Rucksackpacked

In October, 2024, four of us undertook a two week tour of the five Stans of Central Asia, west to east, in an organised group of sixteen from a variety of western countries. Here are some of the highlights, lowlights and observations from the trip. Despite it being over thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, not many Westerners have ventured this way yet. Here's what we found... L as Vegas meets Phnom Penh in Asia Common sense says that arguing with officialdom in a famously repressive country is never a good idea. Common sense also tells us that arguing in English with a bored, tired and probably underpaid official who does not speak it is a waste of both their time and yours. And common sense says that in a strange and unexplored environment, stop, stand back and see what others are doing before joining in. But at three o’clock in the morning after a seemingly endless trek through the huge, lavish and eerily empty corridors and halls of Turkmenistan's Ashgabat a...

 At the risk of stating the obvious, . Africa is big: well bigger than you think. The Mercator Projection of 1569 is still used as the standard way of depicting the spherical globe on a flat map. The main effect is to distort and exaggerate the size of objects further away from the equator, such as Russia and the UK, and therefore suggest Africa and Brazil, for example, are smaller than they are by comparison. Africa remains the same size, i.e. big. In December, we were in Aswan, Luxor and Hurghada, Egypt. Cape Town is 4,500 crow flown miles from Hurghada. At Aswan, near the Sudanese border, we were definitely in an Arab and Muslim country, teetering on the fringes of the Sahara desert. At the other end of Africa just a few weeks later, there's no sand and the infuences are (still) French, Dutch and English. The Red Sea coast and desert are striking but South Africa.... towering mountain ranges, rocky coastlines, green valleys: it's a long way away. And nobody has hassled me fo...

  A man, a plan, a canal, Panama The Pan-American Highway stretches an almost unbroken 30,000 kilometres from Prudhoe Bay in north-western Alaska to Ushuaia in Patagonian Argentina. Over the next three weeks, our journey will cover only a 2,000km section of this, through six different countries, albeit travelling further on the ground as we zigzag from coast to coast. The "almost"  is the notorious 105 k m Darien Gap on the border between eastern Panama and Colombia, where completely impenetrable jungle is home to indigenous tribes and narco-traffickers. Our journey begins with 480 kilometres by highway bus from Panama City to David.  But before that,the City itself. A couple of hundred kilometers west of Darien but a world away culturally. Facing out onto a broad bay in the Pacific with the queue of ships waiting for the entrance to the canal to the western end, Panama bakes in tropical heat beneath a sky full of Frigate birds and a million migrating black-headed vulture...