Central Asia and Turkey: 5 Weeks Across Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
Want the daily routine? Get the free 15-Minute Swing Trader’s Checklist. Get it free →
In September 2022, after almost 3 years without a real trip, I spent about 5 weeks in Central Asia. I crossed 4 of the “Stans”, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and finished in Turkey.
All 4 Stans were new countries for me, and the short version is this. The Stans were far less touristy than I expected, a little less developed, and much quieter, which I counted as a good thing. Turkey was the opposite: beautiful, and very crowded. And across the whole of Central Asia, I really liked the food and the culture.
Why the Stans?
These are 4 countries that were part of the Soviet Union until 1991, sitting on the old Silk Road between China and Europe, and they only became easy to visit in the last decade or so.
I wanted to do all 5. Turkmenistan was still closed to visitors because of Covid, so it stays on the list for another trip.
Dubai: how do you spend a long transit?
Dubai was a stop on the way, with enough hours in transit to leave the airport. So I did the desert safari.
The usual version goes like this. A 4×4 picks you up in the late afternoon and drives about 50 km out of the city into the dunes. The driver then takes the car up and down the sand at angles that make the passengers grip the seats, stops at a viewpoint for the sunset, and ends at a desert camp with a show and a barbecue dinner. It is touristy, and it is still a far better use of a long transit than a wait at the gate.
Kyrgyzstan
Kyrgyzstan is the mountain country of the trip. About 90% of it is mountains, and the Tian Shan range runs right across it. It also has the most stops on my route.
Bishkek and the Burana Tower
Bishkek, the capital, is a city of about 1 million people near the Kazakh border, laid out in wide Soviet-era streets with the mountains in view to the south.
About 80 km east of the city stands the Burana Tower, a minaret built in the 11th century. It is almost all that is left of Balasagun, a city founded at the end of the 9th century on the Silk Road. Around it, in a field, stand rows of old carved stone grave markers.
Chong-Kemin Valley
From Bishkek, the road runs east into Chong-Kemin, a national park of about 1,200 square kilometres with a river running 116 km through it and 7 lakes in its basin. It is one of the prettiest valleys in the country, and it is home to snow leopards and golden eagles.
Kochkor and the yurts
Kochkor is a large village at about 1,800 metres, on the main road that runs from the Chinese border at Torugart up to Bishkek. It is also the jumping-off point for Song-Kol.
My photo folder for this stretch has a set labelled “yurt making”, and that was one of the things I most wanted to see on the trip. A yurt is the round felt tent the nomads of Central Asia have lived in for centuries, and the Kyrgyz still set them up in the high pastures every summer.
I wrote up all 5 days in Kyrgyzstan, from the felt workshop to the yurt going up by Issyk-Kul, in Kyrgyzstan: 5 Days of Yurts, Song-Kol and Issyk-Kul.
Song-Kol Lake
Song-Kol sits at about 3,016 metres. It is the largest freshwater lake in Kyrgyzstan, about 29 km long and 18 km wide, and in summer the herders bring their horses and sheep up to the pastures around it and live there in yurts until the cold comes back.
Issyk-Kul, Jeti-Oguz and Karakol
Issyk-Kul is the big one. It is the 2nd-largest salt lake in the world after the Caspian Sea, and one of the deepest. Its name means “warm lake” in Kyrgyz, because although it sits at about 1,600 metres and the winters are hard, it never freezes.
Near its eastern end lies Jeti-Oguz, “seven bulls”, a line of red sandstone cliffs that the name compares to a row of bulls. And Karakol, the 4th-largest city in the country, is the base for all of it, about 380 km from Bishkek and 150 km from the Chinese border.
Kazakhstan
Saty, Kolsay Lakes and Kaindy Lake
From Karakol, I went on into Kazakhstan, to the Kolsay Lakes. The village of Saty is the usual base, and the lakes sit in a national park on the north side of the Tian Shan, about 10 km from the Kyrgyz border.
The Kolsay Lakes are often called the “pearls of the Tian Shan”. The one people come for is Lake Kaindy, formed by a landslide in 1911 that dammed a river and drowned a forest of spruce trees. The trunks still stand straight up out of the water, more than 100 years later.
Kolsay is one of the stops I picked for the highlights on my travel log.
Charyn Canyon
About 200 km east of Almaty, close to the Chinese border, the Sharyn River has cut a canyon about 154 km long. It is often compared with the Grand Canyon, on a smaller scale: the red and orange rock has weathered into towers, walls and shapes that people name after castles and animals.
Almaty
Almaty is the largest city in Kazakhstan, with about 2 million people. It was the capital until 1997, when the government moved north to what is now Astana, and it is still the country’s commercial centre and its most cosmopolitan city.
Tajikistan
Dushanbe
Dushanbe means “Monday” in Tajik, after the Monday market that once stood there. From 1929 to 1961 it was called Stalinabad. Today it is the capital and largest city, with a population of about 860,000, and most of it is Tajik, which means Persian rather than Turkic in language, a real change from the 2 countries before it.
Iskanderkul and the Fann Mountains
Iskanderkul is a glacial lake at about 2,195 metres in the Fann Mountains, and it takes its name from Alexander the Great: Iskander is the Persian form of Alexander, and “kul” means lake. One legend says his horse, Bucephalus, drowned in it. Near the lake there is a waterfall, which is the stop my photo folder calls “Iskandar Darya”.
