visiting Azerbaijan, I wanted to cross the sea.

But first, I had to get to Kazakhstan.

I left Uzbekistan early one morning on a thirty hour train trip into western Kazakhstan. Travelling on old Soviet rolling stock trains takes time and patience.

There were painfully long halts on both sides of the border when officials from each country took it in turns to board and check passports and search luggage.

I watched out the window as the train clanked along in the vast and unchanging emptiness of the Kazakh steppe.

Kazakh steppeVendors roamed the aisle from time to time selling food and huge stacks of clothing.

I woke from a nap to a lot of shouting and a minor scuffle between the conductor and a passenger. Things like this don’t really seem that weird anymore so I sat calmly back in my bunk and watched. Via my translator app I asked a man next to me what was happening and waited with interest as he typed rapidly on his phone. But when he handed me the phone it was playing what appeared to be his own wedding video. When that finished up and I’d congratulated him, he asked for my phone number.

I’ve noticed that stupid questions from men and requests to be in touch on social media  despite a complete and total language barrier are often a standard part of the solo female traveller experience. From an immigration official who asked me pertinent questions like the English word for the beautiful colour of my eyes; to men approaching me, WhatsApp at the ready in restaurants (and in one notable case, in a public bathroom); and right on up to two invitations to dinner and a disco from the train conductor himself during this very journey.

But other passengers kindly offered me chai, and asked my name and nationality – I heard the news travel down the aisle. Apparently convinced the world would eat me up and spit me out, a sweet old man took me under his wing. As I made my bed he was right there, tucking the sheets under the sides of my bunk. He showed me how to put the pillow into the case. He demonstrated that I should drink some water and spit it out the window. As I climbed into my upper-level bunk, he made a stirrup of his hands and hoisted my feet up behind me.

Finally I disembarked in Aktau, a dusty port-city on the edge of nowhere, and stretched my legs in Kazakhstan.

Crossing the Caspian is anything but a straightforward process. I’m not talking about passenger ferries following a schedule, or booze-cruises with a spa deck and terrible live music provided by bands who failed miserably on land. These are cargo ships that cross when they’re full, taking with them any passengers who have the stamina to wait around in total uncertainty in Aktau hoping for a ride.

Searching travellers’ forums I’d found various office addresses, phone numbers, and vague hints about people in the city who might sell tickets and I started asking around. After two days it quickly became apparent that I was in Aktau for the long haul. Ever budget-conscious,  I badgered the front desk at my hotel into letting me move into the basement, where I knew there were cheaper rooms. Sure enough the basement was under construction and seemed to be partially lived in by staff.  It reminded me a lot of the ‘sanatorium’ I’d stayed in in Nukus but it was cheap. Part of the hallway ceiling fell down in the night but that seemed like the least of my problems.

The day after I moved to the basement, a series of phone calls placed by the front desk receptionist (who clearly wanted me to leave) unearthed a man named Hamid who came to the hotel and sold me a ticket on vessel called the ‘Professor Gul’.

Hamid had sold tickets to three other travellers and we arrived at a distant port outside town together, to be greeted with shifty looks and reticent behaviour from the port crew. After an eight hour wait in the customs office the reason for this became clear – the Professor Gul was loaded with an unidentified ‘dangerous cargo’ and wouldn’t be taking passengers after all. My fellow travellers Matt, Sherry, Nico and I returned to Aktau in defeat at 3 am.

Basing ourselves at a truckstop hotel we spent the next week pacing the seafront; pestering port and management office employees over the phone and in person; and obsessively tracking the Professor Gul’s nautical position online.

On my very first day in Aktau I’d found a restaurant called Italiano, with good pizza and great wifi and we went there – Every. Single. Day.

We watched Borat and we drank vodka. We drank vodka and we watched Groundhog Day – after all, the story of the same day repeating itself again and again seemed only fitting. Until one evening when Nico ran into the living room at the truckstop, disrupting our Harry Potter marathon to announce that the Professor Gul had sailed out of Baku and was expected in Aktau port the following night.

The next morning we rushed to the ferry office and waited tensely til Julia (who we’d all met several times and who by now seemed as invested in getting rid of us as we were in departing Aktau) hung up the phone and triumphantly proclaimed ‘Bilety! (tickets)’. Our ship had come in.

And so a week to the day I’d arrived in Aktau I went to the port – again – with my fellow castaways (but not before one last pizza and attempt at saying goodbye to the bewildered staff at Italiano).

Waiting was second-nature to us by now. We patiently lurked around the port til the cargo was loaded and we could board the Professor around midnight and settle into our shared cabin.

