We take great joy in creating thematically booming trips like this. The Great Silk Road Across the Turugart Pass ties together whole passels of civilizations, epochs, and sceneries. And it tells the grand tale of one of humankind’s great arteries of trade and culture.

Anchored at its ends by Beijing and Tashkent, capital of what used to be Soviet (and before that, Russian) Central Asia (at least three major themes right there, from the Mongols to the Great Game to Marx), this epic journey traverses the heart of Asia, following one of the Road’s major branches. It skirts deserts (the Taklamakan is perhaps the world’s fiercest), lopes over great mountains (cutting the Pamir Knot’s northern strand, the Tien Shan Mountains), and crosses rare borders (the Sino-Kyrgyz frontier at 12,300-foot Turugart Pass, which GeoEx pioneered some years ago).

The roster of cities and sights we visit is soul-mortgagingly enticing: Dunhuang’s Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, Urumchi (the most landlocked place on earth), Kashgar, Samarkand, Bukhara, Uzbekistan, and the still-littlevisited Kyrgyz Republic.

Days 1 & 2: USA to Beijing • Day 3: Beijing • Day 4: fly to Xi’an • Day 5: Xi’an • Day 6: fly to Dunhuang • Day 7: Dunhuang and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas • Day 8: overnight train to Turfan • Day 9: Turfan • Day 10: drive to Urumchi • Day 11: fly to Kashgar • Day 12: Kashgar • Day 13: cross into Kyrgyz Republic, drive to Tash Rabat • Day 14: drive to Bishkek • Day 15: Bishkek • Day 16: fly to Tashkent • Day 17: to Samarkand 18: Samarkand • Day 19: drive to Bukhara • Day 20: Bukhara • Day 21: fly to Tashkent • Days 22 & 23: return to USA.

• General Description
• Health Precautions
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