Suzhou Suzhou had never really been on our list of places to go in China. In fact, we hadn’t even heard of it aside from a recommendation that we got and then immediately forgot from some Chinese tourists we met in Azerbaijan. Only after looking over our options on how we could get to Shanghai … More China: Suzhou, Beijing, and Qingdao
We arrived for our third time in China with little fanfare. Our bus from Hong Kong arrived in Guangzhou, China’s third-largest city. We had several hours to kill in Guangzhou as we waited for our night train to Zhangjiajie, in the Hunan province, so we got some noodles and coffee and walked around a bit. … More China: Zhangjiajie and Shanghai
We were greeted by -27°c weather in Novosibirsk, where our layover towards Hong Kong was. We braved the bitter cold from the plane to the gate with only our modest sweatshirts, which were sufficient for the relative balmy climes of Osh. The layover was unspectacular, and the end of our second leg saw us in … More Hong Kong and Macau
The Uzbek border was about 45 minutes of bureaucracy and waiting. Not as bad as other experiences we have heard, but certainly tougher than any other country so far. After staring at our passports for a good five minutes, the first man stamped our passports, unsmilingly, and we proceeded into a room with a dozen … More Uzbekistan
Kyrgyzstan Our time in Kyrgyzstan was pretty laid back. Ian was well waylaid by a sinus infection (gotten from his overnight in the snow, which most sensible people would avoid for pretty obvious reasons) so he was confined to the hostel for the most part. Our crew of five slowly began to disintegrate after the … More Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan
Our flight back to Almaty was uneventful. We landed in the evening and made our way to our hostel with the shoddy directions given. They said to take bus 92 to Sayakhat and then transfer to the 141, but no details were given about where exactly the 141 stopped, so we wandered around in the … More Kazakhstan
The West We rolled into Shaki in a half-full marshrutka. The town was quite lovely from the get-go, and felt very “Georgian”, with the rolling green foothills of the lower Caucasus in the background. A dozen or so taxi drivers stood milling around the bus station waiting for incoming fares, with no advanced booking we … More Azerbaijan
Svaneti The trip from Zugdidi to Mestia was largely uneventful. The Russian girls we were sharing the car with had pitched in on a bit of a sightseeing tour, for five lari extra, so we were obliged to pay that as well. The sightseeing portion was fairly interesting, and we stopped off at the Enguri … More Georgia
We took the night train from Tbilisi to Zugdidi as our first step in getting to Abkhazia. Well, our first step was actually sending our clearance applications to some random Russian email address, in response to which we received our clearance letters (about a week later) to be printed and shown at the border. Zugdidi … More Abkhazia
We spent five days in Urumqi trying to figure out where we would head next. Oona’s good friend will be meeting us in Kazakhstan in mid-October, so we had a month to kill somewhere between Urumqi and Almaty, or indeed somewhere else entirely. Given that we’ll be spending another month in Central Asia after Almaty, … More From China to Georgia: A Short Update
Sometimes the wrong train will get you to the right place. 