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The Silk Road: The Route That Made the World

In T’s May 17 Travel Issue, four writers retrace the land routes of ancient explorers, looking at food, religion, art, poetry and silk-making.

The Silk Route, unpacked: highlights of Central Asia

By Central Asia specialists John

In the space of just a few days, you can travel from green mountain pastures to a land of desert, punctured by some of the most arrestingly designed Islamic architecture you might ever set eyes on.

Your journey along the Silk Route will be by no means luxurious ― but with sacrifices come immense gains. The hotels will be far from the best you’ve ever stayed in, and the food can be underwhelming. But, I think the scenic and architectural riches you’ll be exposed to more than make up for this.

You can travel the route in full, starting in China, or cherry-pick the parts you’d like: I suggest zooming in on Central Asia, taking in primarily Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan . It’s even possible to see the best of Uzbekistan in 11 days .

What was the Silk Route?

The Silk Route was actually a network of trading routes rather than one long road. Its roots stretch as far back as 207 BC, when silk was first produced in China and transported for trade. It eventually grew to link Asia , the Middle East and Europe , branching off into the Indian Subcontinent and Russia.

Silk Route trade didn’t stop at silk. Goods, from spices, teas, salt and sugar, to ceramics, ivory, jewels and furs, were shuttled back and forth as countries discovered new items produced in far-away lands. Less tangible exchanges also took place: ideas, languages, cultural practices, religions and even diseases were passed on between traders.

How to tackle the Silk Route

Some Silk Route itineraries will have you begin in Beijing and end in Tashkent , Uzbekistan, voyaging the width of China and Kyrgyzstan en route. But, I'm going to rip up the rule book and suggest that you focus your efforts on Central Asia.

For us, it’s the most intriguing section, full of juxtapositions. You’ll go from Kyrgyzstan’s mountains, lakes and plains to wide-open desert. From lakeside yurt camps to spindly minarets, and from relatively relaxed Kyrgyzstan to religiously conservative Uzbekistan and to the highly regulated bubble of Turkmenistan’s dictatorship.

The route I suggest starts off with a flight into Almaty, capital of Kazakhstan. You then cross overland into Kyrgyzstan, one of the most scenic drives of the trip (more on that shortly). From Kyrgyzstan you journey through Uzbekistan, hopping briefly into Turkmenistan before heading back over the border and beginning your homeward journey from the Uzbek city of Khiva .

Silk Route need-to-knows

The Silk Route throws up particular challenges. We’ll always try to make it as manageable as possible for you, though, and I think the rewards of experiencing this region more than make up for the snags you might encounter while visiting it.

Here are some quirks to be aware of:

As you’re covering such a vast distance, long journeys are part and parcel of a Silk Route tour. Some days you’ll spend seven or eight hours in a car. On the plus side, you’ll have private drivers, so you can spend your time gazing out of the window.
As well as lengthy car journeys, the trip also involves several domestic flights and some journeys aboard Uzbekistan’s efficient rail network.
Border crossings are memorable ― not always for the right reasons. You’ll have to contend with sometimes confusing paperwork and arcane bureaucratic formalities. Border guards can be stern, but if you’ve visited the USA before, it feels similar to passing through US customs.
Guides are not usually permitted to accompany you, and you might also have to walk up to 2 km (1.2 miles) with your luggage through no-man’s land when officially crossing a border. This is one trip where you should bring a rucksack, rather than a suitcase on wheels.
Despite the headaches of border crossings, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are visa-free for UK residents. That said, you will need a big, officious-looking visa, arranged in advance and embossed with a huge Sovietesque stamp, in order to enter Turkmenistan. But even this is very easy to arrange, and you don’t need to go to the Turkmen embassy in person.
Places to stay en route are usually no-frills: don’t expect swimming pools or luxe touches.
Food can also be uninspiring. It can be a little trickier if you’re vegetarian, though you can definitely get by. Tasty dishes to look out for include ashlan fu, a spicy Kyrgyz soup served with giant potato fritters; plov, a rice and meat dish; fresh kebabs; and Uzbekistan’s ice-cream. The bread is also a delight: often round, flat and coated in sesame or poppy seeds, it’s sometimes served warm straight from the oven.
You’ll have a different guide for each country, and they’ll accompany you throughout your time in that country. Sometimes quite young, these guides can be a bit happy-go-lucky, but they’re often good company and know their stuff.

Our recommended Silk Route trip: an overview

Crossing overland from Kazakhstan to Kyrgyzstan

Almaty, Kazakhstan is your starting point. Not because it has any intrinsic interest (in fact, it’s all a bit gauche: even the mountains overlapping the city are ablaze with branding and billboards) but because from here you can easily access the best bits of Kyrgyzstan.

It’s a full-day drive that takes you through both bucolic hills and the snaking red-rock corridor of the Charyn Canyon, which looks in places like a copycat version of the Grand Canyon.

The border crossing over into Kyrgyzstan is unusually straightforward ― just a chain-link fence and a couple of young officials sporting the biggest hats you’ve ever seen.

Kyrgyzstan: hiking, eagles, yurts and horses

Vivid-green steppe grasslands, lake-filled alpine valleys and sky-punching mountains… Kyrgyzstan has an untamed beauty. There’s something rather Wild West about it all.

Horses are a big part of life here, and you’ll see everyone astride them ― even toddlers. Hunting with eagles is equally a local discipline, and we can arrange for you to watch a demonstration. You can also stay in a yurt camp, waking to a view over lakes and mountainsides.

Kyrgyzstan’s other calling card is its hiking . You can walk among wildflower meadows, snowy mountainsides, and glacially carved valleys ― and there’ll hardly be another soul in sight. Choose from eight-hour-round hikes or gentler half-day options, skipping some of the ascents by jumping in a 4x4. Guides accompany you every step of the way.

What to see in Uzbekistan: mosques, minarets and madrasas

Fly from Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, to Tashkent , a city where Islamic religiosity rubs alongside Soviet tower blocks. As soon as you step off the plane, the topographical contrast with Kyrgyzstan is startling: you’re now among flat desert.

As you explore, you’ll see how Uzbekistan feels more developed as a country and better set up for overseas visitors than Kyrgyzstan. There are more pedestrian-only areas, major sites are lit up come evening and restaurants occupy every street corner.

Search for Uzbekistan online, and you’ll find images showcasing the country’s intricately decorated mosques, madrasas and public squares. In places like Khiva , Bukhara and Samarkand , their blue domes and patterned mosaics stand out against the surrounding sand-toned structures.

Some of the finest examples can be seen at Samarkand’s Registan , which you can visit by train from Tashkent. This centuries-old public square sits at the heart of the city and has played host to royal announcements, public executions and important ceremonies over the years. It’s framed by three large madrasas: Tilya-Kori, Sher-Dor and Ulugh Beg.

