I recently submitted a post to another member’s trip report in which I commented on a trip I took almost 50 years ago to what was then Soviet Central Asia – (today’s) Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – as well as then-Leningrad and Moscow.

It struck me that there might be some interest in a somewhat more in-depth report on this trip, at least as much as I can recall given the passage of decades, so I’m going to indulge my hubris (and/or delusion) and post it here. Treat this exercise as you will; it’s just a few megabytes in an ocean of petabytes or more.

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In the summer of 1974 I was living in the UK, waiting on word from a couple of universities to which I’d applied for teaching posts. My first wife and I had separated (her loss) and the future seemed a bit unclear, to say the least. A friend, a NASA engineer who lived in the Bay Area, was planning to come to Edinburgh to visit me, and together we decided to go on some cheap two-week (or so) excursion outside of Britain before he would join me in Scotland. Since I wasn’t expecting to hear from the universities for three weeks or so, I got a copy of the Sunday Times, the travel section of which always had advertisements for all sorts of budget holidays available on short notice, and went shopping.

The easy winner was a two-week inclusive holiday to the USSR – flights, hotels, meals, surface transport – for what looked like a crazy price – around £300. We had to fly from Gatwick, which was fine – he’d fly from SFO to London, then we’d jet off to Russia, then back to London, up to Scotland, ta da.

I had a meeting in Nottingham around then (another last-minute interview) so I drove my VW Beetle down, had my meeting – they wanted me but… Nottingham?... and rendezvoused with my friend. We took a couple of days to help him recover from the time change (aided by beer in some Northamptonshire pubs) then made our way to Gatwick.

It was the tour itinerary that had sealed the deal. A couple of nights in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) then off to the Silk Road – Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva in the Uzbek SSR, and a day in Dushanbe, the capital of the Tajik SSR, before returning to Moscow for a couple of final nights. It was definitely a high-speed whistle-stop itinerary, but we were young and up for the challenge. Oh, and it was early August, so it would be hot. Seriously hot. Map -



It was a lot of flying in a short time, and while I know this is FT, I confess that I don’t have a lot of clear recollections of the actual flights, with a couple of (very) notable exceptions. Naturally, all the flights were with Aeroflot, and my inner plane geek was pretty stoked at all the strange and wonderful flying tubes ahead of us. (I came from an aerospace family background; my mom was secretary to the test pilots at Douglas during the “right stuff” days, my (step)dad worked at McD-D on Saturn/Apollo, and I spent some nepotistic summers bucking rivets on DC-9s at the big DACO plant at LGB.)

The flights to and from LGW were on Tu-104s, a workhorse twin jet that lots of airlines bought (and probably regretted given the aircraft’s safety record.) Our flights were unremarkable.


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