“I came to Jaipur because of my ex.” The waiter told me.

“Okay, cool. Could I get the Rajasthan thali?” I asked, a bit overwhelmed by all the options on the menu and not quite sure how to respond to something like that.

“Of course,” he replied, yelling something in a local dialect to the kitchen, then turning his attention back to me.

“She broke up with me, but I just knew we had to be together. So I came here from our village. I’m a computer programmer, do you have any job leads in America? Can I get a visa?” I interrupted him to ask for a bottle of water, and to get a break. I’d taken a taxi from my hotel in the old town of Jaipur to here because I’d heard this was a good restaurant in the new town.

“She asked me to stop talking to her. And not to go see her anymore. She married some other guy. But true love never dies,” he said as he brought me my meal. And then just stopped and stared at me as I ate. Other staff members came and just stared. I was getting used to this in India, but this was a bit much.

Finally some other customers came in, distracting him and letting me pay the bill. My last meal in Jaipur was a bit bizarre, but of amazing quality. The food in India is unbelievably good, and I’ve been vegetarian for all this time. Meat is pretty hard to come by, and of questionable quality.

The view from a lakeside in Pushkar, a Hindu pilgrimage village about three and a half hours by bus from Jaipur. The closest city is Ajmer, but I was able to get a ticket on the direct bus without having to connect. The winding route through the mountains was picturesque, and I kept getting text messages from my employer about whether or not I was in Wuhan. 

The whole lakeside area was a holy site dotted with temples. NO SHOES was a common sign at Hindu temples. Also commonly seen were cows. I ended up spending four days in Pushkar just because it was so relaxing. It had a very hippie vibe, but the India hippies are quite different from their Southeast Asian counterparts.

Grilled vegetables in mango sauce with chai masala (black tea with milk and spices) at a cafe by my hostel, where I rented a private room. The hostel was amazing, with a tree house that looked about ready to collapse at any moment, and a bonfire pit. The cafes in Pushkar were dirt cheap and great places to just look outside and daydream.

My hostel was on a back road about a 20 minute walk from the center of the village. My second night I went out to buy a bottle of water, having realized I’d run out (the tap water in India will make you very sick). This road was dark, lit only by the stars. For some reason a fireworks display started nearby, startling the ubiquitous sacred street cows into a noisy rampage. Hoping I wasn’t about to be hit by a sacred cow, and too far from my hostel to go back, I managed to get to a corner store. The owner let me hang out there for a few minutes until it all died down, and asked me about getting an immigration visa to the US. I told him I honestly didn’t know how that worked, but I did thank him for giving me refuge from the cows. 

I drank a mango lassi and survived to tell the tale! This cafe had really good reviews on their lassis from foreigners. The lassis from the street seemed a bit unsanitary, but the ones I had were all made with yogurt and mangos. Amazingly delicious, just like almost everything I had in India. Not once in my entire three weeks in Rajasthan did I get so much as an upset stomach.

Beard progression at the lakeside temples of Pushkar.

After four days of eating incredible vegetarian fare and doing circuits to the temples of Pushkar, I bought a train ticket to Jodhpur. The closest station was in Ajmer, and when I asked the receptionist at the hostel how to get there he just said, “Ah, my wife is going too! I’m taking her to town, I’ll drop you off at the station.” He refused all my offers to pay him for gas and the incredibly generous ride, which helped me avoid an hour on an overcrowded chicken bus, and said just to leave a good review online. Which, of course, I did.

The fort in Jodhpur, the Blue City. The coronavirus started getting more and more attention while I was here, and I started realizing how serious the situation was. 

Walking around the Jodhpur fort, which sat on a hill on the edge of the Thar Desert.

It was quite the sight!

The buildings the Mughal Empire left behind are incredible.

Looking out upon the Thar Desert.

Another shot of Jodhpur as seen from the fort.

Jodhpur had a much more relaxed feel compared to the chaos of Jaipur. I definitely developed a preference for small town India compared to the overwhelming cities.

A map of India with Rajasthan in red. I spent almost the entirety of my trip in Rajasthan state, next to Pakistan.

