Ken Powell a seasoned globe-trotter and experienced photographer (powellphotography.ca), blogs (powellponderings.com) about his journey with Adventures Abroad’s 21 Day Five Stans Tour, which covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. His insights, images, and expertise offer a wonderful glimpse into this extraordinary tour.

The well-known travel writer Colin Thubron said it well: “To follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost. It flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished, leaving behind it the pattern of its restlessness.”

One can’t talk about the “Five Stans” without reference to the Silk Road. Scorching deserts, high mountain passes and caravan towns defined the route (or as it was then, routes) transporting silk and various other goods from western China to eastern Europe from as early as the second century BC until the mid-15th century when the Ottoman Empire closed off trade with the West. Nearly 6,500 kilometres long, it connected the Eastern and Western worlds.

And it connected it through Central Asia. Caravans with camels or other pack animals crossed these diverse and rugged “Stans”. Our own journey took us through towns and cities that grew because of their geography along one of the Silk Road routes: Bukhara, Khiva, Samarkand, and Tashkent (the capital) in Uzbekistan; Ashgabat (the capital) and Mary (Merv in ancient time) in Turkmenistan; Almaty in Kazakhstan; Bishkek the capital of Kyrgyzstan; and ancient Penjikent in Tajikistan, along with its capital, Dushanbe.

The “silk” refers to the trade of silk textiles, invented around 2700 BC in China (which monopolized production until the secrets spread) and sold to an adoring market in Europe and beyond. (Its production technique was a fiercely guarded secret within China for some 3,000 years, with imperial decrees sentencing to death anyone who revealed to a foreigner the process of its production.)

Other trade products came along – tea, perfume, spices, porcelain, paper, gunpowder, jade and precious stones – an amazing collection of sought-after goods that warranted transport over great distances and difficult, dangerous terrain. Commodities returned back along the route too, such as glassware, wool, manufactured goods, and even horses. Few merchants travelled the full distance, as middlemen would take sections of it. Local knowledge was critical, especially in dealing with and protecting, those who lived along the way.

Other things passed along this route as well: religion, languages, and cultures developed and influenced one another (it helped spread Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism and Hinduism); technologies and innovations (horses introduced to China contributed to the might of the Mongol Empire; gunpowder from China changed the nature of war in Europe); and diseases (some research suggests that the Black Death, which devastated Europe in the late 1340s, likely spread from Asia along the Silk Road).

Eventually ships carrying far larger amounts of goods created a greater economic impact, plus carried different goods than the caravans. While traders on a maritime route faced different perils like weather and piracy, they were not affected as much by political instability.

The famous Catalan Atlas of 1375 includes the first known depiction of the Silk Road: an image of a caravan of merchants and camels (which is also thought to include the man often connected with the route, Marco Polo and his family, around 1274). One of Polo’s diary entries was intriguing: “I did not write half of what I saw, for I knew I would not have been believed.”

Each country we passed through seemed to carry that old trading route deep in its soul.