Curated Itinerary
Cold Winter Deserts of Turan
One cold-winter desert, three countries: Barsa-Kelmes on the dried Aral bed, Repetek’s saxaul forests and the Kyzylkum between the Silk Road rivers.
Take this route into Google Maps
From Barsa-Kelmes to Kyzylkum Desert, in the order we curated them.
➤ Turn on the navigator in Google MapsIt opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
This itinerary crosses the Cold Winter Deserts of Turan, the three-country property UNESCO inscribed in 2023 for a biome that freezes in January and bakes in July. Three stops, one per state: Barsa-Kelmes, the former Aral island now stranded in the desert that replaced its sea; Repetek, Turkmenistan’s century-old sand laboratory in the black-saxaul Karakum; and the red Kyzylkum, the desert the Silk Road caravans actually crossed.
The transect logic is the listing’s own: the same double-extreme climate solved three ways, by a relict island fauna, a research forest, and a caravan desert still worked by herders. Saxaul, saiga and kulan are the recurring cast.
Realistically, start with the Kyzylkum — yurt camps slot into any Uzbek circuit — and treat Barsa-Kelmes and Repetek as expedition extensions. April–May or September–October only; the seasons in between are the reason the listing exists.
Read the full story of this route in the CHO Magazine →
Get this route — explore at your own pace
The walk and the notes are open to everyone, right here. To take the route with you — the GPX and KML tracks for your phone — you need a CHO account, and a free one is enough. We do not sell these routes: we build them ourselves and give them to the people who read us.
Create a free accountAlready have one? Log in.
This route was built with the tools we give operators.
Guides, associations and cultural operators build their own routes here: pick the stops from the archive, add your notes, and the map, the GPX and the printable version come out on their own. Your programme gets a permanent page, your events go on the city pages people read while planning — and if you sell your route as a road-book or a virtual tour, you receive 80% of the price net of tax.
See how an operator account worksBefore you go
A word from your host
Do the Kyzylkum yurt night even if you skip everything else — the desert cold arriving at sunset, minutes after a hot day, is the whole biome explained on your own skin. The other two stops are for the expedition-minded, and worth it.
Getting around
Kyzylkum camps book easily between Samarkand and Khiva; Barsa-Kelmes needs permits and 4x4 logistics from Aralsk; Repetek depends on Turkmen visas. Travel windows: April–May and September–October, strictly.
Step by step
Barsa-Kelmes
Once the Aral Sea's largest island, Barsa-Kelmes—named "the place of no return"—vanished in the 1990s, leaving behind folklore, a nature reserve…
Repetek Biosphere State Reserve
A 346-square-kilometer desert nature reserve in Turkmenistan's Karakum, established in 1928 to protect sand-desert ecosystems and wildlife including…
Kyzylkum Desert
The world's 15th largest desert spans ancient Transoxania between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, shared today by Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Download for tour navigation
🔒 The walk and the notes are open to everyone on this page. The files to take with you — the stop list as a PDF, and the GPX and KML tracks for your phone — come with a CHO account, and the free one includes them.
Walk it with the navigator on
It opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.