India is one of those places that’s been on my bucket list for a long time. The food, history, and natural beauty are rightly famous. For years I’d been put off by tales of the hardship of traveling in India. The constant hassle and scams are two of the first things people would tell me about when I mentioned I was thinking of spending my three and a half week Chinese New Year holiday in India. “It’s dirty, poor, and chaotic. It’d be very easy to get sick,” a Chinese teacher at my school told me (a few days after she said that hundreds of millions of people in China were placed in lockdown for the coronavirus, and she hasn’t mentioned anything about that since).

Sacred street cow in Jaipur, also known as the Pink City, in Rajasthan state. This street was outside my hotel in the old town. My first morning in Jaipur I went out and was startled to see things jumping from building to building over me. They were monkeys! Cows, pigs, goats, chickens, and monkeys roam the streets freely. 

I’m so glad I took the plunge and visited. I ended up loving India, and it’s one of my favorite countries I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting.

I naively assumed Indian food was mainly divided between the north and the south. Each state has its own cuisine, and this is a typical thali or set meal in Rajasthan. Almost every restaurant I encountered was vegetarian. In the north, the thali costs about $1. It includes a few different kinds of curries and naan. You’re supposed to eat with the right hand, as the left hand is considered dirty. I’d just go to crowded restaurants serving hot food and never had even the slightest upset stomach.

I stayed only one day in Delhi, which I’d heard was a hell hole. I got a hotel room across the street from New Delhi Railway Station, and caught the early morning express train to Jaipur, 4.5 hours from New Delhi. Similar to Chinese trains, there were five seats across in Second Class AC. There are a ton of different train classes in India, but I always traveled in this kind. It was comfortable and easy.

The Ajmeri Gate in Jaipur. Most places didn’t really have street names, and the old town was too narrow for cars. This was the closest landmark to my hotel, so I came here to hail a taxi or get dropped off. Haggling with the local drivers was useless, so I instead used a local ride hailing app called Ola. I bought an Indian SIM card off Taobao in Shanghai, and had data upon arriving at Indira Ghandi International Airport in New Delhi.

The main attraction in Jaipur is a day trip to the Amer Fort. There’s a winding walkway to the fort on top of the hill, dodging elephants along the way. This is a view looking down from towards the top of the walkway.

Amer Fort. There’s a bus, but I just took a taxi. It was less than $3 for the 25 minute ride from Jaipur to Amer. Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur are the three most visited spots for travelers to India. But the vast majority of tourists were locals, who often wanted my photo. Just like in China.

Rajasthan means The Land of Kings, and was formed as an amalgamation of principalities under the jurisdiction of the British Raj during the formation of India in 1949. Jaipur is the capital, and it’s the largest state by land area in India. Each city and town had a large, intricate palace or fort on top of the highest hill dating from the Mughal Empire. Rajasthan is a Hindi speaking state, though most people I met spoke a dialect such as Marwari at home. English would be their third or fourth language.

A sign by the lake at Amer.

The courtyard at Amer Fort.

One of the Mughal gardens at the Fort. I easily spent a few hours wandering around this massive building. 

Jaipur street life as seen from the Hawa Mahal Palace in the center of the city.

Sometimes the sidewalks weren’t in the best condition.

Everything happens later in India. Dinner is eaten around 8pm or later, and I found myself getting up too early at the beginning. This is a street by my hotel in the morning.

Eating dinner in an alley restaurant in the old town of Jaipur.

The Mughals left some really impressive architecture, and I spent three days exploring the various locales of Jaipur.

Jaipur was a stunning locale if just for the buildings.

I had no idea what most of the things were on the menus in India, so I just ordered the set meal. One dollar is about 70 rupees. 

Some of the most obnoxious people I’ve ever met love Southeast Asia, and this has always put me off from the region. The lowest dregs of hippie trash society seem to congregate on the beaches of southern Thailand in a hazy mix of illegal substances, to which local authorities turn a blind eye in the hopes of maintaining the flow of hard currency. “I spent six months in Phuket and found myself,” a white dude with dreadlocks once told me. “You just wouldn’t understand.”

But I have a job and a stable source of income, which sets me out from the vast majority of hippie trash finding themselves in the Eat, Pray, Love style, and I’ve heard so many wonderful reports from friends about Vietnam. So I gave it a try, and had a great time! My entire trip including food, accommodation, flights, evisa, and transportation cost less than $700, and here’s how I did it:

Hanoi old town, my first stop.

