A new take on the world’s oldest road trip

A few years ago, Jessica Antola realized she’d visited 100 countries. A passionate travel photographer obsessed with history and geography, she had explored the Middle East, the African continent, spent years in Europe and visited China, with her photographs winning awards and appearing in exhibitions, books and publications from the New York Times to Condé Nast Traveler. But there was a missing piece to the puzzle. One less explored by Western travelers, but that had helped to shape the West: the Silk Road—and, more specifically, those Central Asian countries known as “the Stans.”

“When you say ‘Central Asia’, a lot of people have no idea what you mean,” Antola says. “After I came back, for instance, somebody said to me, ‘Oh yes, I was just in Bangkok’. People don’t know how important the Stans—Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan—are to the history of the world. They were the birthplace of so many things: religion, ideas, languages. When Europe was a muddy backwater, they were basically the center of the universe.” 

For more than 1,500 years, Central Asia, thanks to its crucial position on the ancient Silk Road, was exactly that. Merchants and explorers like Marco Polo traveled this network of routes that extended 4,000 miles, bringing horses, gold and silver east to China, and gunpowder and silk west to Europe. Along the way, a network of well-organized, buzzy rest stops known as caravanserai sprang up along the way—places to eat, sleep, wash and pray. 

“I wanted to see the ancient caravanserai, but I was also thinking, how am I going to document something that’s basically in ruins?” says Antola. “And so for me, what came to forefront were the markets and the people, because I think they’re the strongest representation of what the Silk Road represented.” 

While today it is easier than ever to travel to this part of the world, with plenty of well-organized guided tours available to book, Antola was keen to go even further off the beaten path. She wanted to see the Pamirs, a rugged mountain range crossing from Tajikistan into Afghanistan—and although her trip skirted that border, as she was with guides on a well-planned route, she never went anywhere that was unsafe to travel.  

And when she arrived for her 24-day trip last August, she found beautiful bazaars, selling goods from around the world, from locally popular horsemeat and dried yogurt balls, to macadamia nuts from Australia and cold specialities from Korea. She traveled between wildly disparate locations, from the modern, wealthy cities of Kazakhstan to remote rural regions of Tajikistan; from humble yurts to grand Soviet architecture, to painted houses that looked “almost like gingerbread.”

One photo from the trip, not taken by Antola, shows her holding the eagle. “We all held him,” she says. “He was so heavy, just massive—the wingspan was probably nine feet.” 

While she has traveled much of the world—and this year is set to bring yet more trips, from the Aeolian Islands to Zanzibar—her journey along the Silk Road isn’t done yet. “I want to explore the cities of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand, and I’m curious about Turkmenistan,” she says. “And I hear the spring is also beautiful there—I’d love to see the wildflowers…”