The Professor Gul awaits

Professor Gul’s engines rumbled to life around 3 am and we edged out of the port.

The trip to Baku took around 32 hours. That gave us plenty of time to explore the Professor Gul.

We went onto the bridge, and we climbed up into the radar tower on the top deck.

On Wednesday morning I watched from the deck as the Professor docked.

It was a plan I’d hatched one day on a whim; a single step on this journey that was more than a week in the offing. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from travelling, it’s that the very best plans are the ones you didn’t make in the first place.

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For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Kazakhstan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

The post Plan B: Taking a Cargo Ferry Across the Caspian Sea appeared first on WhirledAway.

There are some old fortresses – 2000 years old, in fact – in the barren emptiness of ancient Khorezm, a now-historical kingdom that’s not far from Khiva. Some of the forts are not much more than crumbled mud-brick foundations but one of them, Ayaz-Qala, looks like an enormous sand castle in the desert.

It’s quiet in this part of Uzbekistan, heading far west.

Khorezm feels pretty remote. But it’s not nearly as remote as Nukus: a Soviet-built town of wide streets and decrepit apartment blocks which at first glance looks like a place where hopes and dreams go to die. That impression remained with me, even after a second and then a third glance. Being in Nukus feels a bit like being at the ends of the earth.

I arrived there with two other travellers after a long day in a share-taxi through the desert. It was a sunny day but also bleak, our rattling old car surrounded by yellow dirt and scrubby bushes, in a flatness that stretched on forever. We hadn’t gotten far before a rock hit one of the wheels and blew the tire, but the driver changed it quickly.

To make matters worse Cynthia wasn’t feeling well – she thought it was due to the taxi driver’s habit of erratic swerving all over the road and his fondness for sudden sharp turns but later it turned out to be her lunch.

In Nukus you aren’t spoiled for choice when it comes to accommodation. We checked into Hotel Nukus, a hotel which appears to exist in a sort of flux-state somewhere in between still being built and being demolished.

The manager led us to our damp basement room down a long, dark and musty low-ceilinged corridor littered with mattresses, smelling of mildew. And oddly enough, although we had a hot shower there was no sink in the bathroom, so we just brushed our teeth over the drain in the floor.

The generally depressing air of the place combined with the hard narrow beds primly lined up against the walls convinced us that it had once been a Soviet-style sanatorium, maybe in the 1930s.

Cynthia stayed in her cot at the sanatorium and apparently had the best evening of the three of us. Davide and I went out in search of food. It was getting late and we didn’t find much (but this was not Nukus’s fault, as it turns out. There are options but we were tired and didn’t ask before looking).

We ended up eating shashlik flavoured chips and sharing a carton of juice at the cafeteria across the vast and completely empty parking lot in front of our hotel (sharing a carton of juice isn’t an activity restricted to Nukus either by the way, people do that of an evening around here a lot in general. It just felt worse that night, in Nukus).

But we had come to Nukus for a reason, and it wasn’t because any of us thought we were coming down with tuberculosis and that a stay at the sanatorium was just the ticket.

We wanted to day-trip to Moynaq, a town around 200 kilometers away from Nukus and even more desolate, if possible (it actually is possible).

It’s not Moynaq’s fault that it has become a desolate ghost town. It was once a busy fishing village, perched right on the edge of the Aral Sea. And the Aral Sea once actually existed – thrived even – but most of it doesn’t exist anymore and that’s the problem.

Formerly a major port, Moynaq is now around 200 km from the seashore. Back in the 1950s the Aral Sea’s surface area was about 70 000 square feet. It was big and beautiful and it was full of fish – but then the USSR decided it was time to boost cotton production in the region. Growing cotton in the desert requires a lot of water and the irrigation channels took over the water supply from both the rivers that formerly fed the Aral Sea. As the plants grew, the sea shrank: the shoreline dropped away from Moynaq and the fishing industry literally dried up with the water.

Today the citizens of Moynaq are leaving in droves and the climate has changed. Since the seabed is now exposed to the air, salt and sand storms occur regularly and the dust travels on the wind for hundreds of kilometers.

There’s a fish leaping optimistically out of a rippling wave on the sign at the edge of town – now it’s just a sad reminder of the village’s prosperous past.

Now, a group of fishing vessels lie rusting on the sand at the edge of town.

The sun glared down on us as we poked around the hulking wrecks. It was like any other day at the seashore – shells underfoot, seagulls flying overhead – except there was no sea.