The 70th anniversary of Chairman Mao’s founding of the People’s Republic of China was celebrated with massive military parades in Beijing and seven days of paid holiday. As a measure of China’s immense scale, one out of every 15 people on the planet decided to travel during this time. Travel in China is a nightmare during this time, so back in May I bought round trip tickets on China Eastern Air from Shanghai to Hanoi for about $400.

 Vietnamese egg coffee! It looked crazy but was actually delicious. Because dairy products were in short supply after the 1975 American embargo, whisked egg yolk started to be used in the cafes of Hanoi to sweeten the incredibly strong Vietnamese coffee. 

Hanging out on a tiny balcony in tiny chairs in a back alley Hanoi coffee shop. The cafe scene in in the capital is phenomenal. Coffees run from 75 cents to $1.75 per cup, and there are countless options where locals go to chat or hang out with a book. Although there may not always be an English menu, there was usually at least one younger barista who spoke some English and was able to help me. Not that there were many options. Usually you just got an espresso with condensed milk, which was delicious (and packed with 180mg of caffeine in a tiny cup!). Overall, getting by with English in northern Vietnam was very easy.

I booked a loft on Airbnb in a nice district of central Hanoi for $20 a night including all fees. The owner was an incredibly helpful woman who spoke excellent English and gave me heaps of recommendations on where to try various local dishes in the old town. She also arranged for a driver to stand at arrivals with my name on a sign and drive me to the apartment, all for about $15.

I spent two full days wandering around Hanoi, which I think was a good amount of time. A meal like this with a beer would run about $2 at a street stall. The workers at the stalls spoke some English, and I’d usually just point to whatever looked good that another patron was eating because I can’t read Vietnamese menus.

The winding streets of Hanoi’s old town are filled with pho shops and cafes where you can sit, order an iced coffee with condensed milk, and watch the ceaseless traffic. I worried about Hanoi coming across as too touristy, and that I’d feel like I was in some Asian Gatlinburg (before it caught on fire). Although there were a lot of foreigners traveling Vietnam, I never really felt like I was in a tourist trap. Maybe that’s because I was going in with low expectations, or because everything was so damn cheap and high quality that I didn’t ever get the feeling I was being excessively ripped off. Vietnam is just pleasant and easy.

Walking along the sea on Cat Ba Island. I used Cat Ba Express to book a bus to the sea, connecting to a 5 minute boat ride to the island, and finally a 40 minute bus to Cat Ba Town. Cat Ba is the largest island in an archipelago, just south of the major tourist attraction of Ha Long Bay. The most common way to visit picturesque Ha Long Bay is to take a 2.5 hour bus from Hanoi to the sea, cruise the islands for a few hours, then take another 2.5 hour bus back to Hanoi. A quieter option recommended to me, which I did, was to spend some nights on Cat Ba Island and arrange an all day boat tour to see more.

Cruising along the islands of Lan Ha Bay. I booked an eight hour kayaking and boat trip for $23, and there were seven other people on board. I was hesitant to do a cruise, but it was a lot of fun! 

Lan Ha Bay is populated by chunks of rock sticking out of the sea. 

Some floating homes and fish farms we passed by and stopped at.

When I arrived at Cat Ba Town, I quickly found that the hotel I’d booked was closed. I found a different place with good reviews on booking.com, went there, and asked the owner if I could get the last minute reservation price. He said yes, as long as I paid in cash. My two bed, air conditioned room with hot water cost $8.65 a night. 

Floating village in Lan Ha Bay.

Looking across the water.

It was cloudy in the morning, but by the afternoon it had cleared up and we had great views across the bay. 

Iced coffee with condensed milk from a street side cafe in Cat Ba Town. It was shoulder season on the island, but pretty much all the restaurants were open. And the food was pretty good! Even at the places that were frequented mainly by tourists, meals were still only about $3 or so.

Crossing the street could be difficult in Hanoi, but I just linked up with elderly locals who had no fear.

Taxis around Hanoi generally averaged about $1 for a 12 minute ride. I used a ride hailing app called Grab which is popular across SE Asia and basically the same as Uber.

My evisa cost $26. After uploading my info plus a photo, two days later I downloaded from the government website a PDF of my visa. I printed that out, showed it to officials upon arrival at the Hanoi airport, and the whole immigration process including waiting in line took about four minutes.

Overall, I really enjoyed Vietnam and would love to go back. Even as a non-beach person who abhors the party circuit of Southeast Asia, I had a blast.

Next destination: Georgia!

