21 Day The Five Stans Tour — TOUR CODE: CA3 21 Day The Five Stans Tour
TOUR CODE: CA3
Ken Powell a seasoned globe-trotter and experienced photographer (powellphotography.ca), blogs (powellponderings.com) about his journey with Adventures Abroad’s 21 Day Five Stans Tour, which covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. His insights, images, and expertise offer a wonderful glimpse into this extraordinary tour.
Travel is a sense of wonder to see the world around us and appreciate what is beyond our borders. Our Turkmenistan stop was an eye-opening experience that allowed a glimpse into the mind of an idiosyncratic leader of the once closed-off country. The following is a memorable experience that will leave you in wonder and awe at the same time.
Journey Around the 5 Stans: A Ball. A Goat (Kind Of)!
21 Day The Five Stans Tour — TOUR CODE: CA3 21 Day The Five Stans Tour
TOUR CODE: CA3
Ken Powell a seasoned globe-trotter and experienced photographer (powellphotography.ca), blogs (powellponderings.com) about his journey with Adventures Abroad’s 21 Day Five Stans Tour, which covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. His insights, images, and expertise offer a wonderful glimpse into this extraordinary tour.
Two separate stories from the sporting world while travelling on the Five Stans tour. From a sport that you will instantly recognize to one that you will not believe that it is a sport.
Journey Around the 5 Stans: Crossing the Line
21 Day The Five Stans Tour — TOUR CODE: CA3 21 Day The Five Stans Tour
TOUR CODE: CA3
Ken Powell a seasoned globe-trotter and experienced photographer (powellphotography.ca), blogs (powellponderings.com) about his journey with Adventures Abroad’s 21 Day Five Stans Tour, which covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. His insights, images, and expertise offer a wonderful glimpse into this extraordinary tour. In this vignette, he recounts a border crossing episode.
We had borders of five Stans to navigate, and one of them twice. While they all had their idiosyncrasies, there was one that we knew would be a challenge – the Uzbekistan into Turkmenistan crossing.
Journey Around the 5 Stans: The Silk Road
21 Day The Five Stans Tour — TOUR CODE: CA3 21 Day The Five Stans Tour
TOUR CODE: CA3
Ken Powell a seasoned globe-trotter and experienced photographer (powellphotography.ca), blogs (powellponderings.com) about his journey with Adventures Abroad’s 21 Day Five Stans Tour, which covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. His insights, images, and expertise offer a wonderful glimpse into this extraordinary tour.
The well-known travel writer Colin Thubron said it well: “To follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost. It flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished, leaving behind it the pattern of its restlessness.”
One can’t talk about the “Five Stans” without reference to the Silk Road. Scorching deserts, high mountain passes and caravan towns defined the route (or as it was then, routes) transporting silk and various other goods from western China to eastern Europe from as early as the second century BC until the mid-15th century when the Ottoman Empire closed off trade with the West. Nearly 6,500 kilometres long, it connected the Eastern and Western worlds.
Journey Around the 5 Stans: The Setting
21 Day The Five Stans Tour — TOUR CODE: CA3 21 Day The Five Stans Tour
TOUR CODE: CA3
Ken Powell, a seasoned globe-trotter and experienced photographer (powellphotography.ca), blogs (powellponderings.com) about his journey with Adventures Abroad’s 21 Day Five Stans Tour, which covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. His insights, images, and expertise offer a wonderful glimpse into this extraordinary tour.
A brief synopsis of the physical and cultural landscapes of these regions will help give you a deeper appreciation of the diversity and history I will encounter on this tour. And the blog entries that follow will be instead of a day-by-day diary account of the delights and challenges of exploring the five Central Asian "Stans", I have chosen a number of memorable vignettes and experiences to tell the story another way. So let's start!
Moais of Rapa Nui
21 Day Chile Tour — TOUR CODE: CL1 21 Day Chile Tour
TOUR CODE: CL1
In his latest blog post, Dale Dunlop, The Maritime Explorer, describes the his Chile Tour as "one of the best Adventures Abroad tours we have ever been on" and ends it with a stunning exploration of the Moais of Rapa Nui. If you are interested in what Adventures Abroad has to offer, please check out our Small Group Tours to Chile.
In the last post from this unparalleled trip to Adventures Abroad 21 Day Chile Tour our group reached our final destination, Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island. In that post I wrote about everything on the island except the main reason we were there, to see the giant statues known as moais that are unique to Rapa Nui. In this post we'll see and discuss more moais than you probably ever want to see, but trust me, these figures are so entrancing that you will not get tired of visiting them. In short, is it worth the time and expense to come to the remotest place on earth to see them – damn right it is and here's why.