We’d arrived in time for a children’s day at the ship cemetery and kids were climbing all over the rusty relics but by the time we came back up to the memorial on the bluff that used to be the shore, the party was over and the families were gone.

The memorial shows an outline on one side of the Aral Sea as it was in 1960 and on the other side, the outline as it is today.

We sat in an empty cafe up above the ships and drank some beer; it was interesting day and a strange one, too.

And there’s yet another reason to visit Nukus: the Savitsky museum. During the Soviet era an artist named Igor Savitsky collected countless works of art which otherwise would have been destroyed for not conforming to the ideals of the time. He brought it here and kept it safe – nobody came looking in Nukus, and the collection has been here in this unlikely backwater ever since.

The next day the sanatorium released us and we parted ways. While Davide and Cynthia went back to Tashkent I stayed behind; homeless in this strange town. I felt like the last person on earth, or at least the only foreigner in Nukus.

I had a train to catch at 4 am so rather than pay for a half-night at the hotel I decided to kill time – maybe drown my sorrows in a carton of juce – and then go to the station as late as possible and just sleep on the station hall floor until departure.

But as I wandered past Hotel Nukus later that same evening, Eik the night manager ran out. It was too cold, he said (it was around 20 degrees) and he insisted that I come stay in our old room, for free. He offered me some food and set his own alarm to wake him before my train.

I set my alarm too and snatched a few hours of sleep.

‘You’re a beautiful woman’ said Eik as I staggered up the stairs from the basement at 3 am, still in the same clothes I’d worn the previous day and then slept in. ‘Are you married?’

But he also called me a cab and checked that I still had enough Uzbek currency left to pay for it, too.

I felt that I’d underestimated the sanatorium and maybe even Nukus – after all, I’d found a decent cafe to spend a few hours in and I certainly won’t forget Eik’s kindness any time soon.

I left Nukus in the dead of the night (ok – it’s dead all the time) and rode to the silent station. The train was waiting; I boarded it in the darkness and settled into my bunk for the long cross-border journey to Kazakhstan.

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For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Uzbekistan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

The post Three Days at the Ends of the Earth, Also Known as Nukus appeared first on WhirledAway.

Whenever I thought about travelling onwards to Uzbekistan something completely different came to mind – the Silk Road, that legendary trading route linking the East to the West, along which the world’s great civilisations traded valuables like spices, incense, tea, ivory, horses, medicine and so on; and exchanged skills, technology and religion, too.

Cities like Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva flourished along the route, and even today their very names conjure up images of camels and caravans, desert oases, and everything at once luxurious and exotic.

Ancient civilisations, ruins and relics. That’s another sort of travel.

I decided I’d visit all three famous cities. But first I had to get onto the Silk Road myself.

Getting a visa for Uzbekistan is no longer the nightmarish tangle of bureaucracy it once was; I dropped off the paperwork at the Embassy in Bishkek and picked the visa up a week or so later without incident other than the fact that the pickup took two tries since the first time, the consular officer was nowhere to be found. But that’s nothing as far as getting visas goes for police states, military dictatorships, formerly stifling communist regimes, and all the other kinds of places I tend to spend my holidays in.

The border was busy on Kyrgyzstan’s side: a queue – more of a throng, really – surged up towards the chainlink fence and seemed to stretch all the way back to Osh. I made sure I was visible to a police officer up ahead: sure enough, he shouted ‘Tourist!’ and the crowd parted like the Red Sea. I skipped the queue (and the next two after that), and flashing me a gold-toothed smile while continuing to shout ‘Tourist! Tourist!’ the police office escorted me to the checkpoint and handed over my passport for me.

Stamped out and good to go, I scooted ahead of all the guys wheeling boxed refrigerators over the border on trolleys (seriously, there were quite a few), and crossed to the Uzbek side where I got a seat in a share-taxi heading for the first town beyond the border, Andijon.

During the ride to Andijon the driver called his brother-in-law Bek, who spoke perfect English. We made friends over the phone, and Bek picked me up in the city. We drove around together for a while in search of another car to make the trip through the mountains to the capital, Tashkent. I was happy to be on the road in another new country, even though this next driver dampened my enthusiasm for Uzbekistan a bit by driving with reckless abandon on the mountainous road, only slowing to a sedate 90 km/hr whenever he wanted to send a text or call somebody (which was startlingly often).

Five taxis in one day seemed like enough driving on the Silk Road for a while so when I went to Samarkand later on, I took the train.

One of the oldest and most influential cities in central Asia, Samarkand was a rich trading centre along the route and its mosques and minarets have been vigorously restored and maintained over the centuries since.

