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This begins a series of blog posts about my Summer 2016 Sojourn to a variety of Soviet Satellite States (yay alliteration). In particular, I’m traveling to (in order): Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Moldova. I’m actually trying to write these posts while on the road…we’ll see how this goes.
As with the last several trips chronicled here, I’m traveling with Aaron through these countries. This part of my summer was originally conceived as a journey across the Silk Road, as I wanted to make some sort of larger journey given that vacation-starved full-time life is looming. I actually seriously considered the overland experiences offered by companies such as Oasis Overland and Dragoman, which at their most extreme are several-month journeys from Istanbul to Beijing, completely by overland vehicle. I of course came to my senses and realizing that three months of land travel while camping in the bush might be…non-ideal. But, these sorts of trips do look really cool in general, and I’m hoping to go on a shorter one sometime soon. We instead lined up a local tour operator, Steppe Journeys for a three week, East to West tour through the five formerly Soviet Stans (all of them except Pakistan and Afghanistan).
Of course, we couldn’t just stop there! We realized that the cheapest flight to Almaty, Kazakhstan actually stopped in Kiev, and it was no cost to add a couple of extra days there. This gave us time to do a Chernobyl day tour. We then found out that Turkmenistan had unfortunately denied our visa applications, for unknown reasons. Perhaps they thought that I was a hacker, or Aaron some regime-changing revolutionary. Or maybe it was just the caprice of one of the world’s most authoritarian states. We were only given a wonderfully official document, which stated in Turkmen: “These are the names of the people whose visa applications have been denied.” I am still quite sad about this, as I was incredibly excited to visit the Darvaza Gas Crater, often referred to as the “Door to Hell.” Hopefully I’ll be able to do a combined Iran/Turkmenistan trip in the near future. Instead, we decided to use the extra couple of days to visit Moldova, and in particular the breakaway state of Transnistria. It’s a small strip of land between Ukraine and Moldova, which apparently still wants to be part of the Soviet Union. It’s often described in Western media as a dangerous hotbed of corruption and criminal activity, an opinion echoed by a Romanian friend of ours. But, some poking around on the internet seemed to indicate that visiting is quite safe. We shall see in two weeks I suppose.
And so the journey begins, first up is Kiev and Chernobyl!