Last summer I ended my Silk Road trip in the Azeri capital and port city of Baku. I began my travels with stepping out of my apartment in Hangzhou, catching a bullet train to Shanghai, and then working my way over the course of two months to the Caspian Sea along ancient trading routes connecting China to the Mediterranean.

Baku wasn’t on my original itinerary for that journey, but it was a lot cheaper to fly from Azerbaijan back to China than from the small, bizarre Kazakh port of Aktau (where I saw elderly ladies walking raccoons on leashes in the park). The backpackers at the hostel in Baku were vagabonding around the Caucusus, and I kept hearing rave reviews about Georgia.

So almost a year later I have plane tickets to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.

Why travel to Georgia?

When I arrived at the Mexican border, five months after having set off from Canada on a 2800+ mile foot journey through the Rocky Mountains along the Continental Divide, I was really fucking done with hiking and camping. But two years on, I miss being on trail and want to dip my toes back in for a bit.

Georgia is small, a little more than half the size of my home state of Ohio. But it’s beautiful, with gorgeous mountain scenery and stellar hiking. Almost 30 years after independence from the Soviet Union, it’s still quite poor and struggling with democracy (though with a reputation for the best food in the former USSR!).

Georgian food! Georgia is famous in the former Soviet Union for its cuisine.

Logistics

Georgia is a comparatively cheap country. A bunk in a higher end hostel is $7 to $10 a night, while a centrally located comfortable hotel is around $30. I expect to spend a fair chunk of nights in my tent, and camping is free in the mountains. There will also be opportunities to spend the night or get meals in villages while on my hikes. A dinner at a very nice restaurant in the capital should cost around $9. A bed on a night train is $5.50, and road travel by public transit costs around $1 an hour.

My Charles Schwab card has zero foreign transaction fees along with refunds of fees from any ATM in the world, so I’ll be using that to withdraw cash. Georgia’s currency is called the lari, which is equal to about 35 US cents.

Citizens of developed countries don’t need a visa to visit Georgia. I purchased travel medical insurance for $42, which will cover me for my 18 days in country plus a week in Belarus following Georgia.

I fly on China Southern Air from Hongqiao International, a small airport close to downtown Shanghai with mainly domestic flights. It’s five hours to Urumqi, a growing Central Asia transit hub in the far west of China. Then I have a six hour layover, during which I’ll get stamped out of China, and another five hours to Tbilisi. I should arrive around 9:30pm Georgia time, and have arranged for a driver to take me to my hotel near the airport. The next morning I will get up, take the metro downtown, and check in to a hotel in the heart of the old town (Tbilisi has been continuously inhabited for over 5000 years).

Then I’ll look at the weather forecast and decide where to go from Tbilisi.

Everything I’m bringing with me to go hiking.

I will eventually go into more detail about the things I bring with me on my hiking trips. Here are some of the big ones:

Tent = TarpTent Protrail. 26 ounces, 740 grams. A single walled tent that I have spent around 150 nights in. Uses my trekking poles as support.

Sleeping bag = Zpacks 10 degree Fahrenheit down bag. 15 ounces, 425 grams. It’s definitely lost some of its warmth, and I would likely not get a Zpacks bag again. But it’ll do, and I’m bringing a liner for extra warmth. It doesn’t warm up my legs as much as it used to, but I am bringing some extra thick long underwear. It’s kept me alive in temps going down to 13 degrees F (-10.5C). I’ve spent 210+ nights in this bag and will buy a new one the next time I’m in the US.

Backpack = ULA Circuit. 40 ounces, 1.13 kilograms. My old backpack died the day before I reached the Mexican border on the Continental Divide Trail, and this is the replacement. I’ve taken it with me on lots of trips all over Asia, including hiking in the Tianshan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan.

Electronics = I’m bringing a 10,000mAh Xiaomi battery pack to charge my phone on the trail. I use my phone for navigation, podcasts, music, and photos. In Tbilisi I’ll get a Georgian SIM card with a cheap data plan (~$10, more than the $1.30 a month I pay to China Unicom). I’ll also have my Kindle. I’m in the process of downloading tons of Chinese romantic comedies to my phone through my Tencent Video subscription to watch on the plane. My addiction to Chinese rom coms is beyond ridiculous.

The route of the Pamir Highway on a map of Central Asia. I went from Osh, Kyrgyzstan to Dushanbe, Tajikistan though the reverse is perfectly manageable, too. Image taken from Wikipedia.

