The Stans vacations

While you can opt for a tailor made tour with a private driver, the vast majority of our Stans vacations are fully escorted small group tours, and for good reason. When you have such a vast area to cover, and so many points of interest to explore, you want an itinerary that doesn’t waste any time and runs smoothly. Our small group tours, which take part typically over two to four weeks, are accompanied by professional tour leaders throughout. They handle all of the logistics of getting from A to B on time, and connect with our brilliant local guides at every stage. Some of our Stans tours also use train travel where possible. This is a great way to meet people from many different backgrounds as they go about their commutes, and reduces your vacation’s carbon footprint as well.

Our trips also lean on their excellent and longstanding connections in local communities throughout the region, to ensure you enjoy unique cultural encounters that you would be difficult to arrange otherwise. In Kyrgyzstan, for instance, you can share a meal at a women's cooperative that brings together craftspeople from surrounding villages, learning about their skills and their lives. You can meet a local eagle hunter in Kyrgyzstan, too. And throughout your adventures you will have opportunities to visit local people, often in their own homes, which can often prove some of the cultural highlights of a trip.

Our Stans vacations connect the capital cities, and also the ancient cities along the Silk Road. But they also explore this region’s magnificent wilderness areas, many of which are almost completely empty expanses that see very few tourists, despite their great natural beauty.

Kazakhstan, a vast country, is home to Altyn-Emel National Park, which spans an area of 4,600km². Tours take in the famous ‘singing dune’, so named because it sounds like a pipe organ when the wind moves the sand, and the ancient burial mounds of Besshatyr. Aksu-Zhabagly Nature Reserve is a significant wildlife watching destination, with bears, ibex, and even snow leopards at high elevations.

In Kyrgyzstan’s Ala Archa National Park, you can enjoy trekking by the side of rivers, waterfalls and glaciers, and hiking Tajikistan’s gorgeous alpine landscapes you can visit rural homestays, and perhaps encounter nomadic pastoralists.

Visits to wilderness areas on our Stans tours are led by local guides and rangers, as there’s no one better to explain the significance of these areas and how their ecosystems work. When staying overnight you’ll be in locally owned accommodation wherever possible. Many of these places are still new to international tourism, and our vacations seek out properties that have policies around the proper disposal of waste and energy conservation. By doing so, we hope that they will help responsible travel values to flourish as tourism to the Stans’ wilderness areas develops.

The history of the Stans was largely shaped by three conquerors who arrived centuries apart: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Timur. What was it that made Central Asia so popular? The Silk Road, a spidery network of trade routes between east and west, along which passed caravans bearing spices, precious stones and metals, tea, porcelain, wine and of course silk. Not to mention information, perhaps the most valuable commodity of all. The Silk Road didn’t just allow traders to mingle, but cultural, scientific and religious ideas – making it hugely influential to modern day civilisations.

Our Stans vacations are a thrilling way to explore the Silk Road, and there are many different itineraries available, from two-week tours that take in two or three countries, to month-long epics that cover the entire region. Many of the ancient sites you’ll visit, such as those of Samarkand, Khiva or Osh, rely on visitor entrance fees for their preservation.

Touring on the Silk Road usually involves long journeys by road, and road surfaces here are notoriously poor, so that drive times are difficult to estimate. For that reason, some of our Stans tours will also include overnight trains, or flights between capitals. What they all have in common is that wherever possible you’ll stay in locally owned accommodation, where meals will typically use ingredients sourced from nearby farms and markets. The Silk Road may have faded, but when travelled responsibly, it can still help sustain the communities along the way.