I went to marvel at the Registan – medieval Samarkand’s central bazaar. Today the vast plaza is a showcase for three of the world’s oldest still-standing medressas (schools or universities), built between the 15th and 17th centuries. The plaza is incredible – all soaring minarets and intricate blue and turquoise tile-work.

And then there’s Timur (or Tamerlane) the infamous and bloodthirsty conqueror who swept through here in the late 14th century, establishing Samarkand as the glorious capital of his entire realm.

He lies interred beneath the Gur-E-Amir mausoleum. Like any good tyrant (or mausoleum) there’s a popular legend associated with his grave. A Soviet anthropologist opened Timur’s crypt in 1941 and as the story goes, he found inscribed on the grave a message that ‘whoever opens this will be defeated by an enemy more fearsome than I’ – and Hitler attacked the Soviet Union the very next day.

Inside, I craned my neck back and stared up at the ornate detail on the domed cupola high above; it’s almost a sensory overload.

There are several tombs under the monument – Timur shares his final resting place with some of his sons and most revered teachers.

I arrived in Bukhara on a Friday without realising it – weekends don’t matter much when you aren’t working – and I was just in time for the annual Silk and Spice Festival. The old town was packed out with live music, singers and dancers, and extra bazaars set up selling silk and best of all, super-fragrant spices heaped up on tables and smelling absolutely incredible.

Historically, this city is famous for a couple of things: being deeply religious, and suffering a lot of plagues.

On the religious side of things, Bukhara was once known as the ‘Pillar of Islam’, and home to hundreds of mosques and medressas.

According to my guide book, one of the medressas today offers a show that is a unique combination of wrestling, puppetry, and cock-fighting (I’m not sure how you’d combine cock-fighting with much of anything at all, let alone a puppet show). I saw no such thing myself, although as part of the festival there was a lot of wrestling going on in the square in front of the Kalon minaret.

The oldest surviving mosque in all of central Asia is here: Maghoki-Attar dates from around the 9th century. It’s the holiest building in this city of holy buildings – it was built on the ruins of a 5th century Zoroastrian temple and an even earlier Buddhist one.

Regarding the other claim to fame, Bukhara’s citizens fetched their water from a couple hundred stone pools dotted around the city – a practice which resulted in plagues that afflicted the city and shortened the average inhabitant’s lifespan to not much more than thirty years. Just one of these pools remains today in the centre of the old town (and it’s only for gathering at, not drinking).

Khiva, the third famous settlement I visited on the Silk Road, had a different role on the trading route: it prospered as a slave market until its eventual take-over by the Russians in 1873.

I liked the massive baked-mud ramparts and surprisingly quiet tangle of little streets in Khiva’s old town more than the noisy splendor of Samarkand.

So I found my own use for the Silk Road too. A beautiful change of scenery; a different sort of travel than what I’d already experienced in Kyrgyzstan; a roadtrip through ancient history.

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For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Uzbekistan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

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We were hungry. I’d been eating cheap; a lot of unidentifiable stuff, mostly lumps of dough concealing meat I didn’t recognize but just bit into, hoping for the best. I’d read somewhere that nobody other than wolves eats more meat than the Kyrgyz people. It was much later that I realised the meat-surprise in my mystery meals usually involved horse. The issue is partly language – I’d noticed it when I asked for water at my very first guesthouse and needed a translator app to get this request across. It’s also partly that the food is generally bad.

But in the capital city there are options so we thought we’d give the national cuisine another go. We discovered a liking for manty – fried or steamed dumplings stuffed with meat and even the odd snippet of greenery.

Plus, the Kyrgyz seem to have a deep affection for salads and at any meal you can end up with three or four small plates full of crunchy beets, walnuts, carrots, cabbage and boiled quail eggs.

We had other important business in Bishkek too, such as shopping for vodka:

And we sought out the local Lenin. A throwback to the good old days, most every town showcases at least one.

Bishkek’s sprawling Osh Bazaar is a great place to visit. Eastern bazaars are not new to us, but this one was different – nobody pressured us to buy tea sets, huge ceramic platters, hookahs, hideous wall hangings, carpets, or any of the other impossible souvenirs that vendors usually try to foist on foreigners in more touristy markets.

Our first real stop together was Kochkor. This inauspicious town boasts a Lenin statue and not much else, but it’s a handy starting point for one of Kyrgyzstan’s most popular activities – horse trekking.

Together with our guide Jomaart, we spent a day riding our rented horses through high mountain passes heading for the alpine Lake Song-Kol. At 3016 meters, it’s frozen for much of the year and too cold for permanent settlement but herders bring their animals here from June to September, and migrate from pasture to pasture taking their yurts with them.