Why do it?

It’s an awesome road trip through spectacular scenery alongside some of the world’s highest mountains. There are stunning glimpses of the Hindu Kush, and this is arguably the best way to see some of Afghanistan (albeit from the outside). A large chunk of the route travels along the Afghan border, separated only by a small river and a few dozen meters.

Route History

As an old Silk Road link, the Pamir Highway has served as a trade route for thousands of years. After centuries of fading into relative obscurity, nowadays its more lucrative commercial activity revolves around smuggling heroin from Afghanistan. Hence the route’s nickname as the Heroin Highway. My Central Asia guidebook claims that a large majority of Tajikistan’s economy is rooted in heroin, with much of the rest coming from Tajiks performing unskilled labor in Russia and sending small sums back to family.

A clear day in the Hindu Kush. I took this photo in Tajikistan, but the mountains across the river are all in Afghanistan.

Nestled among the world’s highest mountains, this has historically not been the easiest place to visit. Traversing the poorest part of the poorest Soviet republic, this region is still extremely underdeveloped. After ties with Moscow were severed, Tajikistan plunged into civil war for much of the 90s. Gorno-Badakhshan, the region of the Pamir Highway, tried to separate with the help of the neighboring Taliban. People bearing ID cards from the region were publicly executed on the streets of Dushanbe, the capital city.

The separatists lost the war, and the current regime has brutally maintained order. Coalition forces entered Afghanistan from the Pamir Highway in late 2001.

Is it safe?

Yes. Right before I did this trip some Islamic fundamentalists drove a car into a group of Western cyclists, killing four. It seems to have been an isolated incident with people connected to the separatists from the Tajikistani Civil War of the 90s. The government immediately and without trial executed a number of locals who may or may not have been linked to the murders, parading their bodies on television. In these kinds of places, anybody who could possibly threaten tourist dollars entering the country is quickly killed.

The New York Times posted an article the same day about 66 shooting victims in a single weekend in Chicago with no arrests. Statistically, you’re much safer in Tajikistan than in the United States. Which, as my non-American friends would counter, doesn’t really say much.

Visas

It’s gotten much easier over the past few years to visit Central Asia. Most people from developed countries can enter Kyrgyzstan without a visa. The Tajik e-visa is easy to obtain. Online I uploaded a scan of my passport’s bio page, a photo of my lovely face, and paid the $50 fee via credit card. The e-visa was in my inbox within 36 hours. You need an extra permit to visit the Pamir Highway, which costs $20 and nowadays just involves checking an extra box during the e-visa application process.

Checkpoint near Afghanistan. We had to stop every couple of hours for passport and visa inspections along the Afghan border.

Cost and Logistics

The cost of driver with car plus fuel for 4 days cost $744, split three ways. So, I paid $248 for my share. You can have more people in your car, but it wouldn’t be that comfortable. Food and lodging came to an extra $20 per day. Meals and lodging were all at homestays. The drivers know where to go, and probably get kickbacks. The people in this region are Persian, like across the border in next door Afghanistan, and it’s a great way to experience Persian life for a bit.

The most common way to do this trip is to rent car plus driver for 4 to 6 days. You can start in either Osh or Dushanbe. From what I heard the best place for organizing the trip is the Osh Guesthouse, and in the summer months there are departures every couple of days. There’s a signup board with names and contact info for people who are looking for others to help split the cost. I contacted a guy from the signup board, but I got bad vibes from him and instead ended up posting my Kyrgyz phone number at caravanistan.com (the best website for travel details in Central Asia). A couple of guys from Romania contacted me within a couple hours, and the three of us organized the trip through the Guesthouse. The driver picked me up at my hotel in Osh early the morning of day one.

The beginning of the route on the Kyrgyz side is mostly paved, but once you get into Tajikistan it’s rough dirt road. Stalin had the highway built in the 30s to help with troop movement.

The village of Sary Tash, near the Kyrgyz-Tajik border. We stopped for lunch here at a local hole in the wall. All the meals were pretty much the same: black or green tea, with some kind of pasta accompanied by a chunk of meat.

The first night we stopped at a yurt camp populated by Kyrgyz nomads. They let me set up my tent in their pastures. It got below freezing that night, and I’d wished I’d stayed in one of the yurts with a fire.

