I agree. A trip like this makes me appreciate life more because it almost forces me to be alone in my thoughts and to notice the things I have in this life. I feel more comfortable to engage with my surroundings, it’s a humbling type of experience.

It’s a camping area set up about 500 meters from Darvaza Gas Crater.

That’s Chorsu Bazaar, it’s a domed building within an open-air market.

Advantour organized the trip, and it looks like this:

Tashkent → Samarkand → Penjikent → Bukhara → Merv, Ashgabat, Darvaza → Khiva → Return to Tashkent

Tashkent has a lot of soviet architecture, along with bazaars and Temurid sites. The scale of each site was almost comically large, and its style is brutalist like the Hotel Uzbekistan.

Samarkand and Bukhara had a lot of Islamic sites. Those days were mostly spent visiting madrasahs, necropolises, and mausoleums. Samarkand had the iconic sites spread out in a mostly modern city. Bukhara felt more like a compact medieval Central Asian town with a madrasah in almost every corner it feels like.

Penjikent had archeological sites and mountains. We ate at a lot of homestays, and it was the coziest/homiest leg of our trip. The people from Tajikistan I would note are the friendliest, almost everyone would wave at us, and were so happy to see tourists around.

Turkmenistan was the most hectic leg of the trip: one day spent on ancient sites in Merv, another seeing the empty marble section of Ashgabat with its own share of eerie, brutalist monuments, and a day spent riding out in the desert to Darvaza crater and camping in yurts.

Khiva is my favorite part of the trip. It's like an walled city, an open air museum with a lot of things to see in every corner. I was able to go around the city thrice on foot with a lot of minarets and madrasahs as well, but I felt this was a city that felt alive but never overbearing.

I personally love the food, plov (which you may know as pilaf) is one of the staples in this region. We ate a lot of lamb and beef skewers. Their salads (especially the fried eggplant) was always great, and that's coming from someone who doesn't them often at home. They served a lot of hearty soups as well which were mostly influenced by the Russians.

Uzbekistan had a lot of tourists, but Tajikistan and Turkmenistan only had a countable number of tourists coming in when we went. In Tajikistan, the reception felt really warm and welcoming. In Turkmenistan, some people were really friendly, but in certain places it kind of felt wrong to be there (especially in the more populated parts of Ashgabat), people were just staring at us blankly. And even in sites, there's really a fixed structure you have to follow (like in the national museum for instance). In the 10th photo, we were riding a ferris wheel that we didn't even think would be operating; they literally just opened it for us and another group, it really felt abandoned. I took a picture from the inside looking out.