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The new Alder body with all of the gear attached.

After a year’s hiatus from playing electric guitar (I usually play fingerstyle pieces on my acoustic nowadays), I had rediscovered my baby blue Tanglewood Stratocaster, which was my first guitar. I had already modded it to the stage where not much of the original guitar remained. The bridge was replaced by a MiM Fender one, the tuners are now retro-style Washburn tuners, and similarly the pickups have also been long since replaced by some nice “Warman” pickups made by a bloke in Wales.

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A relaxing shot from the garden of Nizwa castle.

Despite Oman having a long history, there wasn’t much evident of it in the capital city Muscat, which is a city caught between being a hectic middle-eastern metropolis and a resort town for rich oil-sheiks, depending on where you are and your station in life. Therefore, in search of some history, I took a coach out to Nizwa, a major city and oasis town in the desert interior of the country.

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The Sale of Drinking Water shop

Mustcat, Oman, is a busy city of about one and a half million people. In districts like Al-Gubrah, it has wide, traffic-jammed boulevards lined with tall concrete buildings. There often isn’t any pavement but instead the side of the road is a car park for the shops on the ground floor. The sun was scorching when I visited in October and the temperature around 39c. Therefore, I wanted to stay in the shade as much as possible and that meant keeping close to the shop fronts. However, the more I walked around, the more amusing I found the names of the shops!

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The turquoise waters of Kol'su lake.

One of the highlights of the trip to Kyrgyzstan was taking the UAZ, the go-anywhere vehicle, up into the remote fringes of the country. It was the type of journey for which the van was designed and I was not disappointed! The scenery encountered along the way remains some of the best I’ve ever seen and being able to drive around essentially anywhere unrestricted or meeting much sign of human life remains a priceless experience for me.

The aim of the journey was to see Kol’su lake, an alpine lake hidden between the peaks of the central Tian Shan mountain range, which separate Kyrgyzstan from China. The lake itself sits at an elevation of 3514 metres. The lake itself has an air of mystical quality about it: Kol’su was formed by a seismic event in the 1970s and has no proper outflow. Nevertheless water manages to escape underground through cracks in the rock formations and through soil. This causes it to occasionally dry out entirely, before it can be resupplied by the Kurumduk river.

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Our UAZ parked in front of some laundry.

You are cruising the pacific coast of California in your Mustang, the wind flows through your hair and the engine purrs as you thread the car through the gentle turns along the coastal highway. What could be better? How about trundling along in a UAZ!

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The smooth and fast road leading into Barskoon Valley.

On my recent trip to Kyrgyzstan, one of the highlights was the beautiful Barskoon Valley. On the south shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, sits the town of Barskoon and this road brings you up into the Tien-Shan mountains and beyond. Somewhat unusual for Kyrgyzstan, is that this road doesn’t totally suck! We managed to do about 90 km/h in our UAZ on this dirt track, while we could only manage about 20 km/h when we were travelling in the south of the country around Naryn.