louiseinlimbo

The only one of the ‘stans that I hadn’t visited was Tajikistan, so seeing a trip there advertised that involved days travelling alongside the Afghanistan border in the Wakhan Corridor, I could not resist. Nine of us were on the tour, but joining in different places, and I flew to the official starting point of Osh two days early, so as to save lots of money on the cost of the flight (not sure why it should cost £219 to fly there on 9 September, and five times as much to fly there on the 10th or 11th!).  I arrived in Osh early in the morning, getting out of the airport around 06:30, and decided to walk the five kilometres to the hostel given my assumption that the earliest check-in would be rather later in the day, but thankfully the door was open when I arrived (although there was no-one around), so I was able to go in and make myself comfortable. It seemed that one of the things to see in Osh was a statue of Lenin – the largest in Central Asia (and third largest in the world ??),...

Unfortunately, China are not that keen on the UK currently, so unlike those from mainland Europe, Brits need a visa to visit China – and it’s not a visa that can be obtained online, but requires a visit to a China Visa Application Centre in one’s home country.  I have a China tour coming up in October and so this first week of September was my opportunity to pass through London and get this done.  It required two visits to the Visa Centre, and I’d also got myself a ticket to see Samba Toure perform at the Jazz Café in Camden, so I needed to be based in London rather than with friends in Kent or on the Isle of Wight, and so I booked myself into a hostel near King’s Cross.  Not the best hostel in that it didn’t have a kitchen (they prefer that you spend money in their bar and restaurant), but the location was superb, enabling me to walk everywhere I wanted to go, and it was a pretty successful visit.  Enough time to add in visits to the British Museum and to the V&...