We came down through the Salang Pass from Mazar, and then drove up a surprisingly good road to the Panjshir valley. The entry to the valley is an extremely defensible narrow gorge between steep cliffs. The Panjshir Valley was the great stronghold of the mujahideen in their battle against the Soviets, and there are frequent […]
Browsing Posts in Travel
Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley
October 8, 2009
Uzbek Customs: That Personal Touch
October 4, 2009
I crossed from Tajikistan into Uzbekistan at the Tursanzade-Denau crossing, on the road from Dushanbe to Termez. The Tajik exit formalities were straightforward, taking only about 25 minutes. On the Uzbek side, the immigration formalities were easy, but customs was a little ugly. Uzbekistan has tight currency controls. If you are carrying undeclared currency, the […]
Khojand: Alexandria-the-Furthest
September 29, 2009
Khojand (aka Khujand) is a sleepy industrial town in Northern Tajikistan. In an earlier age it was Leninabad. And in an even earlier one, it was Alexandria-the-Furthest. Yes, Big Alex was here, pursuing a Scythian army. In 329 b.c. he re-founded the existing city as Alexandria Eschate (“Alexandria the Farthest”) on the Jaxartes River. Unfortunately […]
Brezhnev's Rolls Royce & Stalin's ZiS
May 18, 2009
I took a trolleybus out to the delightful Riga Motor Museum. This hosts a fine collection of historic vehicles, but most famous is their exhibit of classic Kremlin cars, acquired back when Latvia was still an SSR. Their finest piece is probably the preserved wreckage of Leonid Brezhnev’s beloved Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. (Apparently there […]
Tretyakov Sculpture Garden
March 31, 2009
Moscow’s Tretyakov Sculpture Garden (aka the Art Muzeon Sculpture Park) hosts a wide variety of modern sculptures, including a number of abandoned Soviet statues. These statues appear to be consciously presented as debris from a past life – this doesn’t seem like an attempt to glorify the Soviet past, but merely to record it. It […]
Astana's Cosmonauts
March 20, 2009
Astana takes pride in being Kazakhstan’s visionary new capital. But in the older parts of town there are also many traces of the Soviet past. My favorite of these is a fine Soviet era mosaic outside the train station, showing a spectacled engineer and a waving cosmonaut. A nice reminder of Kazakstan’s broader role in […]
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