Some guesthouses don’t display anything.
So I’m lost... by Lake Kara-Kul in Tajikistan... is this a guesthouse or a homestay? 😏
The first guesthouse—or gîte, to use the French term—when you arrive at Lake Kara-Kul from the Kyrgyz border is the one called Aigerim. Over time, between washes, it’s had signs saying "guesthouse" and later "homestay."
That one:
The yurt, which was recently removed, used to be there before the house.
The owner, with his wife and youngest daughter, has interesting stories about this corner of the high plateau and is Kyrgyz himself:
This lakeside spot by the main road is kind of a tourist trap, given the location. Groups in big 4x4s from Osh tend to stop either in Sary-Tash or Murghab at smaller, better-equipped hostels.
You’ll recognize this—the Panj River just outside Khorog, with Afghanistan on the left bank:
Further on, past Kalai Khumb, I stayed here—no sign, just word of mouth, after asking someone at another house:
Sometimes accommodations are marked with мехмонхона/меҳмонхона, which is Tajik for the idea of a hotel, hostel, or gîte.
In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, in places off the tourist trail, you’ll often find bilingual signs. Here’s a "mini-hotel," Shougla, in Almaty, outside the city center—конал ли/гостиница:
The Forester parked out front is my car, and for the most part—not everywhere, but mostly—it handles the main roads just fine.
At the Ak-Baital Pass on the way to Murghab:
Old Foresters are rare in Kazakhstan, where big Japanese 4x4s are common, and even more so in Kyrgyzstan. At this stop, it was with a first-generation "colleague":
Norwegian plates because I live in Norway (since 1998), and from my place, the route to Osh is straightforward:
Map projections can be more or less intuitive—a rough spherical representation makes more sense:
The ferry to Stockholm, then straight on—I cross the Russian-Kazakh border between Orenburg and Aktobe. With gas three times cheaper in Russia than in the NATO zone, it’s still a reasonable deal.
To continue on the topic of accommodation signs, here in the old town of Bukhara, a tourist hotspot if there ever was one, they’ve got English here and there, and they’re also clued into Spanish customs, as I point out on their sign (though I didn’t stay there):
