Destination guides
What we would tell you if you rang and asked. When to go, how many nights a place is worth, and what it honestly costs, written by the people who run the trips rather than lifted from a guidebook.
Uzbekistan
Tashkent
Where almost every Uzbekistan trip begins, and a city most people write off before they arrive.
Bukhara
A living old town rather than a monument, and the one travellers tend to wish they had given another night.
Samarkand
Timur's capital, and the reason most people come to Uzbekistan in the first place.
Amirsoy and the Tashkent mountains
The western Tian Shan, an hour and a half from the capital, and the reason Uzbekistan is not only desert cities.
Georgia
Tbilisi
Balconied houses stacked under a fortress, sulphur baths in the old quarter, and a food scene that has quietly become one of the most interesting in the region.
Gudauri
Georgia's main ski resort, high on the Georgian Military Highway below the Jvari Pass.
Kutaisi
An old capital in western Georgia, with two UNESCO monasteries and a cave system on its doorstep.
Bakuriani
The gentler of Georgia's two ski resorts, in pine forest above the Borjomi valley.
Batumi
Georgia's Black Sea city, subtropical, and unlike anywhere else in the country.
Kazbegi and the Georgian Military Highway
Gergeti Trinity Church alone on its ridge at 2,170 metres, with Mount Kazbek behind it.
Armenia
Yerevan
A pink tufa-stone capital with Mount Ararat filling the horizon, close enough to look reachable and across a closed border.
Tsaghkadzor
A mountain resort an hour from Yerevan, with a medieval monastery in the middle of it.
Goris and Tatev
The far south of Armenia, and the cable car that made Tatev monastery reachable in a day.
Azerbaijan
Baku
A UNESCO-listed walled city under three flame-shaped towers, on the edge of the Caspian.
Gabala
Green foothills of the Greater Caucasus, three hours inland from Baku and a different country in every way that matters.
Shahdag
Azerbaijan's high mountain resort, inside a national park in the north of the country.