Closer photo of the yurt camp. The Kyrgyz herders bring their sheep up here during the summer months. Lenin Peak, the tallest mountain in the former Soviet Union at 7,100m/23,400ft, rises in the background. I’m not sure exactly which peak it was… The herders asked for a couple of dollars for a hot dinner.

At the beginning there were a couple of other of cars, mostly French guys. Here’s a stop where we got out of the car to stretch our legs along with some others.

This is one of the Romanian guys with whom I rented the car plus driver. He didn’t really speak English but his friend, who was closer to my age, used to live in the US and was fluent. The highest point on the Pamir Highway was here at Ak-Baital Pass, 4655m (15,270 ft.). 

Going from Osh to Dushanbe over the course of 6 days gave me time to do some side trips, like this solo hike I took for about an hour off the main route.

Early on day two we entered Tajikistan, which was a pretty painless border crossing. I noticed our driver slipped the Tajik border guards some cash, which probably played a big role in how quickly we were able to get through the formalities. I never had to pay a bribe at any other border crossing in Central Asia.

Ever since leaving central China, all the locals I’d encountered had been dark skinned, dark eyed descendants of Turkic nomads. The Tajiks looked very different and much more European. The high prevalence of blue eyes was a bit of a shock to see after all my months in Asia.

Tajik means “not Arab, not Turkish.” Ethnically they’re Persian, and they speak Persian. Most Tajiks live in Afghanistan but during the Great Game, when the Russian and British Empires of the 19th century carved up Asia, some of the Persians were given to the Czar (in present day Tajikistan) and the rest were dumped into the newly created buffer state of Afghanistan, where lots of completely different peoples were forced together into one bizarre amalgamation.

Sometimes the Pamir Highway wasn’t as developed as in other places.

I still have no idea what this car was doing. We saw some guys doing the Mongol Rally, which is an annual event in which people drive from London to Mongolia. They don’t really spend any time in the countries they visit, but rather just drive.

Across the river is Afghanistan. We spied a couple of small villages there, but I only saw somebody on the other side once: a man on a horse. The Afghan side of the river was even more underdeveloped than Tajikistan.

A typical sight along the Pamir Highway.

There are no ATMs on the Pamir Highway. Instead, you must bring all cash you will need for the trip. Although each Stan has its own currency of dubious value, the local economies are focused on the US dollar. You can get $100 bills out of the ATMs in Kyrgyzstan, or you can buy them from ubiquitous money change kiosks that offer very close to the online bank rate. Fun fact: I didn’t know what $100 bills looked like from my own currency, so I had to study the images online to make sure I wasn’t being given counterfeits. I never use cash in the US, especially not $100 bills.

It’s also possible to buy Tajik somoni, the Tajikistani currency, in the Kyrgyz city of Osh. I brought about $50 worth of somoni and $250 in US dollars. In Khorog, a Tajik town we spent the night in, we went to the “market” to exchange dollars into somoni. The market ended up being a semi-deserted sea of shipping containers, out of which emerged an elderly woman whose teeth were all gold.

She didn’t speak, but rather just used a calculator to tell us the rate, which was pretty decent. We weren’t sure how much she’d be able to exchange, this being a very poor country, but she was eager to get our dollars. Us plus another group ended up converting somewhere around $700 into the local currency, and once she’d gotten all she wanted she found more elderly locals who wanted to buy dollars.

By the end I was as exhausted as I look here, with Afghanistan in the background. Oftentimes there would be electricity for only a few hours a day in the places we stayed at. The homestays were quite nice! They’d usually have a big room with bedrolls on the floor, with Persian carpets covering the walls and floor.

Another shot of the Hindu Kush, closer to Murghab. Murghab is across a bridge from Afghanistan, though I don’t think anybody really crosses there. There used to be a Saturday market in the area where you gave your passport to a border guard, and could walk into Afghanistan for a couple of hours and peruse the sales. Now that the Taliban control this area on the Afghan side, the market no longer happens. In Murghab I parted ways with the Romanians, stayed a day, and then caught a 13 hour cramped shared taxi to the Tajik capital of Dushanbe. I stayed in a great homestay with a woman who did a semester abroad in college in Akron, Ohio not far from where I grew up. She was so excited to have an Ohioan stay with her, and talked to me a ton about her year in Ohio. The other members of her family sharing the large house with her didn’t speak English, but they were quite friendly. I knew some very basic Persian/Russian words and phrases, which helped. Most people in Central Asia speak Russian as their second language because of the Soviet Union, though many of the younger generation also speaks at least some English.