Built between the 15th and 17th centuries, the madrasas have towering minarets rising on both sides, huge domes, and archways that are symmetrically decorated with bright tiles. Guides point out the significance of the Sher-Dor’s decoration: it uses images of tigers, despite the general rule in Islam that living beings shouldn’t be depicted on religious buildings.

Make sure to return to the square at night, when local families come to mill about, and the madrasas are subtly illuminated against the night sky.

From here, you travel on to Bukhara. You can climb the gigantic, still-intact portion of The Ark , a fortified citadel where British emissaries Stoddart and Conolly were executed during the years of the ‘Great Game’. Then, nose your way through souq-like markets and ascend the Kalon Minaret for panoramas over the city.

The whole city has a more languid feel than Samarkand, and you don’t have to wander far on foot to see unpaved gravel backstreets that look much like they did during the Great Game years.

What to see in Turkmenistan: ghost cities, gas spectacles and a glimpse at life in a dictatorship

From Bukhara, it’s an hour’s drive to the Turkmen border, a two-hour border crossing, and then a four-hour drive to Merv. A long day, but you can wake up the next morning to explore these completely unrestored, ghostly and weather-beaten ruins in the middle of the desert.

A once thriving Silk Route town before Genghis Khan set his sights on it, it’s a place of untouched citadels and adobe mounds. It’s how parts of Uzbekistan would look had they not received a facelift, nor witnessed any Soviet influence.

What I like about Merv is that there’ll only be about ten other visitors there, if that ― it redefines the meaning of off-the-beaten-track.

From here, it’s a four-hour drive to the capital, Ashgabat. A city of white marble buildings, it hosts a cult of personality dedicated to the president: a gold statue of him once rotated to face the sun. Foreign internet and mobile sites, as well as non-state TV channels, are banned.

You can explore, with your guide, the city’s prized carpet shops and its old Russian quarter. I also recommend enjoying the comforts of your hotel: it’s one of the few plush ones en route, with a swimming pool and bar.

Our advice is to revel in this luxury while you can: for the next day, you’ll be taking a long overland drive through the desert to the Darvaza Gas Craters (purposely lit in the 1970s, and still burning bright).

It’s a real adventure ― just you, your guide, your desert campsite, the stars, and the fiery mouths of the craters. There’s no commerce around the site, for the moment. Your driver will cook a decent barbecue, and there may well be vodka passed around.

From Darvaza, you drive to the Uzbekistan border, where you’re treated to more ruins, Kunya-Urgench ― a decaying cluster of mosques, fortresses, minarets, mausoleums and a caravanserai, some dating from as early as the 11th century. If you’ve already been to India and you think these structures look familiar architecturally, you’d be right ― they went on to inspire Mogul Empire creations.

Uzbekistan: there and back again

After crossing the border, it’s a half-hour drive to Nukus, where you can visit the Savitsky Collection, one of the world’s best (yet least-known) avant-garde art museums. It includes once-banned pieces smuggled out of Stalinist Russia. On a less lofty note, the café opposite the museum does very good coffee and cake.

From here, you drive on to Elliq-Qalas, great sandstone fortresses soaring up from the sand out of nowhere. They’re part of Alexander the Great’s legacy ― a fittingly mighty finale to your trip.

Then it’s onto to Khiva, a city of (you guessed it) more madrasas and mosques. They’re covered in elaborate majolica and azure patterns. From Khiva you fly back to Tashkent to begin your homeward or onward journey.

Best time to follow the Silk Route

As you’re covering a vast area, it’s hard to travel at a time when everywhere is at its best. I recommend taking a trip along the Silk Route between April and early June or September and October, when it’s warm but not uncomfortably hot like it is between late June and August. That said, cars (especially in Turkmenistan) are of decent quality and have air conditioning.

If you’re particularly interested in driving over the high-altitude passes in Kyrgyzstan, postpone your trip until June to avoid the spring snows.

Uzbekistan discovered

10 days from $4,195pp

Highlights of central Asia: Kyrgyzstan's mountains & Uzbekistan's architecture

15 days from $5,420pp

Silk Route journey: western China, Kyrgyzstan & Uzbekistan

21 days from $10,970pp

Start thinking about your experience. These itineraries are simply suggestions for how you could enjoy some of the same experiences as our specialists. They’re just for inspiration, because your trip will be created around your particular tastes.

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National Geographic's 'cool list' of 2024 features 30 places to check out

National Geographic Traveler has published a roster of 30 places and experiences comprising its 2024 'cool list.'

About half the list is in Europe, including areas as diverse as the ruins of Pompeii and the mountains of Albania, which the magazine dubs "Europe's rising star."

But whether you prefer exploring a major world city, traveling for a sporting event or getting away from it all in a remote paradise, there's a nice mix here for just about every kind of explorer.

City breaks

For great food, museums and nightlife, head to some of the cities featured on National Geographic's list.

Among those getting recognition are Xi'an, China, which is best known for the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Terracotta Warriors and Lima, Peru, which has become one of the world's most acclaimed food destinations.

Meanwhile, Tainan, Taiwan's original capital, will be marking its 400th anniversary in 2024, which provides a good excuse to check out its eel noodles, turkey rice, tofu pudding and other street food classics.

States of being

In several cases, National Geographic highlighted entire states. There were two in the US, Texas and New York - each of which is about the size of an entire country in Europe.

National Geographic advises not only visiting New York City - the Empire State is also home to some natural beauty at Lake Placid and Niagara Falls. Meanwhile, Texas has several great spots for admiring 2024's total solar eclipse.

In Victoria, the Australian state home to Melbourne, a new "Great Victorian Bathing Trail" was credited with highlighting the area's lesser-recognized thermal springs.

Meanwhile, National Geographic also lauded the northern Indian state of Sikkim, which is nestled in the Himalayas near the country's borders with Bhutan and Nepal. Its crown jewel is Kangchenjunga, the world's third-tallest mountain.

And Nova Scotia, Canada - which is a province, not a state - was recognized for its Acadian culture. This ethnic group is made up of descendants of Canada's original French settlers, and their cultural heritage is reflected in Nova Scotia's delicious seafood dishes.

Natural wonders

The National Geographic list is heavy on beautiful natural destinations.

Places getting the nod include the Atacama Desert in Chile (the world's driest place), the lush Caribbean island of Dominica and the Andrefana Dry Forests of Madagascar, which are famed for baobab trees.

Scotland has expanded its UNESCO-designated biosphere reserve in Galloway and Southern Ayrshire, hooking them up to a nationwide circuit linking all 13 of Scotland's UNESCO sites.

See the full list below.

