With their desert-dominated geography and shared Silk Road and Soviet history, the five countries of Central Asia are often lumped together as one. But each has a distinctive character of its own, as a 3,000-kilometer overland journey across this vast and storied region reveals.

Photographs by Yngwie Scheerlinck

The Darvaza gas crater in Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert.

The night sky above the Karakum Desert was pitch-black as I made my way down a sandy slope to a giant flaming hole in the ground. As tourist attractions go, this methane-fueled fire pit is an unlikely one. Known as the Darvaza gas crater, it was created in the 1960s or ’70s (nobody seems to know for sure) when Soviet geologists drilling for oil in this remote part of Turkmenistan hit a pocket of natural gas. The earth collapsed, leaving behind a gaping cavern the size of a football field that’s been burning for at least 50 years. “We call it the Gates of Hell,” said our guide from the nearby village of Darvaza. And that’s exactly how it seemed. I stood transfixed at the edge of the hole watching tongues of fire leap from fissures in the crater walls and floor. The radiated heat took the edge off the cold desert air.

In the glow of the blaze, I contemplated, not for the first time, Turkmenistan’s reputation for being one of the world’s strangest countries. Largely shut off from the outside world and ruled by an autocratic regime that blocks social media, messaging apps, and foreign news, the onetime Soviet republic may also be one of the hardest places for a tourist to visit. To qualify for a visa, you must be part of a government-approved tour group and be thoroughly vetted by the Foreign Ministry. And this is one of the few countries that still requires a Covid test on arrival. I discovered this two days earlier when I landed at Ashgabat International Airport, where I was welcomed with a swab stuck up my nose.

Ashgabat itself certainly qualifies as strange. Much of this is down to Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, who ruled Turkmenistan for 15 years before handing the presidency to his son in 2022. A megalomaniac with a taste for vanity projects, Berdimuhamedow Sr. mandated that all public buildings in the capital would be faced in blindingly white marble, and that all cars, trucks, and buses should also be white. He also commissioned dozens of gilded statues of himself, including one riding a golden Akhal-Teke, Turkmenistan’s treasured horse breed.

I had heard beforehand that you couldn’t wander around Ashgabat on your own. Either the regime recently changed that rule or it’s always been an urban myth. I had no problem exploring the city on foot, tasting spoonsful of Caspian caviar offered by hawkers in the Russian Market, quaffing pints of not-too-bad beer at a British-style pub, or snapping photos of all those larger-than-life statues. There was never a feeling that I was being monitored or tailed by the secret police. Or maybe they’re just super good at their job.

Ashgabat was the starting point of my two-week journey across Central Asia with Lupine Travel, a British-based tour company whose catalog of unconventional destinations includes North Korea, Yemen, and Chernobyl. Traveling by minibus, private coach, 4×4, and train, this trip would take me and 15 other intrepid guests across the “five ’stans”—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan—stretched out between the Caspian Sea and western China, all of them former Soviet republics that gained their independence in the early 1990s.

Besides a shared Turkic heritage and Soviet history, the ’stans have other things in common: Islam is the predominant faith, desert is the most common landscape, and their cuisines reflect a fusion of nomadic traditions, Persian flavors, Turkic influences, and trade connections from the Silk Road era. I started out thinking they would more or less feel the same. I came away realizing each had its own intriguing vibe and identity.

After overnighting at a yurt camp beside the Darvaza gas crater and touring the ruins of the 12th-century capital of the Khorezm satrapy near the otherwise unremarkable market town of Konye-Urgench, we drive across the border to Khiva, the first of three fabled Silk Road cities on our Uzbekistan itinerary.

“And this is where Isfandiyar Khan kept his concubines,” said our guide as we stepped into an elaborate courtyard deep inside Nurullabai Palace. “It once housed 100 women, maybe more, and the khan’s three wives.” Compared to nearby Itchan Kala, Khiva’s ancient walled town, the sprawling palace-turned-museum is a relatively modern site, completed in 1912. It’s also massive, with countless rooms and courtyards, halls and gar dens. But Isfandiyar Khan would enjoy Nurullabai for only a few years. Deposed by a coup in the spring of 1918, he was executed on these grounds shortly thereafter. The old Khanate of Khiva didn’t long outlast him. It was absorbed into the USSR in 1924 and divided between the Turkmen and Uzbek Soviet republics.

