Farewell, 'stans! I hardly knew ye...

Karina made it the 60km from her ancestral home in Issy-Kul, Kyrgyzstan to meet me in Almaty in just under 12 hours (the road is somewhat indirect). I whiled away a day waiting for her, strolling the leafy streets of the former Kazakh capital and laying in the park among young couples to read my book. We're now in the sleek Almaty airport waiting for our 1am flight to Delhi. Flights at inconvenient times seems to be a hallmark of Central Asia.

It was nice to end my trip in Kazakhstan. Despite ending up as the homeland of Borat, this is really the only country on my trip which has shown a glimmer of a future for itself. Kyrgyzstan has nothing, and while Uzbekistan has as much oil as Kazakhstan, it appears quite set on plundering it on monarchical glamour projects and counter-productive suppression of Islamists. I didn't even visit the two countries regarded as the regions most backward, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

This is a fascinating part of the world, and its vast steppes have been an amphitheater for some of the most important developments in the last millennium of the world's history. Today, the region suffers mostly from irrelevance, far from everything, too far even, for the proper exploitation of its mineral wealth. Proper governance is all that can save these small, unsustainable countries. And without some kind of economic union to being them to a something close to a global scale, even that won't be enough. As I travelled the region, I kept thinking of the fascinating role of the Russians, who fought for 200 years to conquer this region, and then gave it up in the space of a few months in 1991. Despite the horrors of the Stalinist USSR, it is not clear that for the common people, the state of independence is better.

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