The 'cool list' 2024

Albanian Alps, Albania

Belfast, Northern Ireland

Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Europe by train

Galloway and Southern Ayrshire, Scotland

Nordland, Norway

North Yorkshire, England

Pompeii, Italy

Saimaa, Finland

Tartu, Estonia

The Euros, Germany

Valletta, Malta

Whisky in Wales

Wild Atlantic Way, Ireland

Atacama Desert, Chile

New York State

Miami, Florida

Nova Scotia, Canada

Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico

Ibera Wetlands, Argentina

Akagera, Rwanda

Andrefana Dry Forests, Madagascar

Sierra Leone

Sikkim, India

Tainan, Taiwan

Xi'an, China

Victoria, Australia

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These are the most exciting destinations for 2024, according to National Geographic

From places with prehistoric stories to hot spring havens, this list is sure to provide you with some fresh ideas

With 2024 just around the corner, travel publications are releasing list after list on where to travel next year. We've covered the most budget-friendly , most underrated and top trending destinations – but what about the world’s most exciting places to visit in 2024?

Well, the travel gurus at National Geographic have the answer, as they’ve just released The Cool List for 2024 . 30 destinations dotted all over the world have made the list, from the Albanian Alps to the Andrefana Dry Forests in Madagascar.

Europe dominates almost half of the list with 13 entries, including Malta ’s capital Valletta and Pompeii in Italy . Many destinations are now more reachable thanks to the vast improvements happening on railways. Perhaps most intriguingly, National Geographic predicts that Wales is going to be a hit travel destination in 2024.

According to The Cool List, Wales has a centuries-old Whisky tradition that’s often overshadowed by that of Ireland and Scotland . Welsh whisky has undergone something of a renaissance; Cardigan Bay and Penryn are home to two of the nation's four ‘geographical indication-sanctioned’ distilleries, which means you sample the whisky right at its source.

The Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico is another destination highlighted to be one of the most exciting for travel next year, and it’s no surprise, given that Mérida, the state’s largest city, also made the list of trending destinations according to Booking.com . The Yucatán landscape has a fascinating history: the meteor that wiped out dinosaurs landed here, forming extremely flat lands and the area’s famous cenotes, which were formed by the meteor’s fallout.

Sierra Leone also makes Nat Geo’s list. The country has recently become significantly more accessible thanks to the opening of a new airport. Nature is what most travellers venture here for, and there’s plenty to marvel at with its beaches, mountains, and native chimpanzees.

Other destinations include Sikkim in India , which boasts bountiful views of the Himalayas, and Victoria in Australia , thanks to a new road trip that visits the area's thermal hot springs.

Here are the most exciting destinations to visit in 2024, according to National Geographic

Albanian Alps , Albania
Belfast , Northern Ireland
Emilia-Romagna , Italy
Galloway and Southern Ayrshire , Scotland
Nordland , Norway
North Yorkshire , England
Pompeii , Italy
Saimaa , Finland
Tartu , Estonia
The Euros , Germany
Valletta , Malta
Wild Atlantic Way , Ireland

The Americas

Atacema Desert , Chile
Lima , Peru
New York State , US
Nova Scotia , Canada
Yucatán Peninsula , Mexico
Iberá Wetands , Argentina
Akagera , Rwanda
Andrefana Dry Forests , Madagascar
Sierra Leone
Sikkim , India
Tainan , Taiwan
Xi-an , China
South Pacific
Victoria , Australia

Where to travel in 2024

At Time Out Travel, we keep you updated on all the best places to travel to right now. Check out our recent ranking of the world’s coolest neighbourhoods , or head to our Travel hub and up-to-date travel guides page for some travel inspo for 2024 – plus all the best things to do, eat and drink around the world.

Did you see that these are the countries to visit in 2024, according to Lonely Planet ?

Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Time Out Travel newsletter for all the latest travel news.

Liv Kelly Contributing Writer

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For an adventure that will be the envy of many globe-trotters, travel part of an ancient route that connected the east and west, the iconic Silk Road. Discover the culture and traditions of hub cities along this sprawling network from China to Europe .

63 Silk Road tour packages with 141 reviews

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Tailor-Made China Adventure to the Silk Road with Daily Departure

10% deposit on some dates Some departure dates offer you the chance to book this tour with a lower deposit.

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Along the Silk Road Tour Uzbekistan - Private Tour (Standard Option)

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In-depth of Central Asia: Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan

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Uzbekistan : Experience the warmth of Central Asian hospitality and discover the ancient Uzbek culture.
Azerbaijan : Discover this amazing Central Asian country.
Caucasus : Admire the beauty of the largest lake in the Caucasus and enjoy the views from the top of Mount Gergeti.
Adventure : Stay in the Kyzylkum Desert in yurts and explore the Guri-Amir Mausoleum.
Ashgabat : Learn about the history and culture of Turkmenistan.
Tashkent : Taste the local culinary delights and explore the Old City.
China : Discover the Chinese part of the Silk Road.
Kazakhstan : Discover the Kazakhstan landscapes and visit the Valley of Castles.
Kyrgyzstan : Delve into culture and stay in yurts with the locals.
Iran : Experience Persian style nomad camp and marvel at the Zargos mountains.
Central Asia : Enjoy the best of this amazing region.
Georgia : Explore the ancient capital of Georgia and hike in the Caucasus mountains.

Silk Road Holiday and Vacation Packages Reviews

"I had a phenomenonal 10 days in Uzbekistan. The itinerary was beyond belief, every..."

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Premium Content

A bustling trackside market in Tbilisi offers a taste of what Georgians hope soon to gain: an economic boost as trains pass through their country en route from oil-rich Azerbaijan to trade partner Turkey and beyond.

The New Silk Road

A railroad through the southern Caucasus will soon connect Europe and Asia, fueling dreams and discord in the region.

The dynamite comes from Ankara. Ten tons, and it takes two days. The truck climbs carefully, screwing 2,500 feet up the mountains of northeastern Turkey, where the clouded sun makes faraway ice fields roll like a distant sea. This is beautiful, forbidding country, through which a new railroad will soon run.

Arslan Ustael awaits the dynamite in the snow, with night temperatures reaching 40 below. Standing before the rail tunnel, Ustael says that in this weather your spit freezes before it hits the ground. He is a young man still, 30, and free with Turkish good humor, even up here in the cold clouds waiting for the dynamite that will make the volcanic mountain agreeable to his demand to bore a tunnel through it. Free with good humor because he knows this is an undertaking that could make a young engineer's career: building the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway, an "Iron Silk Road" that will connect the oil-rich Caspian Sea region to Turkey—and beyond to Europe.

