As we are writing this, we’re already stuck for more than 12 hours on the Caspian Sea ferry to Turkmenbashi and it hasn’t even left the port yet. Getting from Azerbaijan to Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan isn’t as easy as taking a ferry from Dover to Calais. It takes a lot of patience and time (which you probably don’t have).
So we crossed the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul and are now officially in Asia. After our short visit to Istanbul, we split up with the other Belgian team ‘Silly Coincidence’ because they needed to take another route to go into Iran. Our first planned stop was Amasra, a small port town at the Black Sea. After 7 hours of driving, we finally arrived there at sunset. But unfortunately, it was too crowded and too difficult to find a good camping spot. It was already dark when we drove further to find a place to sleep. This became an extra 3 hours drive until Cide, where we found a small hotel at 11pm. We just went for it because at this time, and with all the mountain roads, it became too difficult to camp. We had some late night köfte in town and went back to the hotel for a good night rest. However, we didn’t know that the local minaret would wake us up at 4am.
Since we’re participating in the Mongol Rally, we have read an overload of information about Central Asia. We didn’t know a lot about these countries and they weren’t really on our travel bucket list yet. But now we absolutely can’t wait to explore these countries and their culture.
Central Asia, also known as the “stans”, named after the countries that make up this region: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. But also Mongolia, Afghanistan and a part of China are within the Central Asian region. These are maybe among the less traveled, but perhaps most intriguing areas of Asia.