The Fann Mountains around it hold about 100 peaks, several over 5,000 metres, with the highest, Chimtarga, at 5,489 metres. Iskanderkul is another of the stops I chose for the highlights on the travel log.
I wrote up all 4 days in Tajikistan, from the reclining Buddha in Dushanbe to the cable car over the Syr Darya, in Tajikistan: Iskanderkul, the Fann Mountains and the Road to Khujand.
Khujand
Khujand, in the far north, is one of the oldest cities in Central Asia, about 2,500 years old. Alexander the Great took it in 329 BC and renamed it Alexandria Eschate, “Alexandria the Furthest”. It sits where the Syr Darya river leaves the Fergana Valley, which made it an important stop on the Silk Road.
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan is where the Silk Road stops being a phrase and becomes buildings. This is the stretch most people have heard of.
Tashkent
Tashkent is the largest city in Central Asia, with almost 3 million people. The name comes from the Turkic “tash” and “kent”, the city of stone. Genghis Khan destroyed it in 1219, it was rebuilt on the trade of the Silk Road, and in 1865 it fell to the Russian Empire, which is a lot of history for a city that now looks mostly modern.
Samarkand
Samarkand is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Central Asia, with theories putting its founding in the 8th or 7th century BC. For long stretches it was one of the largest cities on the route between China and Europe, and today most of the people there speak Tajik, a form of Persian, rather than Uzbek.
Lake Aydarkul
Aydarkul is a lake that should not exist. It formed by accident in the Soviet era, when water from an overflowing reservoir was diverted into a dry basin in the Kyzylkum desert in 1969, and it became part of a lake system covering about 4,000 square kilometres. A blue lake in the middle of a desert is a strange sight, and it is the third of my Central Asia highlights on the travel log.
Bukhara
Bukhara has been lived in for at least 5,000 years, and the city itself is about half that age. It was a centre of trade, scholarship and religion on the Silk Road, and its old centre, with about 140 listed monuments, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Khiva
Khiva was the last stop in Uzbekistan. Its walled inner town, Itchan Kala, was the first place in Uzbekistan to be added to the World Heritage List, in 1990. The old town inside the walls is so complete that it is often called an open-air museum, except that people still live there.
Turkey
After 4 quiet weeks in the Stans, Turkey was a shock. It was very touristy and a lot more crowded.
Istanbul
Istanbul, once Constantinople, sits on both sides of the Bosporus, half in Europe and half in Asia, and holds over 15 million people, about 1 in 5 of the country.
Cappadocia
Cappadocia, in central Turkey, is known for its “fairy chimneys”: tall cones of soft volcanic rock, worn into shape by wind and rain, and dug out over centuries into homes, churches and whole underground towns.
Antalya, Pamukkale, Kusadasi and Ephesus
From there, the route ran down to the coast. Antalya is the biggest Turkish city on the Mediterranean, the centre of what people call the Turkish Riviera.
Pamukkale means “cotton castle”, and the name is accurate. Hot spring water rich in calcium has run down the hillside for thousands of years and left terraces of white stone about 2.7 km long and 160 metres high, with pools of warm water in them. The ancient Greek city of Hierapolis was built right on top.
Kusadasi is a resort town on the Aegean coast, and the base for Ephesus, about 20 km away. Ephesus was one of the great cities of the ancient Greek world, home to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Today the ruins include the Library of Celsus and a theatre that held about 24,000 people.
How did the trading fit in?
The same way it does on every trip: about 15 minutes a day on my phone, a watchlist, a few alerts, and nothing that needed me to sit in front of a screen.
What changed along the way was the clock. The US market opens at 9.30 in the morning in New York. In Bishkek and Almaty that was 7.30 in the evening. In Tashkent and Dushanbe it was 6.30. By the time I reached Istanbul, it was 4.30 in the afternoon.
So the check moved a little later or earlier each week, and the routine itself stayed the same.
I wrote up how the routine works on the road, the watchlist, the alerts and the time zones, in how I trade while travelling.
What came next?
Turkmenistan is still the one Stan I am missing.
In 2025, I went to the other side of the Caspian, to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, which makes a natural sequel to this one.
Have you been to any of the Stans? If you had 5 weeks, would you go for the mountains of Kyrgyzstan or the Silk Road cities of Uzbekistan? Let me know in the comments.
All my other trips are on the travel log, country by country, and more photos are on Instagram, @iamrecneps.
Want the daily routine? Enter your email for the free 15-Minute Swing Trader's Checklist.
Free 5-page PDF, then occasional trading emails. Education only, not financial advice. Unsubscribe anytime. Kit stores your email in the US: see our privacy policy.
Want to learn the full method? The Trading Mastery Program teaches the 4 strategies I have traded since 2011. It suits beginners and experienced traders.
Rather follow the trades as they happen? Daily Trading Signals is our Telegram channel: my trade ideas with entry, stop and exit, and every trade is public.
Questions about this post? Ask in the free Telegram channel →
Educational content only, not personalised financial advice. Trading carries risk, including loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Synapse Trading is not licensed or regulated by MAS.