The travels of antiquity are tiring to contemplate. The 750-mile stretch of land between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea is known as the Caucasus, named for the mountain range through which Ustael is digging his tunnel. Before the region got swallowed up by the Russian Empire, the Caucasus served as a transit point between Europe and Asia; the old Silk Road passed through it. Yet transport between West and East has never been easy. For centuries, to get from one sea to the other, you had to paddle north up the Don River from the Sea of Azov, portage over the steppe, then drift down the Volga to the Caspian. Only when the Russians began building railroads over the Caucasus in the 19th century could you travel more directly across the region.

The Iron Silk Road will launch a new chapter in the history of the Caucasus. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the newly independent republics of the southern Caucasus—Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—regained strategic importance. A realization of the enormity of the oil and natural gas reserves lying beneath and along the Caspian Sea ignited a scramble to lay pipelines across the southern Caucasus to bring those resources to the European market. Today the pipelines are operational, and the BTK is being built to grease a trade boom, transporting European goods east and petroleum products west across the southern Caucasus. Once completed, by 2012, the railway will begin at the Azerbaijani capital of Baku and travel through the Georgian city of Tbilisi, before carrying on to Kars, a Turkish post town on the southwestern lip of the Caucasus region.

The participation of Turkey signals a new alignment in a region often viewed as Russia's backyard. Like the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline—which opened in 2005 to bring oil from Baku to the Turkish port city of Ceyhan, on the Mediterranean—the BTK railway is the result of an alliance between Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan; neighboring Armenia was deliberately left out of the party. And like the pipeline, this east-west corridor will provide an alternative to going through Russia to the north or Iran to the south. It is a more than $600-million project of economic development, social engineering, or shrewd geopolitics, depending on your point of view, which in the southern Caucasus shifts as quickly as the snow that obscures the mountain road.

For Ustael, chief of the tunnel operation on the Turkish-Georgian border, this railroad has become something else: a road to loneliness. Back in Trabzon, a temperate, Turkish Black Sea coastal town, his girlfriend's face clouded when she imagined two years in the Caucasus Mountains, for that is how long it will take to build this tunnel. She just couldn't do it. Ustael exhales, stirs the sugar through his tea. A man must make choices. Smoke hangs over the canteen. Workers chalky with tunnel dust stare distantly at the men in sun and shorts chasing a ball across the TV. Through the windows, another blizzard is mixing up the air. In World War I, 90,000 Ottoman soldiers waited in these mountains for the Russians to come. "Some froze to death without firing a shot," Ustael says. He grabs a hard hat and walks to the door. Tunnel work progresses in round-the-clock, three-hour shifts.

Work is likewise endless for the Turkish state, toiling to gain acceptance into the European Union (EU). Turks look indignantly at countries like Bulgaria and Romania that have already been accepted, places with much less developed economies and greater corruption. Turkey, the Cold War NATO ally, meanwhile, waits for an invitation that may never come. This "raises questions of fairness, at least," says N. Ahmet Kuşhanoğlu, the Turkish deputy director of transport in charge of railways. "Turkey's face is turned westward since two centuries." Now Turkey is looking east in order to make itself indispensable to the West. Once the Marmaray rail tunnel opens in 2013 beneath the Bosporus in Istanbul, trains from Baku will reach all the way to London. "It is easy to see that this railway shall serve Europe also," says Kuşhanoğlu.

Looking directly east, Turkey has lately sought to repair relations with its neighbor Armenia. In 1993 it had closed the border and shut down its rail service with Armenia as a sign of loyalty to Azerbaijan—a close Turkish ally with the same Muslim religion—after Christian Armenia helped ethnic Armenians in the Azerbaijan enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh wage a bloody war to secede. Last year in Zurich, under the watchful eyes of the EU and the U.S., Turkey signed an agreement with Armenia to mend diplomatic ties and reopen the border. But the Armenians then demanded that Turkey acknowledge that the 1915 massacres of its people constituted genocide, which Turkey is loath to do. For their part, the Turks began insisting on some resolution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Since neither is likely to happen anytime soon, the deal—and the opportunity for a rapprochement—collapsed last spring.

A bridge between Turkey and Armenia actually does exist, though most of it has crumbled into the Akhuryan River, which cuts deeply through a gorge that serves as the border between the two countries. The Silk Road city of Ani stands abandoned along this part of the border, its mosques and churches intact after a thousand years, its bazaars echoing in a winter wind. Beyond an electric fence and across the river, Armenian guard towers keep watch over the ruins.

Some 50 miles north of Ani, Ustael's workers continue to dig 13 feet every day. Once completed, the tunnel will run for a mile and a half, 1,300 feet beneath the surface. It will be one of the longest in Turkey, Ustael says, and everyone will know his name. "Maybe then I can go work someplace warm."

Ustael spends his downtime in Kars, 42 miles south of the border, the two-hour drive made eventful by the slippery fact of coming down the mountain. Along icy roads, the car twists through slopeside villages, past minarets and the mud roofs of stone huts overgrown with grass. A vast westward migration of people in search of jobs has robbed these villages of all but the least mobile. Foxes forage at the roadside, headlights igniting their eyes.

In Kars, the site of great 19th-century battles between Ottoman Turks and Russians, the hilltop citadel remains. The women stay indoors. The men walk arm in arm down the streets, savoring a drink of raki in the saloons that exist in this region of lax Islam. Raki tastes like the anise-flavored pastis of France, but there is little European refinement in Kars. That could change when the BTK links this city to Baku, its wealthy antipode on the Caspian, injecting new revenue into the local economy. The governor of Kars, Ahmet Kara, talks of how the railroad will transform Kars into a city "important in the world's eyes." Behind Kara hangs a photo of Mustafa Kemal, or Atat�rk, the first president of Turkey, who turned the Ottoman Empire into a modern, secular state, encouraging Western ways and outlawing the fez.

With a knit cap on his head and bundled in a thick anorak, Ustael watches a drill needle the far wall of the tunnel, making small stones out of solid rock. A front loader strains up the tunnel's incline, its bucket carrying a ton of freshly dislodged stone. It emerges from the tunnel and rolls into the blizzard, driving past Ustael toward a waiting truck. He says he wants to contribute to modern Turkey, to help bridge East and West. When the dynamite arrives, he laughs when he sees that it was made in China; it has already crossed this border once before.

There will be no explosions today. The mountain rock is soft enough for the drill to do its work without dynamite. Ustael looks down the tunnel toward Georgia. "We haven't found gold yet," he jokes. The stones tumble from the front loader into the truck, the crash almost drowning out his voice. "The Silk Road will live again."

They're not hiring in Akhalkalaki. There's no gold here either. Not much glitters in the hardscrabble hills near this town in the Georgian south. This is where the old railroad from Georgia's capital city of Tbilisi terminates. Beginning here, 60 miles of new rail will be laid, running south through Ustael's mountain tunnel to Kars. Another 75 miles of existing rail will be rehabilitated. Work begins with the thaw.