Itchan Kala, with its blue-tiled domes and winding car-free streets, proved to be Uzbekistan’s most atmospheric town, especially after sundown, when its residents emerged to shop, eat, and gossip, many of the older men crowned by puffy chugurma fur hats. Yet Samarkand, 700 kilometers to the east, is considerably more famous, largely because of the Registan, a public square flanked by three imposing madrassas with luminous turquoise domes and lofty minarets that are counted among the masterpieces of Islamic architecture. In 1888, the British explorer and future viceroy of India George Curzon declared the expansive plaza to be “the noblest public square in the world.”

More than a century later, the Registan still dazzles, though it has long since been discovered by the outside world. I encountered far more selfie-snapping travelers here than anywhere else in the five ’stans. Still, far more intriguing to me was the nearby Gur-e Amir, the mausoleum where Timur was laid to rest in 1405. Known to Western historians as Tamerlane, he was the last of the great Turco-Mongol conquerors and the founder of a dynasty that sparked Samarkand’s medieval golden age.

“The tomb is cursed,” a caretaker explained. “Before he died, Timur said that anyone who disturbs him in the afterlife shall die suddenly.” Indifferent to superstition, Soviet archaeologists exhumed the remains of Timur in 1941; two days later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin eventually ordered the bones to be reinterned with full Islamic burial rites. Little more than a month after the tomb was resealed, the Red Army defeated the German forces besieging Stalingrad. No one has messed with Gur-e Amir ever since.

I didn’t hear many stories about the Soviet days during my time in Central Asia, but here and there, I came across reminders of the region’s five decades behind the Iron Curtain—especially in Bukhara, another of Uzbekistan’s ancient Silk Road centers. A stall in one of the city’s old covered bazaars was running a brisk trade in pins emblazoned with portraits of Lenin, Soviet soldiers, and 1980 Moscow Olympics symbols. Back on the street, a vendor sold me an ice cream bar with a wrapper featuring cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

A rooftop restaurant terrace overlooking the UNESCO-listed Old Town of Bukhara.

A train carriage at Termez, southern Uzbekistan.

A more memorable relic of the past was the night train from Samarkand to Termez—a line of old Soviet sleeper cars pulled by an equally vintage diesel locomotive. The toilet was down the corridor and you had to open a top window for “air conditioning,” but a sullen Uzbek Railways porter provided a pillow, bedsheet, and bottled water. I shared a second-class cabin with a local guy who graciously offered me the upper bunk to get the full effect of the cool desert air blowing in from outside.

Stepping off a train in Termez feels very much like the end of the line. Once upon a time this area was conquered by Alexander the Great, who founded a settlement he hoped would become a beacon of Hellenic civilization in Central Asia. Nowadays it’s a drab, dust-blown border town best remembered as the place where the Soviets staged their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Tourists can no longer cross the ironically named Afghanistan-Uzbekistan Friendship Bridge over the Amu River, but you can get your photo snapped in front of a barbed-wire fence with a sign warning you not to venture any farther.

Like just about every other stop on the Silk Road, Termez flaunts ancient Islamic tombs. But its most significant landmark is Fayaz Tepe, the remains of a Buddhist monastic complex on the outskirts of town that testifies to the sway of Buddhism in Central Asia before the arrival of Islam. I would have been rather underwhelmed by the mudbrick ruins if not for a guard who offered to let me into a ramshackle building beside the entrance gate. Propped against the walls of a dark room, without any sort of protection, were fragments of some of the original monastery murals. They were stunning. One depicted Lord Buddha; another, Alexander the Great in a goat-horn helmet. Clearly, this was once a glorious place.

A view of the Fann Mountains from Hisar Fortress, a Silk Road–era relic near Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

What a difference a day can make in Central Asia. From sweltering heat and dusty desert, we transitioned into the blue skies and mild climes of the Pamir foothills in western Tajikistan. From the Tajik capital of Dushanbe, the highway took us north through the Varzob Gorge, a glacier-fed river valley with rocky slopes and an entourage of snowy peaks. At a riverside fruit stand, I slurped down a slice of the best watermelon I’d ever tasted as a group of young Tajik women in kurta dresses posed for pictures on the grassy bank. This was the calm before the storm, a peaceful interlude before confronting a mountain route considered to be one of the region’s most dangerous roads.

Wicked switchbacks lifted our Sprinter van to around 2,700 meters above sea level and the entrance of the notorious Anzob Tunnel. With no ventilation or lighting and seepage that could have doubled as a small waterfall, it made for an anxious pas sage. Carefully dodging the many fallen rocks and potholes, our driver got us safely through the pitch-dark death trap.