It was a beautiful day – until it wasn’t, when in a series of unpredictable events my horse fell and then kicked me and dragged me at a gallop, while Oyv watched in horror. Miraculously, apart from some pretty bad bruising (not to mention a terrific scare) I was ok.

We found an unexpected use for our vodka – Oyv poured it over the bleeding gouges on my fingers where the reins had scraped off layers of skin.

The expression ‘You have to get back on the horse’ suddenly took on a very literal meaning for me – halfway to Song-Kol our options were limited to a long ride in the gathering darkness to the closest yurt camp by the lake, or an even longer ride back to the village.

At camp, ducking under the heavy felt curtain and into the main yurt for dinner we discovered that I already knew four of the six other travellers there. That’s Kyrgyzstan – hang around a few days and you’ll get to know pretty much everyone else in the vicinity.

Keen to put the lake behind us, we moved on to Bokonbayevo and checked into a homestay run by Gulmira and her husband. Eating dinner with them that night (‘Like a family’ said Gulmira) our hostess pointed at the virbrant purple bruise on my arm. As I sniffled through our horse trekking tale, Gulmira spoke to her phone in Russian and pointed it at me. ‘Do not cry’ translated the robotic voice from the phone, while its owner nodded sympathetically in a motherly fashion.

We were really, really over horses so it seemed natural to turn our focus to birds of prey. Eagle hunting – that is, hunting with eagles, not for eagles – is a Bokonbayevo tradition, still practised by a few men who hand the skill down from one generation to the next. Gulmira called her neighbor Talgart and we met him in the garden with his eagle Tumara.

Talgart birdnapped Tumara from her nest when she was just an eaglet, and she’s lived with him ever since. On autumn weekends they ride together into the mountains to hunt for foxes, rabbits and other small animals – Tumara gets the meat and Talgart is after the skins. Today it’s more of a cultural hobby than a means of sustenance, and Talgart trains other eagle rulers to compete in hunting matches with their birds.

That afternoon Talgart drove us to the main street to catch a mashrutka. Sitting in the back of the car (which Talgart started by jamming a screwdriver into the ignition) I noticed Tumara was along for the ride, too.

Getting to the southern part of Kyrgyzstan is easier said than done: the options are a dubious domestic flight or an endless twelve hour ride in a share taxi through the mountains, with a driver whose skillset includes things like speeding wildly and overtaking other vehicles just before the entrance to mountain tunnels, on roads so bumpy in parts that Oyv’s fitbit recorded the journey as steps.

It was well past dark and raining when we finally climbed out of the car in central Arslanbob – a deserted town square in the woods. In a country which otherwise offers little to no infrastructure for travellers, Kyrgyzstan has a network of CBT (Community Based Tourism) homestays. It’s a good way for us to travel and for small communities to profit from our presence. Finding the local CBT office we called the number painted on the door; moments after that three men pulled up in a jeep and we climbed into the back. A short ride later, the men dropped us off like a delivery at one of Arslanbob’s homestays.

It’s possible that Arslanbob is one of the weirder towns either of us has ever been to, and that’s saying a lot. Back at the main square in the light of day, we discovered a busy transport hub almost hidden by the trees, filled with marshrutkas and the men who drive them, and a lot of depressing shops selling the same terrible selection of dusty biscuits and candy. But we did not come to Kyrgyzstan for a lively urban experience or to shoot the breeze in the town square, so we were fine with that.

Wandering past the last of the shops we hiked into the surrounding forests and misty hills.

We had just a day or so left before Oyv’s flight home. Over shashlik and shots of vodka in Osh, the country’s second biggest city, we talked about the day-to-day experiences we’d had, the things that make up a trip.

There’s the abiding fear of never eating a meal you like or even recognise, ever again. And that moment when you find yourself taking a selfie with a Lenin statue. It’s wandering in a crowded bazaar where the only attention you draw is friendly greetings. Or shivering in an alpine meadow, dousing your lacerated fingers with vodka, and then riding to a yurt camp on the shores of an icy lake – to find people you already know gathered around the table and then drinking the last of the vodka with them. It’s kind concern from a stranger you can barely communicate with, expressed via Google Translate. There’s sharing a ride in a battered old car with a majestic eagle. Or finding a comfortable bed at a homestay in an isolated village after a long day’s travel, and hiking in peaceful forests and beautiful mountains.

And that’s travel in Kyrgyzstan.

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For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Kyrgyzstan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

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