At some point last year Ileana asked why don’t we go to Samarkand. Very good question, why not? Let’s go. We looked it up, saw that we might need a few days, but if we go there we should also go to Khiva and Bukhara. It might take 10 days, best time to visit should be in the spring or fall. Slowly over several months that idea turned into a trip of three and a half months (104 days) around the world in which we visited 14 countries. Here is a brief summary of what we did.
First some numbers:
- UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS) - 36 (in the text below the number in parentheses identifies the running count).
- Tentative World Heritage Sites (TWHS) - at least 15
- Countries - 14: eight new for both of us, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Oman, Bhutan, the Netherlands was new for me, revisiting England, Turkey, EAU and Thailand, plus of course, Romania.
- Flights - 23, for 29300 miles (46900 km), and at least 75 hours.
- Road trips - give or take 9200 miles (14700 km), some of it on highways and some of it on really picturesque “roads”.
- 20921 pictures to go through to select a few for you...
Our goal to visit UNESCO World Heritage sites played a major role in the planning of this trip. Ileana had seen a couple more than me and to make it easier to keep track, I asked her to take me to two of them: London’s Kew Garden (245) and Amsterdam’s 17th century Canal Ring Area (248).
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| Kew Garden, up in the temperate house |
