Central Asia Itinerary 2013

Click the links below for photos and information on each stage af the journey

Turkmenistan, Iran and Azerbaijan are not the most obvious of countries to visit, but for us it was a continuaion of an exploration of the Silk Route which we had done further north last year . There is a cetain frisson of excitement in crossing the border into Iran, and another in getting back out.

The trip with Wild Frontiers was just 16 nights, effectively 14 nights as the first and last nights were middle of the night flights. Therefore there was a lot packed into the time available. Overall I enjoyed the trip and the experience very much, though there were, as inevitably, things that could have been better. The itinerary was good, and difficult to do more than tweek it here and there asI assume the main problem is to get it into 2 weeks to attract the wider market of people who cannot get away from work for longer. Personally I would have preferred to have gone on to Georgia as a recce trip did 2 years ago and done a 3 week trip.

The Good Things

• Turkmenistan was a bonus, I had not been expecting something that was out of our world. It is impossible to explain Ashgabat to someone who has not seen it
• The Gas Crater and the 2 nights in the Karakum Desert camping and following the sand tracks for 2 days.
• The train journey from Mashhad to Tehran - in spite of the fact that the carriages were clapped out, the whole experince was "real"
• The homestay at Zarabad - again not a hint of luxury, but the food was good
• Roodkahn Castle - the walk up and the castle when we got there.
• The Old Town of Baku
• The majority of lunches were in good restaurants with good food, certainly better than I had expected.
• The Iranian people were wonderful. Polite and curious as to why we were in Iran. Helpful and courteous and well just "nice"
• I bought a double side silk carpet in Tehran
• I am not usually a man for guides or drivers but the guide and the driver in Iran, Majid and Hossain, I thought were particularly good.
• I was impressed by Jake's organisation and attention to detail, though he was short on sleep for the first few days which gave him certain problems!
• Photos for the Boys Album and for Our Album

The Bad Things

• There were 13 in the group - Wild Frontiers promise a maximum of 12. This was a new tour, and they were wrong/greedy to push numbers up. This caused continuing problems throughout the trip
• There were no proper inroductions, the first 4 days were spent in the same jeep with 3 of the group to a jeep, and there were 4 futher nights where we were bedded down 4 to a room. The net result was that there was effectively no group, just a series of closed cliques. Two of the group refused to say a single word to me over the whole trip. In short there was no camaradery, of the sort that we found on previous groups.
• The hotels were uniformly bad/bland. With the exception of the President Hotel in Ashgabat, which was a substitution for the really bad hotel that we should have stayed in. They lacked any local character, and were "charmless" and "soviet" things did not work, and the staff did not care. Other alternatives were available at no extra cost, so Wild Frontiers really should have done some research on TripAdvisor and found better places to stay
• The Hotel/Guesthouse in Masuleh was without doubt one of the most revolting places in it has ever been my misfortune to stay. Dank, damp, smelly, dirty, peeling paint.
• The majority of dinners were bad (Mashhad and Tehran were very good dinners). I could not fathom how the ground agents could give us good restaurants for lunch and bad for dinner
• Our tour leader Jake, did a good job, but was hindered by the fact that he had never been to any of the 3 countries, and Wild Frontiers had not run this tour before, so no tour leader notes existed.

First stop Istanbul