Kyrgyzstan

Bishkek doesn't try particularly hard to impress you, and that's sort of the appeal. Ala-Too Square is enormous, flanked by the Kyrgyz Parliament — all columns and scale, built for a different era's idea of what a government building should look like — and a Victory Monument with twin bronze figures under white arches. A few blocks over, the Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University's ornate spire pokes up over its own gardens, and the whole city has this wide, planted, slightly sleepy Soviet-boulevard feel that a lot of the region shares but wears differently here.

The train out to Issyk-Kul was its own small pleasure — tea in a glass holder, rattling east while the mountains built up on the horizon. Around the lake, roadside stalls sell dried and smoked fish stacked in pyramids, chebak straight off the water, and a short drive off the highway drops you into Skazka — Fairy Tale Canyon — where the same red sandstone formations you'd expect three countries over rear up out of scrubland next to one of the highest alpine lakes on earth. It's a strange, good combination: glacier-fed water on one side, Martian rock on the other.