Kazakhstan & Kyrgyzstan

Central Asia wasn’t on anyone’s radar when I booked it. I flew Emirates through Dubai to Astana, and from the minute I landed, nothing was what I expected. The Airbnb was in the Northern Lights towers in the heart of the city, and it gave me weird flashbacks to my old apartment in Hong Kong.

All the McDonald’s in Kazakhstan are called “I’M” — identical in every way except the name, because they were all owned by a Russian company that had to rebrand. We rented an AVIS and drove from Astana south through the steppe. Everywhere we went, there was nobody else there.

Then came the car chase. We’d pulled off the highway near Lake Alakol to photograph a sunset. A Land Cruiser pulled up behind us and three people got out. I drove off-road around a truck and accelerated. They chased us all the way back to the highway. Whatever they wanted was enough to chase us, but not enough to follow us onto a main road.

The rental company charged me $70 for a chunk of tire that got ripped off somewhere in the desert. The zoo had a “North American turkey” as an exotic exhibit, which might be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in another country.

We couldn’t take the rental across the border to Kyrgyzstan, so a driver named Sergey drove us six hours from Almaty to Bishkek. Horseback riding through the mountains of Chon Kemin National Park was the highlight of the entire trip — wide open valleys, snow-capped peaks, and not another tourist in sight.