A 7-hour bus ride from Baku brought me to Sheki. The guidebook said it was a pretty place and it was somewhat on my way to Ganja.
Category: Asia
Baku, Azerbaijan
I will say this though – the Carpet Museum of Baku was one of the most interesting museums I’ve ever visited in the entire world! You may ask why I’d be interested in carpets of all things. But have you seen carpet-weaving art? It’s stunning and very intricate!
The Food of Uzbekistan
I am a lover of food and I ate a lot of Uzbek food while traveling around the country. Hands down, my favorite is PLOV but the rest, I also enjoyed very much and I did not have a bad meal! I had a lot of other food not posted here but I didn’t get…
Samarkand, Uzbekistan
A train ride took me from Bukhara to Samarkand – from the train station, a taxi ride to my hostel where my roommate was a jolly Aussie guy who spoke fluent Russian due to family heritage. (Was definitely great to be out and about with him as he chatted up the Russian-speaking elderly Uzbek taxi…
Bukhara, Uzbekistan
I think the main attraction for me in Bukhara was checking out “The Ark”, a fortress apparently occupied from the 5th century until about 1920 when it was bombed by the Soviets. The wooden pillars that held a lot of the place up together showed its age, in comparison with say, a lot of the…
Nukus and Khiva, Uzbekistan
An early 2-hour flight from Tashkent, across desert, took me to the capital of the Karakalpakstan region, Nukus. I knew there wasn’t much to do here – it was desert-hot and dry – but every desert sometimes has a rose and the Igor Savitsky museum of art would be that rose. Although I am not…
Tashkent, Uzbekistan
I used the capital, Tashkent, as a launching point for my travel in Uzbekistan – it’d have to be where I enter and where I exit the country – as there are no other international airports that’d take me to my next planned destinations. When faced with one entry+exit point in the past, I’ve been…
The Road to Samarkand
When I was a kid, I read a children’s story about a place called Samarkand. What we know of Aladdin’s or Ali Baba’s world, Samarkand was a place like that – an important stop along the famous Silk Road where tales of mystique and adventure could be had. But we don’t live in that world…
The Oasis of Architecture
After saying goodbye to Nuri from the hostel, I caught a bus to the airport to catch my 1.5 hour flight to the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana. Note: I literally just found this out while typing this but as of March 2019, Astana is now renamed to “Nur-Sultan”, after its long-time President/Dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev. I personally think…
The (original?) Big Apple
I follow the MoskvaDown to Gorky ParkListening to the wind of change… Although I did not follow the Moskva like the Scorpions, I did end up in Gorky Park but only in the former capital of Kazakhstan, Almaty, a city name whose name essentially means “apple”, due to it being the area of origin for certain varieties of…