Your escape plan — Central Asia
Three Central Asian destinations an edition: the Silk Road cities, the steppe, and the mountains — across Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
In this issue
Tashkent's Soviet modernism and ornate metro reward three days on foot — but the 1966 rebuild left a centre with little pre-Soviet fabric.
The Silk Route Desk · September 22, 2026
Also inside
A Russian-built grid town below the Tian Shan, with a nail-free mosque and a Sunday market that still runs on livestock, not souvenirs.
A red sandstone canyon three hours from Almaty, with a valley floor you can walk into and camp on overnight.
Itchan Kala is a walled inner city you can walk in an hour — stay past the day buses and it becomes a different place.
A river, a defensible terrace, and the only practical gap between two mountain systems.
The old city is small enough to cross in twenty minutes. The mistake is trying to see everything on the first day.
Three thousand metres up in Kyrgyzstan, reachable for about four months a year, and worth arranging a trip around.
A green city under three-thousand-metre mountains, with a metro, good coffee and a gondola out of the centre.
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