In travelling one usually starts with the obvious choices, meaning countries where most people choose to go. The usual ingredients for the average succesful vacation are beautiful scenery, relative safety, overall hygiene, helpful people, nice beaches and snowy mountains… The list is of course long, varies from one person to another, but mostly resembles your Instagram content: smiles and selfies and blissfulness.

But there are other choices available on the table. Some of us like to travel to countries that are an acquired taste. Think of smoking: you may suffocate the first time you inhale it, but when you get addicted to it you could die for a cigarette.

The stans of Central Asia belong to this category of acquired-taste travelling. Definitely not the easiest to travel to, but once you get used to them, there’s no going back to Instagram travelling.

There are 5 stans: Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tadjikistan (Pakistan or Afghanistan are not -stans). This trip was a daring one, in the sense that I had to plan a 3-country trip when actually two of the countries don’t speak to each other (Kyrgyzstan and Tadjikistan). It made planning and travelling a bit complicated, but it was absolutely worth it.

One travels in Central Asia for the hospitality of the people and the nature (especially when it comes to Kyrgyzstan). One also travels there to see brutalism (monumental, heavy architecture built by the Soviets) and other communism remnants: Lenin statues, weird spas, derelict buildings, out-of-use airfields and abandoned tanks: a very acquired taste, of the weird kind. Yet this kind of tourism flourishes nowadays, given that half the planet is in war, or has quite recently come out of it. In that sense, all the Central Asia -stans are not the wildest ones and are easy to travel to: Europeans do not need a visa since 2023 (except for Turkmenistan) and they are probably safer than your actual neighborhood. Hygiene is more or less ok, prices are unbeatable and hospitality is simply unbelievable.

What are you waiting for?