Steppe in Style: adventures in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

The story behind my tour of the Balkans was an emotional one. Turning 29 was the start of weeks of angst for me. My next birthday will be 30, the start of a whole new decade and I couldn’t help compare the way I felt now with how optimistic I was nine years ago about the…

Confirming we had left the edginess of the first three destinations on our Balkan tour behind, Ljubljana was just as pretty as Zagreb and even cleaner. Like Zagreb it had a history as part of the Hapsburg empire that had left behind a legacy of elegant buildings, many of them painted in pretty pastel colours. …

Zagreb was a shock (and a very pleasant one). After the age and pollution blackened buildings of Bucharest, Sofia and Belgrade, the street we emerged onto from the station was chocolate box pretty.  Ahead of us was a wide street with a strip of park along the middle, the grass and footpaths shaded by tall…

It was just over eight years since the Nato bombings that we arrived in Belgrade. Sleepy and crumpled after our second overnight train journey, we still couldn’t help notice the two damaged buildings on the main road near the train station, one with its high brick front still standing, the other burnt and twisted seemingly…

Underground in Sofia railway station it’s dark, dingy, a bit sinister and all the signs are in Cyrillic. I immediately feel at home here. This is the Eastern Europe I remember.  People are loitering, holding cigarettes and tiny plastic cups of very black coffee or — at 6am! — beer. The little shops have almost…

Bucharest was the very first place I visited in Eastern Europe. I came here in summer 1998 as one of a group of students on our way to teach English in neighbouring Moldova for a few weeks. We flew into Bucharest, where we stayed one night, got our Moldovan visas then took the Bucharest-Iasi-Chisinau overnight…

The heat in Turpan is so soporific that we have little energy to do much at first, and we soon fall into an easy rhythm for our four days here.  The Turpan Depression is one of those areas that because of its peculiar geography, has been settled for centuries, so there’s plenty to see and…

The next day we hire a car and go first to the other ruined city in the oasis, Gaochang. We arranged a car through the hotel that for $10 will also take us to the Flaming Mountains, the Astana Tombs and the Bezilik Caves. This time we leave in the heat of the afternoon in…