Sorry, no individual country impressions anymore. On this page, I used to have a little summary of my main impressions of all the countries I rode through. I did not spare with praise, but in the interest of providing an undistorted picture I also included negative comments. Not surprisingly, the negative comments often did not go down well with people from the country concerned. They pointed out, rightly, that my comments focused on a certain negative aspect while omitting positive ones. In short, they drove home the obvious point that to provide an undistorted picture of my travel impressions (i.e., including also negative comments) would make for a critically distorted picture of the countries themselves. So I just dropped the whole thing and let the pictures and stories on the rest of the site speak for themselves. In the end, the world clearly is a great place, and nice people abound everywhere, so what's there to talk about anyway?

Nevertheless, I do not want to waste the opportunity to advertise the wonderful country of Kyrgizstan, my favorite on this trip (cf. landscape pics 32-40), and to hint that Iran's evil reputation in the West is only part of the story (compare the two pics...).

 

 

 

 

Oh, and nothing can be complete without at least one picture of the Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan's friendly dictator. His picture is on every wall and every corner of Turkmenistan, often accompanied by the slogan "Halk. Watan. Turkmenbashi." (or, as we Germans used to say, "Ein Volk. Ein Reich. Ein Führer."). You may have heard of his great ideas to build an ice-palace in Turkmenistan's dessert. What you may not have heard is how to translate his name (Turmenbashi): "the great Turkmen" in Turkmen, but in closely related Azeri it's "the Turkmen dick" ...