Akhalkalaki is in Georgia, but most of its residents are ethnically Armenian—and desperately poor. The factories in Akhalkalaki were dismantled after the Soviet collapse, their components sold off in the new capitalism. Since the agricultural collectives shut down, once fertile lands have overgrown with weeds. Bandits clipped the aluminum wires and copper connectors that helped propel rail cars, selling the metal in Iran and Turkey. The economy took a big hit in 2007, when the Russians closed a military base here.

There is no work, so the men go to Moscow, where they step into the orange jumpsuits of the street cleaner, sending money back home. Many who have stayed feel neglected by the central Georgian government. Protests have been frequent. Very few people in Akhalkalaki and the surrounding Javakheti region speak Georgian, and in the schools there is no one to teach the language. During the 1990s the prospect loomed that Javakheti could be Georgia's next breakaway region, like Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the north, which declared independence in the early 1990s but remain largely unrecognized.

Now Georgia is counting on the BTK railway to boost economic activity and help integrate this turbulent Armenian enclave into the rest of the country. When plans to open the railway were first announced, Georgia's Armenians opposed its construction, citing the unfairness of its bypassing Armenia. But today in Akhalkalaki there is a small hope that the new railroad will alleviate this long postcommunist endurance.

Grigoriy Lazarev stands guard at Akhalkalaki's outdoor bazaar. He takes potatoes on consignment from a local farmer, barters them for mandarins, then sells the fruit at the bazaar for 40 tetri a kilo, or about ten cents a pound. He would like to work on the railroad. "I am a mechanic, a welder, a master engineer," he says. "Selling mandarins is not good for my psyche." He stands before a pile of fruit in the trunk of his green Moskvitch, looking left and right at the many others who also sell mandarins here. In Soviet days this street had order, Lazarev says. "But everybody became sellers." He is 58 years old, has only enough teeth to chew soft food like citrus fruit. He has two young children, and a few tetri jangle in his coat pocket.

When Lazarev drove two hours to the town of Kartsakhi to apply for work on the railroad, the contractors turned him away. He visited the camp forming on the outskirts of Akhalkalaki, where Turkish and Azerbaijani skilled workers will soon congregate. You cannot operate a Komatsu excavator, they said. You do not speak Georgian.

The ministers in Tbilisi say Akhalkalaki will be the site of a critical station on the Iron Silk Road, where trains will switch between European and Russian rail gauges. For people in Akhalkalaki, it is difficult to imagine how they will benefit. Like Lazarev, many hundreds of locals have petitioned for railroad work, yet such work remains elusive.

Conditions have improved since Mikheil Saakashvili assumed the Georgian presidency—people in Akhalkalaki will admit that. Under Eduard Shevardnadze, they had electricity only five hours a day—while they slept—long enough for bread to bake in time for morning. It was subsistence living: no TV, poor roads, little interaction with Tbilisi, and a rationing of the wood that fueled the house stoves that kept people from freezing in their beds. Now there are a few good roads and electricity all day, if not running water in every home. It is often cold in Akhalkalaki, even indoors, and the abiding stress makes the people wander these streets weakly, nothing like the powerful Narts, the fabled giants that inhabited the Caucasus before humans arrived and that inspired them to carve mountains into kingdoms and then into nations.

Just 19 years old as a nation, Georgia is struggling through its adolescence. Seven years ago the Rose Revolution engendered all manner of youthful aspiration. Membership in NATO. Inclusion in the European Union. Bringing the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia under firm federal control. Reworking relations with Russia. Saakashvili wanted it all, wanted it quickly. If not for Georgia's northerly neighbor, he might have gotten it all.

The Russians have long felt a sense of entitlement toward Georgia, for they were the ones who folded Georgian nobility into their ranks during the 19th century, forming many principalities into a single governable entity, a Christian fortification in a region otherwise allied with the Ottomans or Persians. Russia also feels a deep emotional attachment to a land romanticized by Aleksandr Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy. But benevolence is a matter of perspective. Soon after Alexander I attempted to adopt Georgia in 1801, the widowed Georgian queen greeted the tsar's envoy with a dagger in the side, killing him.

More recently tensions spiked as Russia, fed up with Georgia's Western desires, closed the border between the two countries in 2006. Russia worries that if Georgia gains entry to the Western institutions it so esteems, this could inspire similar freethinking in the northern Caucasus—including the Russian regions of Dagestan, Ingushetiya, and Chechnya—which continues to shudder with explosions and assassinations that threaten Moscow's territorial hold.

The long-running tensions between Russia and Georgia escalated into war in the summer of 2008. Russia moved to assert control over the breakaway regions. Its troops routed Georgia's army, and Russia recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as new nations. It was a reminder that a small skirmish in these borderlands could spark a global showdown. Yet the EU and the U.S. were notably indisposed to intervene. Since the war, Georgia's pro-Western policy has stalled. Though the border between the two countries reopened last March, tensions are still high.

Like Prometheus, whom the gods chained to the Caucasus as punishment for giving humanity the power of fire, Georgia cannot escape its coordinates. Yet its position on the map may be its strongest asset. For NATO, the southern Caucasus is now viewed as a needed route for supplying the war in Afghanistan, ever since terrorist attacks in November 2008 began threatening the supply route through Pakistan's Khyber Pass. For Turkey, an important trade partner, Georgia is the gate to Central Asia. Armenia and Russia cannot trade with each other without going through Georgia. And Azerbaijani oil cannot reach the Mediterranean without passing through Georgia, earning the country $65 million in annual transit fees.

Georgia is a small player at the table, left to stack small chips. Indeed, the most significant impact of the Iron Silk Road on Georgia may prove to be the dismay it will create in the Black Sea ports of Batumi and Poti, the country's most dynamic economic centers, once freight can be diverted to Turkey instead. Still, Georgia can hope that if there's another conflict with Russia, European countries will cry foul if their trade through the southern Caucasus is disrupted.

In Akhalkalaki, Grigoriy Lazarev packs up his scale and its rusted one- and five-kilogram weights, and slowly walks away from the bazaar. He passes a funeral procession running along the main thoroughfare, a photo of the deceased man affixed to the windshield of a sedan. Arms linked, men walk up the mud of the street, women up the mud of the sidewalk.

Lazarev's small house was built in 1850, in the time of hard-willed Nicholas I. The roof leans severely, threatening to cave. Lazarev cannot pay to fix it. He and his family live off his mother's 90-lari (about $50) monthly pension. Still, when they have guests, Lazarev's wife, Liza, busies herself setting the table with what food they possess. A daughter, Gohar, sits at an old upright piano and practices her lessons, filling the small room with music and missteps. Lazarev grieves over his bad luck with the railroad and more generally, but not so loudly that his family will hear.