An old Silk Road fort that’s seen better days.

Tajikistan and especially Kyrgyzstan have some great hiking opportunities. Many people told me Kyrgyzstan was known as the Switzerland of Central Asia back in the Soviet days, and that Tajikistan is where the Soviet mountaineers trained. Kyrgyzstan does seem a lot like Switzerland, except much cheaper and with friendlier people.

The 13 hour shared taxi from Murghab to Dushanbe, the end of the Pamir Highway and close to Uzbekistan, was definitely not something I would want to do again. There’s a semi-regular flight in a small propeller plane through the Afghan Hindu Kush to Dushanbe, but I wasn’t able to get tickets because of a backlog due to recent storms. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nobody in my car spoke English, but they seemed fascinated by the foreigner. There was a new mother who looked exhausted, and spent most of the bumpy ride in a deep coma from which she only emerged for ice cream and bathroom breaks. Her baby was passed around from person to person, and at one rest stop a guy motioned for me to pass him the baby from the backseat. I’d just met these people and they were already asking me to hold their baby and carry it briefly.

I only did the Pamir Highway because getting a visa to the isolated bizarre Turkmenistan proved overly tedious (don’t know what else you can expect from a country whose president renamed months of the calendar after his family), but overall I was glad I did it. I’d highly recommend it to anyone else doing a jaunt through the Stans of Central Asia.

Map of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, with the village of Karakol in the northeast of the country to the east of the large alpine Lake Ysyk Kol. Taken from Wikipedia.

Karakol is the trekking capital of Kyrgyzstan, the country which boasts to be the Switzerland of Central Asia (minus the economic and political stability). Marshrutkas, the Russian name for passenger van, leave from the chaotic Bishkek West Bus Station when full for Karakol. Wait times in July seem to be 2 to 20 minutes, and tickets are bought directly from the counter with large letters proclaiming Касси. Ignore the touts out front and follow the crowds of locals into the large, open-air terminal. Tickets should be about $5.50 for the five and a half hour journey, which parallels the mountainous Kazakh border much of the way to Karakol. The babushkas on board seem to have built a heat tolerance in the depths of hell, and will ask you to shut all windows if the temperature dips below 90F/32C.

You don’t go to Kyrgyzstan to see the towns. You go to the towns to springboard into the surrounding countryside.

Pretty much all of the backpackers in Karakol stay at Duet Hostel, which is one of the nicest joints I’ve stayed at in the 48 countries I’ve visited. The price is pretty typical for this part of the world at $5 or $6 a night for a bunk in the dorms, and the young Kyrgyz woman with flawless English running everything has plastered trekking maps, detailed step by step instructions on how to get to each trailhead, and contact info for tour organizers all over the walls of the adjacent cafe (which she also runs, and serves great milkshakes, pizzas, sandwiches, and tea).

Taxis from the Karakol bus station to the hostel should cost no more than $1.50, but you’re highly unlikely to get that price. It only costs 15 cents to ride on a marshrutka from the station to within a 5 minute walk of the hostel (which would probably be a 35 minute walk with no vehicle). Just tell the driver a-stan-ah-VEE-tyeh, which I think means stop in Russian, when you want to get off.

Duet Hostel in Karakol, photo taken directly from their website.

One of the more popular hikes in the region is Kyzyl Suu to Jeti Oguz. By Kyrgyz standards of popularity this means that over the course of 72 hours I saw two other groups of hikers on trail, both within a few hours of each other. I hiked the route in reverse, but I’d recommend doing the standard Kyzyl Suu to Jeti Oguz direction because it’s way easier and less steep of an ascent.

You can hitch a ride pretty easily from the road through the Jeti Oguz gorge, which pretty much everyone does to skip about 20km, but I found it to be a pleasant walk along rivers and Kyrgyz summer yurt camps.

Marshrutkas leave about every hour starting at 10am from the Karakol bazaar. You’ll know you’re in the right place when taxi drivers start telling you the bus service has been discontinued and you can only go by taxi. Duet Hostel has little pieces of paper with maps and detailed walking instructions that will take you to the exact spot to pick up transport to Jeti Oguz, which is about a 20 minute drive and should cost around 40 cents.

