There is a number I carry with me everywhere I go. Forty countries before I turn forty. It sounds like a challenge someone invented for social media, and maybe the framing is, but the intention behind it has always been something more personal than that. It is a commitment I made to myself during a period in my life when the world had contracted to the size of a small room, and I needed to promise myself that it would open up again.
It has opened up. South Africa, Cyprus, Thailand, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the UK, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bali. Each one has added something to the architecture of who I am becoming. Each one has asked a different question of me and waited to see how I answered.
And now I am looking at Central Asia, four countries at once, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, and the feeling is the same one I have learned to trust: the quiet, steady pull of knowing that this is next.
The list was never really about the number
I want to be honest about the 40-before-40 project, because I think the version of it that looks impressive on paper is not actually the version that matters to me.
The number is a structure. It gives shape to something that would otherwise be formless: the desire to keep moving, to keep choosing the discomfort of the unfamiliar over the comfort of staying put. Left to my own devices, without the structure of a goal, I know myself well enough to know that I could talk myself out of almost anything. The list makes the intention concrete. It makes backing down feel like a choice rather than a default.
But the countries themselves have never been stamps on a passport. They have been teachers. Azerbaijan and Georgia, in particular, rewired something fundamental in me. There is an essay in that, and probably a whole book, which is actually in progress. The point is that the travel has always been internal work wearing the costume of external adventure.
Central Asia is the next classroom.
Why these four countries and why now
I have been circling Central Asia for a while. It started with Azerbaijan, which shares cultural and linguistic roots with parts of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Being in Baku gave me the first real taste of the Turkic world, the food, the aesthetic, the particular warmth of the hospitality. It opened a door and I have been looking through it ever since.
There is also something about the geography and the history that speaks directly to what I find most interesting about travel: the places where multiple worlds collide. Central Asia is that at its most dramatic. The Silk Road passed through here. Islam and nomadic traditions and Soviet history and post-independence modernity are all layered on top of each other like sediment. You cannot walk through Samarkand or Bishkek without feeling the weight of everything that has happened in these places.
As for the timing, November 2026 is when Seoul happens, which means Central Asia needs its own window. I am planning it deliberately. I am not rushing it. I want to go with enough knowledge to see what is actually there, not just what the surface offers.
What I am nervous about
I believe in honest travel writing, which means I am also telling you what gives me pause.
Tajikistan is the part of this itinerary that requires the most research. The Wakhan Corridor, the Pamir Highway, the remoteness of the east of the country: these are not casual tourist destinations. They require physical preparation, the right permits, and an acceptance that you are entering a part of the world where things may not go as planned. That is not a deterrent. It is just a reality check.
Travelling through four countries in one trip also means managing a fairly complex logistics puzzle. Visa requirements for South African passport holders vary across these countries, and some require more advance planning than others. The transport links between countries are not always straightforward. The itinerary in the image that caught my attention, twelve days across all four, is ambitious and I will need to decide whether I am building on that framework or taking more time.
And then there is the honest truth of solo female travel in a region that is more conservative than the places I am used to. I have navigated this before, in Baku, in parts of Southeast Asia. I know how to do this. But knowing how to do something does not mean you stop feeling the particular alertness that comes with being a woman alone in unfamiliar territory. I would rather name it than pretend it isn’t there.
What I am most excited about
The landscapes. Genuinely and without qualification. The Tian Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan. The Charyn Canyon in Kazakhstan. The Pamir plateau in Tajikistan. These are places that human beings have been visiting and being undone by for thousands of years, and I get to add my small experience to that long line.
I am also excited about the food. The culinary traditions of Central Asia are an entire education. Plov, the rice dish that is considered the national dish of Uzbekistan, is apparently made in ways that vary city by city. There are dumpling traditions, bread traditions, fermented drinks made from mare’s milk. I am going to eat everything that is placed in front of me.
And I am excited about the people. Every trip I have taken has given me at least one human encounter that I could not have invented and cannot forget. The stranger at the summit who makes you feel, for a moment, that the world is smaller and kinder than you thought. The host who feeds you without asking what you want because hospitality doesn’t work that way here. The conversations that happen when you are the only outsider in a room and everyone is curious about you.
Those are the moments I travel for. I am already looking forward to the ones I cannot predict yet.
The preparation starts now
Part of what I love about the lead-up to a trip is the research phase. The reading, the planning, the slow accumulation of context that means you arrive somewhere as a curious guest rather than a blank tourist. Over the coming months, I am going to be writing through my preparation for Central Asia: the history, the cultural context, the practical realities for a South African woman travelling solo, the food, the landscapes, and whatever else surfaces as I get deeper into it.
This is the beginning of that process. The decision is made. The door is open.
Forty countries before forty. Central Asia, you are next.