He rummages through a wardrobe and returns to the table. In his hand is a felt-backed shoulder board, its green fabric faded nearly to gray. It is the emblem of a lieutenant, an engineer with the Russian border service. "My grandfather served under Nicholas II," Lazarev says. "He built roads to Akhaltsikhe and Batumi." Lazarev smiles, a rare incident, and then the room goes dark. The electricity has gone out in Akhalkalaki, and the Lazarevs fall silent, but for the sound of the old piano.

It is electricity that initially impresses in Baku, its roadway lamps gilding the new asphalt from airport to city. Baku no longer supplies half the world's petroleum needs, as it did at the opening of the 20th century. But it feels like it does. In the past three years all manner of luxe stores have opened along the boulevard Neftchiler Prospekti, their windows reflecting the Caspian waters. Plans are progressing on a $4.5-billion, carbon-neutral resort on Zira Island, in the bay beyond the city. A Four Seasons Hotel will open shortly to house the guests drawn to Baku by the wealth of the state oil monopoly, located across the street. In the five years since the BTC pipeline began pumping oil out of the Caspian and money into Baku, Azerbaijan's economy has grown by more than 100 percent.

In the years after the former Turkish president, Süleyman Demirel, broached the topic of the Iron Silk Road in a Tbilisi speech in the late 1990s, the parties involved attempted to secure international funding for its construction. But the Armenian diaspora blocked all financing efforts, arguing convincingly that the routing of the railroad, like that of the oil pipeline before it, was a punitive gesture linked to Nagorno-Karabakh. Washington, the EU, and the World Bank stayed away. When the oil spigot turned on in 2005, briefly making Azerbaijan the world's fastest growing economy, the hesitance of international financiers no longer mattered. Azerbaijan can now afford its own portion of the railroad, upgrading 313 miles of outdated lines to the Georgian border. It is also loaning Georgia a few hundred million dollars for its section on neighborly terms—25 years at one percent annually. Magnanimity is a pleasure of abundance.

No train passed through Musa Panahov's hometown in the Azerbaijani west, so he went out looking for one. He graduated from the Moscow Transportation Institute during the time of Leonid Brezhnev, then joined the Soviet railroad fraternity. The Soviet Union administered the world's largest, by volume, rail system; all strategic goods were transported by train. This centrally commanded network was a key part of the national security infrastructure, protected and privileged. Train employees had their own separate hospitals, their own schools, even their own militia. "We had everything except a foreign ministry," says Panahov, now Azerbaijan's deputy minister of transport.

Railroads are less important in Azerbaijan today. Oil and gas predominate, according to the plan of the late Heydar Aliyev, the country's third president and primary citizen, who by force of will forged Azerbaijan into what it is today: the relatively secure, relatively independent economic dictator of the region. Aliyev possessed the foresight to invite foreign firms to cooperate in Caspian development, and he understood the importance of the Iron Silk Road. Panahov is the man laying another plank in Aliyev's plan for Azerbaijanis' continued independence.

Panahov, 51, unrolls a map of the southern Caucasus across a table in his office and slowly runs his fingers from east to west, from sea to sea. At this table he negotiated with transport ministers from Georgia and Turkey in discussions that lasted until early in the morning. Cherubic but with graying hair, he speaks in a soft voice as he delineates the numbers. Total length of the Iron Silk Road: 500 miles. Total annual cargo capacity: 25 million tons. He speaks of the Azerbaijanis who fled to Turkey to escape communism. "It gives me a sense of happiness to connect brothers again," he says.

Azerbaijan became a Muslim parliamentary republic in 1918 and enjoyed that status for a couple of years. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, however, little about Azerbaijan is visibly Muslim or parliamentarian. It is difficult to locate a minaret or an honest vote in Baku, less so a Bentley. Prosperity and social equality need not be strangers, but when a country has oil, it is tempting to focus on the former at the expense of the latter. More tempting still when the world needs what it has to give. The BTC is the only pipeline that delivers non-Russian, non-OPEC, non-Arabic oil to Mediterranean tankers. With the global oil supply diminishing, Azerbaijani influence has only risen.

Social justice is not a topic of public debate in Azerbaijan. More important to those in power is the fact that this small nation has managed to survive—and now thrive—in a difficult neighborhood. As one official said, "The optimists live in Georgia, the people who are complaining all the time live in Armenia, but the realists live in Azerbaijan."

Or rather in Baku. A short ride on the existing rail leading northwest from the capital reveals not political realists but reality itself, the hovels that house those who have not felt the benefits of Baku's oil boom. A quarter of Azerbaijanis live below the poverty line.

These train cars retain the cracked gloss of Soviet adornment, frills and curtains that are rough to the touch, landscape paintings that hang in the spaces between the windows. A sorority of railway workers in starched uniforms tends to the train as it rolls through a world cleanly separated from Bakuvian luxury. One woman shovels coal into a furnace that heats the car's interior.

Musa Panahov knows these trains, knows they do not rival their German, Japanese, or American counterparts. He is a railway man in an oil country. "But oil and gas will end someday," he says, smiling. "The railroad will live always."

Trading Silk for Horses: The Surprisingly Simple Origins of the Silk Road

While rome was falling, these powers were on the rise.

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Silk Road Threads through History

National Geographic Archaeology Fellow Fredrik Hiebert explains the significance of Afghanistan to the ancient Silk Road—and how the country might develop a new Silk Road in the future.

Geography, Human Geography, Physical Geography, Religion, Social Studies, World History

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Many traders met on the Silk Road . It was an ancient system of roads and trading posts .

It linked Asia with regions along the Mediterranean Sea.

The country we today know as Afghanistan was in the center of the Silk Road .

Afghanistan has many large mountains. These actually helped ancient traders travel, says Dr. Fredrik Hiebert. He is a National Geographic Society archaeologist. Archaeologists study objects from long ago.

All those mountains mean there are valleys. These are like natural trails. It was easy for traders to follow along the valleys and rivers, says Hiebert.

Graveyard Of Empires

Afghanistan sits between the China Sea and Mediterranean Sea. People from Asia, eastern Africa and southern Europe all met there.

Afghanistan's location on the Silk Road helped it gain great wealth. It had many farming products, minerals and animals to trade, Hiebert says.

More than goods were traded. Ideas were exchanged on the Silk Road, too.

Buddhism , for example, started in India. It spread to Afghanistan before moving to China, Hiebert says.

Bamiyan is in central Afghanistan. It was a center for the religion Buddhism . The area had statues of Buddhas that were 60 to 90 meters (200 to 300 feet) tall. They towered high up on cliffs . These were easy for traders to see, Hiebert notes.

