Ged Gillmore - Stans By Me: A whirlwind tour through Central Asia - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan

Ged Gillmore likes to think of himself as James Bond. Or Indiana Jones. Or a suave and daring hybrid of both. As he flicks through his world atlas, he pictures himself infiltrating enemy lines, uncovering ancient artefacts, and strapping himself in for white-knuckle flights over dusty arid landscapes. So the very thought of joining an organised bus tour is enough to make our intrepid traveller dry retch and shudder.

But join one he must if hes to survive multiple border crossings on his mission to discover the mysteries of Central Asia in only three weeks. Follow our rugged Indiana Bond as he clambers aboard a bus with an unlikely group of characters thrown together by exotic circumstances for a whirlwind tour through the five Stans Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

In the following pages

prepare to come face to face with mesmerising landscapes and striking citadels that look like sets from Star Wars and Game of Thrones.

learn about ancient rituals such as goat-pulling and bride-stealing that are still practised today.

visit floating mountains, singing dunes, sunken forests and bejewelled cities so beautiful they are almost impossible to describe.

Along the way youll encounter yurt erections, bullet trains and enemy travel agents. Youll learn how a babys first steps are celebrated in Kyrgyzstan. Youll become acquainted with the life-and-death importance of etiquette in a Khans palace. And youll be gently reminded that people even those on a seemingly boring bus tour are rarely what they seem

Ready for the trip of a lifetime? Buckle up and lets go!

Travel is all about luck. The luck of being born in a country that lets you leave. The luck of having a passport accepted at borders you want to cross. And the luck of discovering, when travelling, places and people you never imagined. This is why I never buy lottery tickets. I suspect all my luck has been used up.

I have two passports one from the United Kingdom and another from New Zealand which, between them, get me pretty much everywhere. I am also lucky enough to live in Sydney, Australia, and to travel between that city and Europe every year. Which is, in a roundabout way, how I came to visit the five Stans of Central Asia in the first place.

The flights between Down Under and Back Home invoke the same emotions as any modern air travel: a frisson of excitement at take-off, followed by the immediate boredom of Are we there yet? The difference is, of course, when youre travelling between Sydney and, lets say, Dublin, the Are we there yet? lasts twenty-four hours. I dont normally mind though, because like everyone else, as soon as Im allowed to, I turn on the planes entertainment system. The only difference is, I turn it on for the Flight Path function and for that function alone.

First of all, I devour the irresistible back pages of the in-flight magazine. You know, the one with the maps showing all the exotic locations the airline flies to: Bombay, Manila, Maroochydore (this is normally Qantas, after all). I then gaze into space, imagining all the wonderful places my passports could take me. I consider, yet again, writing to the British and/or New Zealand Secret Services offering my unique combination of yet-to-be-determined skills. In my ideal scenario, its the infamous New Zealand Apple Board who gives me the job.

Yis Gid, I imagine the recruiter the mysterious Muster Ix telling me. We thunk youre the virry bist men for the job. Were sinding you ivirywhere to enfeltrate and protict our biosecurity.

Maybe I wont do the Kiwi accent in the interview. Ill be James Bond instead: well-spoken but not so posh that my mouth gets ugly around the vowels. More Sean Connery than Prince Charles, if you know what I mean. Oh yesh, Mish Moneypenny.

As soon as we have taken off, and the tiny plane icon on the seatback monitor in front of me is inching its way around the world, I start comparing its progress to the view outside the window. What mountain range could that be? What desert is this? Is that water or just low cloud? We think we fly around the world these days but, in reality, we bypass it, as if driving past a local town we feel no need to visit. As we race by, we dull ourselves with movies about our own cultures while somewhere down there, someone with a life we cant even imagine looks back up at us, a tiny white dot in a broad blue sky or a flashing spark in the stars.

Inevitably, somewhere over Asia, I give in and tear myself away from the Flight Path screen, to watch instead what the person in front of me has been looking at for the previous hour or so. There is, it seems, no widely-agreed name for this phenomenon so I hereby trademark the term DistrAction Movie. Definition: a movie someone else is watching on a plane and which looks so bad you are unable to stop watching it yourself.

But last year on my flight over Asia something changed.

After a really bad DistrAction Movie, which thank you, Tom Cruise proved no more enjoyable when viewed on my own screen with the sound turned up, I dejectedly flicked back to Flight Path, only to discover that we were still flying over the same part of the world as before the dreadful film. This seemed unlikely, so I zoomed in and out of the map a few times, struggling to believe there was such a huge part of the planet I knew nothing about. And yet there it was. Central Asia: a region larger than Western Europe. Kazakhstan alone was massive (it is, in fact, the ninth largest country in the world) and, zooming in again, I found it surrounded by a cluster of other countries: Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan. A family of not-so-little Stans of which I the boy who won the Geography prize at school for his colour-coded map of all the public toilets in town was totally ignorant.

I was thinking I should at least learn these countries capital cities, when the lady in front of me turned and scowled at me from between the seats. Could I please stop jabbing her in the back of the head, she demanded, so she could watch the rest of her movie in peace? I considered telling her she should watch better movies for my sake, if not her own. Instead, I apologised in a way that was meant to be charming. Because by now I wasnt only James Bond. I was Indiana Jones too. And I knew the next time I took a plane out of Australia, I was going to Central Asia.

All facts and figures in these section summaries come from the CIA World Factbook (free online and highly recommended). They were accurately reported at the time of writing but, by the time you read them, will already be out of date such is the nature of data. If youd like to compare the information in these tables to the same information for a country you probably know better, I have included a comparison table at the end of the book.

The flight into Almaty, the largest city and former capital of Kazakhstan, is majestic. Approaching from the east, the plane flies low over the Tian Shan mountains. These form the upper horizontal of the great C of mountain ranges that curve around Chinas northwestern borders, and it is difficult to imagine a more suitable introduction to a land of exotic adventure. The Tian Shan ranges have altitudes between 7,439 metres above and 154 metres below sea level, but all I see from the plane are steep, white slopes, topped by jagged peaks. To the west, I know, this range continues into Kyrgyzstan but, when the plane banks sharply to the north on its descent into Almaty, the mountains come to a sudden halt, as if even the mighty Tian Shan are daunted by the extent of the grasslands to north. These grasslands are the steppe, of course: that great ribbon of green that runs whenever you are far enough from the ocean right around the northern hemisphere. Here in Eurasia, they stretch from Romania to eastern Siberia and northeastern China. In North America they are more commonly called prairie and cover the interior of the continent from Canada down to Mexico.