The river crossings are all done by bridge, which don’t look stable but seemed fine. I took this photo while standing on one of those bridges.

I saw this while walking from the tiny village of Jeti Oguz along the only dirt road heading towards the mountains.

A bit different from the road walks on the Continental Divide Trail. But the scenery was actually pretty similar.

I was a bit surprised how much of the hike was along a road, which has a decent amount of traffic coming out of Jeti Oguz for the first 15km. Multiple cars stopped to offer a ride, but I was enjoying myself and just walked. There’s one touristy spot where the gravel road ends and a rough dirt road begins, and this is where you’ll stop seeing people. At 6:30pm I’d already covered 22km since noon, and with a storm coming I set up my tent by the river the road parallels. You could set up your tent next to a yurt camp for about $1.50, just ask the owners permission, and a hot dinner would probably be inexpensive. I never took advantage of that option so I can’t comment on it. The locals don’t seem to care if you camp in the forest and clean up after yourself.

Because it’s so full of sediment and murky, the river looks way deeper and more treacherous than it actually is (in person it looked way worse than in the photo). You can pay a local man with a horse $1.50 to cross on horseback, which honestly is probably the way to do it. Stream crossings are the most dangerous part of all my hikes (not bears or murderers in the woods!).

Navigation is pretty easy when you just have to follow a river upstream.

Looking back downstream as storm clouds gather. The weather changes fast.

The river I followed got smaller and smaller as I reached its source.

Snowcapped huge mountains everywhere in the distance!

Eventually I got high enough to be level with the snow. Basically I just ascended a valley from 6k feet to 12.8k feet (1800m to 3900m).

I was below the only pass of the trip when it started hailing. I set up my tent and waited it out. Within 45 minutes, the intense storm had vanished and been replaced by clear, sunny skies. So I packed everything back up and booked it to the top. After ascending a couple thousand meters since the morning, and going at a very steep incline, I wasn’t walking very quickly.

The pass is up there somewhere. It was a tough scramble, and there were parts that were very unstable. Cairns marked the best route, which wasn’t obvious looking at it from a distance. There were multiple parts where I just didn’t look down. At 6pm a group of Germans with insanely huge packs told me there was no way I’d get over the pass and be able to camp by nightfall. Within an hour, 7pm, I was in my tent. It gets dark around 9pm in late July.

The pass, Archa Tor, was beautiful. But the weather had soured by the time I literally hauled myself up a snow bank and onto the pass, so I took some photos and then hurried down.

Proof that I made it to the top!

I set up my tent in a clearing about 300m below the pass, down another steep scramble. The hail started again, not as intense as before, shortly after I climbed inside my sleeping bag. My socks were soaked, and my sleeping bag had gotten a bit wet during the previous hailstorm. Since it’s a down sleeping bag and has gotten over 300 nights of use, the warmth and loft aren’t what they used to be. It was a bitterly cold night because of that, and it didn’t help that at 9pm a herd of cows graced me with their presence. I seriously don’t have any clue why cows would decide to chill out at night at 3600m on a mountain, but they shit and pissed wonderful smells all around my tent. They also tripped over the guylines supporting my tent all night, and one managed to get inside my food bag to eat my chocolate bar. I got around 1.5 to 2 hours of sleep that night and developed a cold, which was not ideal.

The next morning was gorgeous, with clear skies and awesome vistas.

Damn cows everywhere on the mountain.

A cow path tracing its way around the mountain. I wonder if they ever fall off the edge. Sometimes I hoped so.

At one point you cross the river for the final time on a cart with pulleys operated by two young Kyrgyz boys who charge a whopping $1.50 per trip.

I ended up road walking from the end of the trail to Kyzyl Suu, camping behind some bushes by the road along the way. I wasn’t feeling very well by that point, having caught a cold from lack of sleep and the wet, sub-freezing temps the night before, and passed out for 8 hours straight in my tent. It was glorious, and the next morning I had a 2.5 hour walk to the highway.

I’m sure there’s a marshrutka or something from Kyzyl Suu back to Karakol, but I was able to hitch a ride within seconds once I reached the highway. The local driver asked for $1.50 to take me on the 35 minute ride, and picked up some others along the way. Hitchhiking is common and safe here.

I was back at Duet Hostel by 10am, and spent the rest of the day chatting with other foreigners, eating, and drinking iced tea.