Descending into the wide green Fergana Valley, we spent the night in Khujand. Known as Leninabad during the Soviet period, Tajikistan’s second-largest city is renowned for having the biggest market in Central Asia, the Panjshanbe Bozor, where more than a thousand stalls sell a mindboggling array of edibles, electronics, clothing, and home goods.

Wandering one of the building’s narrow passageways, I was approached by a woman who spoke excellent English. Assuming her to be a fellow traveler, I asked where she was from. She laughed and said, “Right here! I am a third-generation Tajik Korean.” Noting my bemused expression, she recounted how her grandparents were among the thousands of ethnic Koreans from the Russian Far East who were forcibly relocated to Central Asia by Stalin to work in the factories and cotton fields.

A guide at the Arbob Cultural Palace in Khujand, Tajikistan.

Our route into Kyrgyzstan the next day traversed another epic mountain range, the Tien Shan. These peaks are not as high and mighty as the Pamirs, but they are in their own way more striking: a mosaic of spruce forests, small lakes, and alpine meadows dotted with the cream-colored yurts of nomadic families who migrate back to the highlands each summer to graze their beloved horses.

In a scene that has played out along the Silk Road for centuries, some nomads offer their wares to passing travelers. Pulling off the road, we investigated a stall selling a variety of traditional Kyrgyz foods and beverages. The regular mare’s milk was quite tasty; the fermented version not so much. The rock-hard balls of cheese called kurt were okay on their own, but even better when washed down with a can of Zhivoe beer. The woman running the stall was kind enough to show us the inside of her family yurt. Roomy and homely decorated with handspun textiles, it was a good cut above the yurt I slept in back at the Darvaza gas crater.

The mountains gradually faded into the steppes of Central Asia, the golden grasslands that carried the Mongols and other horseback conquerors all the way to eastern Europe. Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, had its own unique feel, having been built by Russian settlers in the late 19th century. “Which is why we have so many parks and trees and irrigation canals in the middle of the city,” explained local guide Valentina Romancheva as we walked along boulevards spangled with old tsarist and Soviet-era buildings. Like the city itself, Romancheva had a complicated genealogy. Her ancestors were a mix of Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians and Moldovans, a mishmash of peoples who migrated to Central Asia during Soviet times.

In a park behind the national museum, I was surprised to see a statue of Lenin gazing upon a star-shaped bed of red flowers. Bishkek hadn’t completely divorced itself from olden days, Romancheva admitted. But it had made concessions. “He used to be in the big square in front of the museum. But we moved him back here and replaced him with a statue of the Kyrgyz warrior Manas, our own national hero from ancient times.”

A herder’s semi-mobile home in the Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan.

The late-Soviet-era House of Officers building in Almaty’s Panfilov Park.

After two days in Bishkek, we crossed one last border into Kazakhstan. It was another culture shock, this time of the modern variety. Fueled by oil and gas profits, the largest of the five ’stans has stepped firmly into the 21st century.

An eight-lane freeway took us into the heart of Almaty, the country’s largest city and the final stop on our journey across Central Asia. After bidding adieu to the rest of the group, I stayed on in Almaty for another couple of nights. Eschewing the newish high-rise hotels where most visitors seem to stay, I settled into vintage Soviet-style digs in the historic city center, walking distance from the candy-colored Russian Orthodox Ascension Cathedral and the sprawling socialist modernist Arasan bath complex. Yet I kept getting sucked into modern Almaty.

I tooled around town on the sleek underground metro, disembarking at stops renowned for the murals, mosaics, and other artworks that decorate what many consider to be among the world’s most beautiful subway stations. In an upscale mall fronted by a six-story replica of the Eiffel Tower, I walked a gauntlet of perfume and fashion boutiques to visit a “secret” underground museum that safeguards an incredible collection of Kazakh art and antiques collected since independence by a local oligarch. And there was “neo-nomad” cuisine to explore, a fusion of modern cooking methods and heirloom ingredients used for centuries on the Central Asian steppes and presented like little works of art in upscale restaurants with modish nomad decor.

That’s how it played out across the ’stans: something novel and unexpected nearly every day. The region I had contemplated for years turned out to be so much different than anticipated once I was finally there. On my way to the airport in Almaty, I found myself longing for more. If there was a sixth, seventh, or even an eighth ’stan, I surely would have kept going.

Lupine Travel’s 15-night Central Asia: 5 ’Stans tour costs from about US$2,700 per person.

Uzbek ladies at a village paper mill outside Samarkand prepping mulberry bark for boiling into pulp.

This article originally appeared in the June/July 2025 print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Lands of Plenty”). Buy a single issue or subscribe here.

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