The statues were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. The Taliban is a violent extremist group. It is fighting the government to control the country.

Traders also shared ideas about art. Evidence of Greek building style was found in ruins in northeastern Afghanistan. Messages to Greek gods have been found on ancient objects there.

Afghanistan's wealth also made it a target. Other empires hoped to take it over.

Still, Afghanistan has been nearly impossible to conquer . Alexander the Great could not take it. The British Empire could not take it in the 1800s, either.

Afghanistan is "really cold in the winter," says Hiebert. It is also "really hot in the summer."

The area's weather and mountains also have divided Afghan people.

Mountains block off groups from one another. When groups meet in the valleys, there is sometimes fighting, Hiebert says.

New Silk Road

For the past 30 years, Afghanistan has been torn apart by war. Still, Hiebert says, Afghanistan has lasted for 5,000 years. He thinks it can survive once the country becomes stable again.

Large amounts of underground copper were just found there, he says. Hiebert wonders if another Silk Road could happen.

Hiebert thinks that old trade partnerships could be renewed soon. However, silk will not be traded, he says. Oil and gas will be.

Still, Afghanistan faces much trouble. It could take many years to heal from it, he says.

Big Find In 2003, Dr. Fredrik Hiebert was among a group of archaeologists who witnessed the rediscovery of the “Bactrian hoard,” a bounty of 20,000 gold, silver, and ivory objects that had been hidden in Afghanistan’s presidential palace in Kabul 15 years earlier. Read more about the Bactrian hoard here.

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The New Silk Road

A railroad through the southern Caucasus will soon connect Europe and Asia, fueling dreams and discord in the region.

Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, Human Geography, Social Studies

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The dynamite comes from Ankara. Ten tons, and it takes two days. The truck climbs carefully, screwing 760 meters (2,500 feet) up the mountains of northeastern Turkey, where the clouded sun makes faraway ice fields roll like a distant sea. This is beautiful, forbidding country, through which a new railroad will soon run.

Arslan Ustael awaits the dynamite in the snow, with night temperatures reaching 40 below. Standing before the rail tunnel, Ustael says that in this weather your spit freezes before it hits the ground. He is a young man still, 30, and free with Turkish good humor, even up here in the cold clouds waiting for the dynamite that will make the volcanic mountain agreeable to his demand to bore a tunnel through it. Free with good humor because he knows this is an undertaking that could make a young engineer's career: building the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway, an "Iron Silk Road " that will connect the oil-rich Caspian Sea region to Turkey—and beyond to Europe.

The travels of antiquity are tiring to contemplate. The 1200 kilometer (750-mile) stretch of land between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea is known as the Caucasus , named for the mountain range through which Ustael is digging his tunnel. Before the region got swallowed up by the Russian Empire, the Caucasus served as a transit point between Europe and Asia; the old Silk Road passed through it. Yet transport between West and East has never been easy. For centuries, to get from one sea to the other, you had to paddle north up the Don River from the Sea of Azov, portage over the steppe, then drift down the Volga to the Caspian. Only when the Russians began building railroads over the Caucasus in the 19th century could you travel more directly across the region.

The Iron Silk Road will launch a new chapter in the history of the Caucasus . After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the newly independent republics of the southern Caucasus —Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—regained strategic importance. A realization of the enormity of the oil and natural gas reserves lying beneath and along the Caspian Sea ignited a scramble to lay pipelines across the southern Caucasus to bring those resources to the European market. Today the pipelines are operational, and the BTK is being built to grease a trade boom, transporting European goods east and petroleum products west across the southern Caucasus . Once completed, by 2012, the railway will begin at the Azerbaijani capital of Baku and travel through the Georgian city of Tbilisi, before carrying on to Kars, a Turkish post town on the southwestern lip of the Caucasus region.

The participation of Turkey signals a new alignment in a region often viewed as Russia's backyard. Like the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline—which opened in 2005 to bring oil from Baku to the Turkish port city of Ceyhan, on the Mediterranean—the BTK railway is the result of an alliance between Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan; neighboring Armenia was deliberately left out of the party. And like the pipeline, this east-west corridor will provide an alternative to going through Russia to the north or Iran to the south. It is a more than $600-million project of economic development, social engineering, or shrewd geopolitics , depending on your point of view, which in the southern Caucasus shifts as quickly as the snow that obscures the mountain road.

For Ustael, chief of the tunnel operation on the Turkish-Georgian border , this railroad has become something else: a road to loneliness. Back in Trabzon, a temperate, Turkish Black Sea coastal town, his girlfriend's face clouded when she imagined two years in the Caucasus Mountains, for that is how long it will take to build this tunnel. She just couldn't do it. Ustael exhales, stirs the sugar through his tea. A man must make choices. Smoke hangs over the canteen. Workers chalky with tunnel dust stare distantly at the men in sun and shorts chasing a ball across the TV. Through the windows, another blizzard is mixing up the air. In World War I, 90,000 Ottoman soldiers waited in these mountains for the Russians to come. "Some froze to death without firing a shot," Ustael says. He grabs a hard hat and walks to the door. Tunnel work progresses in round-the-clock, three-hour shifts.

Looking directly east, Turkey has lately sought to repair relations with its neighbor Armenia. In 1993 it had closed the border and shut down its rail service with Armenia as a sign of loyalty to Azerbaijan—a close Turkish ally with the same Muslim religion—after Christian Armenia helped ethnic Armenians in the Azerbaijan enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh wage a bloody war to secede. Last year in Zurich, under the watchful eyes of the EU and the U.S., Turkey signed an agreement with Armenia to mend diplomatic ties and reopen the border . But the Armenians then demanded that Turkey acknowledge that the 1915 massacres of its people constituted genocide , which Turkey is loath to do. For their part, the Turks began insisting on some resolution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Since neither is likely to happen anytime soon, the deal—and the opportunity for a rapprochement—collapsed last spring.

Some 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Ani, Ustael's workers continue to dig four meters (13 feet) every day. Once completed, the tunnel will run for a mile and a half, 395 meters (1,300) feet beneath the surface. It will be one of the longest in Turkey, Ustael says, and everyone will know his name. "Maybe then I can go work someplace warm."

Ustael spends his downtime in Kars, 68 kilometers (42 miles) south of the border , the two-hour drive made eventful by the slippery fact of coming down the mountain. Along icy roads, the car twists through slopeside villages, past minarets and the mud roofs of stone huts overgrown with grass. A vast westward migration of people in search of jobs has robbed these villages of all but the least mobile. Foxes forage at the roadside, headlights igniting their eyes.

