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I was looking at maps and figured out maybe fly to Tashkent and then travel to Samarkand and Bukhara ground mode, and then back northeast
and over the mountains into the Fergana valley. It looks like China is only about a hundred miles west through the mountains---a week on horseback.
My horse back riding idea came from one of my later kid incarnations when I had a horse and used to wonder up from Northridge into the hills just north, and out west above Chatsworth, Box Canynon and the hills leading to Simi Valley. But back then there were only a few housing tracks off Devonshire and the rest was either undeveloped or orange groves.
Mine was an over the hill Mustang named Faraday (after the physicist) built low, slow, and thick headed---just what you want perched on a steep slope. Faraday had absolutely none of that fancy Quarter horse personality shit. He was a palmino, big hoofs, thick legs, boney, rough coat, blue eyes. I suspect he had been a working horse that was sold to a rent stable for retirement before I got him. He was not pretty. In fact I was ashamed of him like a heyseed cousin next to the fancy breeds my rich friends rode. But he could step over barbed wire and go down steep slopes and generally amble along forever.
BTW, isn't it the Uzbeks who play this scary horse game with a dead sheep?
CG