When the internet first became a “thing” back in the 1980s, I could sign up for any service with my username being my first and last name, like “markulmer@aol.com.” As the years have gone by, however, I’ve discovered that there are a surprising number of people that share my name. So many that when I now sign up for something, I’ll get a suggestion to open an account in the name of “markulmer475” or something like that.

Instead of accepting those suggestions, a few years ago I started using the nom de guerre “markopolo” when signing up for new accounts on the internet.

Maybe that subconsciously interested me in the Silk Road the real Marco Polo traveled around 1275 A.D. across the heart of Asia. At any rate, for some time now I’ve had a desire to see that part of the world: the Caucuses and the -stans of Central Asia, the entrepôt of empires and the locus of the geopolitical Great Game.

Thus we booked a month-long trip to that part of the world for April 2020. Well, you know what happened in March of that year. Pandemania! Emirates Airlines canceled its international flights out of the U.S. just days before our scheduled departure. Scuttled.

It’s probably a good thing we hadn’t booked a month earlier – we would likely have been stuck in Kazakhstan in quarantine for months. Fortunately, nearly all our deposits were returned.

Now, five years later, we’re finally on our way, although we’ve shortened the trip by dropping Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan from the itinerary.

We’re going to be visiting six countries, starting in the east and ending in the west, in this order: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, circled on the map below:

You may have noticed that Iran and Afghanistan border the Central Asia countries we will be visiting and two of the Caucasuses countries share a border with Russia (Ukraine is not far away either).

This time, our flight on Emirates Air was scheduled to depart Miami, Florida, at 11:50 p.m. on Sunday, April 13, that is, just before midnight, arriving in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, at 10:10 p.m. on April 15, the loss of a day resulting from traveling through eight time zones. The flight itself was expected to take a little more than 14 hours, one of the longest flights we’ve flown.

We were all packed to go carry-on in order to quickly get to a nearby airport hotel in Dubai for a couple hours sleep before our connecting flight the next morning to Uzbekistan.

It was a good plan, but good plans go awry and we watched ours slip away hour by hour as our flight was delayed again and again…. We finally departed at 2:45 a.m. on Monday.

Except for the delayed departure, we had a great flight. We had been offered a deal on an upgrade to Premium Economy which turned out to be what Business Class used to be: deeply reclining seats, lots of legroom, and delicious food. Highly recommended.

Our flight took us nearly around to the opposite side of the globe, 8,300 air miles from Miami to Dubai, and another 1,400 from there to Tashkent, just short of 10,000 miles!

We flew a very peculiar route from the Mediterranean to Dubai which I later realized was to avoid war zone airspace: Ukraine/Russia; Israel/Palestine; and, USA/Yemen, all circled in red, below. What a world we live in!

I took this photo of the seat-back screen as we took off later that morning on our connecting flight to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on FlyDubai. We flew right over Iran and Afghanistan.

We landed in Tashkent around 4:00 p.m. and were shuttled to our hotel, Holiday Inn Tashkent City, right in the the heart of downtown. If Tashkent was a dart board, our hotel would be the bullseye.

We had dinner in the hotel’s rooftop restaurant, overlooking Tashkent City Park. The city was alive with lights and fountains and is much more modern than I had expected.

Marco Polo would have been amazed.