The Big Picture

TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN

There have been a lot of requests for maps. I understand. I love maps; I paper my walls with them. Unfortunately, the actual map of where I've been for the last three weeks, from the tour company, is in a "corrupt or unrecognizable file format," so I'm having to cobble together some substitutes from our good friends at Google Image Search. There are some things the computer is surprisingly bad at, and maps are one.

A bit hard to read above, I know, but I like the way it spotlights the very area I've been concentrating on. The funny thing about my trip, as I was just discussing with the tour leader, is that I spent just over a week crossing all of China (Beijing to Urumqi, on to Almaty, Kazakhstan), a distance of more than 3000 miles; I'm now about to spend just under a week covering Tashkent, Uzbekistan to Moscow, a roughly similar distance; yet I've spent three solid weeks circling from Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) to Kashgar (China) to Fergana (Tajikistan) to Kiva (Uzbekistan) and finally here (Tashkent, Uzbekistan). A lot of points of interest in between, obviously, but overall an almost ludicrously short distance compared to what I did on my own.