The Spirit of Adventure is here...
Trip Format
This Trans-Asia Recce is a no frills trip; we will be camping for about 10 nights for each sector and at campsites, everybody will have to chip in to set up camp, do cooking, cleaning and also Night Guard duties on rotation while the other members snore away.
Only when we are in developed areas and cities where locating a suitable campsite are not possible, will we find a safe budget hotel for the night.
The whole group will be as "1 group" and decisions will be on "one for all & all for one". Camaradie will be the key to the overall extremely enjoyable experience. Even though, the members will be from differentage groups, backgrounds and personality, all will have to be totally co-operative and have perfect common sense. Group size will be between 30 – 35 people.
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Highlights of the expedition are Turkey, Russia, Central Asia (country names ending with the “tans”), traversingBukhara, Samarkand in the Fabled and Romantic Silk Road, into Xinjiang, then to the Home of Genghis Khan, Mongolia and also to Manchuria, now HeiLong Jiang, China.
From Istanbul, Turkey where Asia meets Europe on the Bhosphorus River, we head west to Georgia, formerly part of Russia, then north along the Caspian Sea into Russia and going round the top of this big inland sea to enter Kazakhstan, then to Bukhara, Uzbekistan leading us to Dushanbe in Tajikistan and then to Kyrgyzstan.
These places believe me is OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD, their cultures, terrain, sceneries, food has remained intact with the test of time, combined with green-eyed beautiful people !!!
What’s more, we are going Camping too !!!
Then, we continue on the SILK Road to Kashgar in Xinjiang, even the city spells a mystery, and we have timed it to arrive for the weekend, to visit the MUST see, Sunday Market, which has been on for the last 100 years !! Anybody wants to buy a Camel or a Lion, well here is the place !!
Cutting across the plains of Xinjiang, we camp on the banks of the famous Qinghai Lake, which is best viewed in August. From Qinghai, it is to Gansu to Lanzhou, an important Cross-roads of the Silk Road, then heading north to Yinchuan, Ningxia to visit the world famous Mosques that adopts a Chinese Temple design.
Home of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan is in endless vast grasslands of Inner Mongolia. We are even giving Baotou, their Provincial capital a miss to sleep in the Mongolian Yurts ( a round Tent with a fire hole in the centre top, the way Genghis Khan slept ).
All the way along the Mongolian Grasslands and Plains, to Hei Long Jiang ( Black Dragon River, formerly known as Manchuria), to Harbin, then to the most eastern point on the Continent of Asia to Chang Bai Shan (Great White Mountains), before we head south to Qin Huang Dao (Golden Islands of the Yellow Sea) to Tianjin in Hebei Province.