In Kars, the site of great 19th-century battles between Ottoman Turks and Russians, the hilltop citadel remains. The women stay indoors. The men walk arm in arm down the streets, savoring a drink of raki in the saloons that exist in this region of lax Islam. Raki tastes like the anise-flavored pastis of France, but there is little European refinement in Kars. That could change when the BTK links this city to Baku, its wealthy antipode on the Caspian, injecting new revenue into the local economy. The governor of Kars, Ahmet Kara, talks of how the railroad will transform Kars into a city "important in the world's eyes." Behind Kara hangs a photo of Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk, the first president of Turkey, who turned the Ottoman Empire into a modern, secular state, encouraging Western ways and outlawing the fez.

They're not hiring in Akhalkalaki. There's no gold here either. Not much glitters in the hardscrabble hills near this town in the Georgian south. This is where the old railroad from Georgia's capital city of Tbilisi terminates. Beginning here, 95 kilometers (60 miles) of new rail will be laid, running south through Ustael's mountain tunnel to Kars. Another 120 kilometers (75 miles) of existing rail will be rehabilitated. Work begins with the thaw.

Akhalkalaki is in Georgia, but most of its residents are ethnically Armenian—and desperately poor. The factories in Akhalkalaki were dismantled after the Soviet collapse, their components sold off in the new capitalism . Since the agricultural collectives shut down, once fertile lands have overgrown with weeds. Bandits clipped the aluminum wires and copper connectors that helped propel rail cars, selling the metal in Iran and Turkey. The economy took a big hit in 2007, when the Russians closed a military base here.

When Lazarev drove two hours to the town of Kartsakhi to apply for work on the railroad, the contractors turned him away. He visited the camp forming on the outskirts of Akhalkalaki, where Turkish and Azerbaijani skilled workers will soon congregate . You cannot operate a Komatsu excavator, they said. You do not speak Georgian.

More recently tensions spiked as Russia, fed up with Georgia's Western desires, closed the border between the two countries in 2006. Russia worries that if Georgia gains entry to the Western institutions it so esteems, this could inspire similar freethinking in the northern Caucasus —including the Russian regions of Dagestan, Ingushetiya, and Chechnya—which continues to shudder with explosions and assassinations that threaten Moscow's territorial hold.

Like Prometheus, whom the gods chained to the Caucasus as punishment for giving humanity the power of fire, Georgia cannot escape its coordinates . Yet its position on the map may be its strongest asset. For NATO, the southern Caucasus is now viewed as a needed route for supplying the war in Afghanistan, ever since terrorist attacks in November 2008 began threatening the supply route through Pakistan's Khyber Pass. For Turkey, an important trade partner, Georgia is the gate to Central Asia. Armenia and Russia cannot trade with each other without going through Georgia. And Azerbaijani oil cannot reach the Mediterranean without passing through Georgia, earning the country $65 million in annual transit fees.

Lazarev's small house was built in 1850, in the time of hard-willed Nicholas I. The roof leans severely, threatening to cave. Lazarev cannot pay to fix it. He and his family live off his mother's 90-lari (about $50) monthly pension. Still, when they have guests, Lazarev's wife, Liza, busies herself setting the table with what food they possess . A daughter, Gohar, sits at an old upright piano and practices her lessons, filling the small room with music and missteps. Lazarev grieves over his bad luck with the railroad and more generally, but not so loudly that his family will hear.

In the years after the former Turkish president, Süleyman Demirel, broached the topic of the Iron Silk Road in a Tbilisi speech in the late 1990s, the parties involved attempted to secure international funding for its construction. But the Armenian diaspora blocked all financing efforts, arguing convincingly that the routing of the railroad, like that of the oil pipeline before it, was a punitive gesture linked to Nagorno-Karabakh. Washington, the EU, and the World Bank stayed away. When the oil spigot turned on in 2005, briefly making Azerbaijan the world's fastest growing economy, the hesitance of international financiers no longer mattered. Azerbaijan can now afford its own portion of the railroad, upgrading 500 kilometers (313 miles) of outdated lines to the Georgian border. It is also loaning Georgia a few hundred million dollars for its section on neighborly terms—25 years at one percent annually. Magnanimity is a pleasure of abundance.

Originally published by National Geographic Magazine and natgeo.com in August, 2010.

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The Silk Road: An adventure concludes

As our digital nomad reaches the end of her 47-day silk road journey, she reflects on the six countries, 7,456 miles and 15 unesco world heritage sites encountered along the way..

Istanbul, Turkey.

"Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living." – Miriam Beard

When Marco Polo returned home to Venice, dressed in Mongol rags, after 24 years tracing strands of the Silk Road, his relatives promptly disowned him. Luckily, we run no such risk. In 47 days, we've managed to cover what would have taken a camel caravan — capable of travelling 20 miles a day — a minimum of 400 days. To achieve it, we replaced four-legged dromedaries with a few trains, planes, buses and boats, but nevertheless have stuck to the original east-west route, taking in six countries, 7,456 miles, 15 UNESCO World Heritage Sites and accumulated a camel-load of souvenirs (like good merchants) along the way.

Of course, the statistics don't capture the encounters and experiences — the mundane and the remarkable. From bidding adieu to sleep on overnight trains in China, to playing a starring role in countless Uzbek wedding photos. From the repetitive plates of bland beef and rice offered up in Turkmenistan, to the jovial supper invitations offered by every Iranian we met. From mastering the art of wearing the hijab, to learning how to pick out the prettiest yak at Kashgar Animal Market. From practising our most innocent-looking border-crossing faces, to sleeping by the stove in the home of a Kyrgz herdsman.

There were places where the Silk Road connection was strong, such as Kashgar, China, and others where it was hanging by a thread, such as in Sivas, Turkey. And there were times when I would've liked to linger longer. Incredibly, in Iran, I met another tour group who asked what we were doing. When I explained, one elderly lady looked impressed: "You're travelling the length of the Silk Road in two weeks?" Immediately assuming all itineraries must be compressed into a fortnight. Today, two months is a luxury most can't afford, let alone Marco Polo's 24 years.

And in the rush — where most of us fly in and fly out — there's a tendency to view each country in isolation. Extended journeys like these reveal the slow metamorphose of facial features, foods and scenery, until it hits home how flimsy geographical borders really are. How connected we are by our ideas, inventions and idiosyncrasies. As James Millward points out in The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction, what makes the Silk Road so unique is that 'it stands for the idea that humanity has thrived most when connected across its far-flung habitats by exchanges of goods, ideas, arts and people'.

Now, as I sit overlooking the boats plying the Bosphorus, a steaming cup of Turkish tea in front of me, I wondered if the journey shows on me. The clothes are dirtier, but the mind a little richer. Around me the mood of the locals is as grey as the clouds hanging overhead. They hurry past, heads down, unaware of this Silk Road traveller that has journeyed thousands of miles to sit in this city. Like the tealeaves, I'll need to let everything settle.

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