Kyrgyzstan

A Seljuk-era minaret standing 26 metres tall on the floor of the Chuy Valley, the surviving remnant of the ancient city of Balasaghun and once one of the highest Islamic structures in Central Asia.

A vast endorheic alpine lake in the Tian Shan mountains of northeastern Kyrgyzstan, the seventh-deepest and second-largest saline lake in the world, never freezing despite its altitude.

The world's largest natural walnut forest, covering approximately 25,000 hectares in the Zapovednost nature reserve of southwestern Kyrgyzstan, where walnut trees grow alongside apple trees, maple and wild pear under a canopy that reaches twenty metres or more.

A high-altitude alpine lake at 3,016 metres in the Tian Shan range of central Kyrgyzstan, surrounded by summer pastures where traditional Kyrgyz nomadic families camp for the warm months, offering immersion in a living pastoral culture.

A distinctively shaped limestone mountain rising in the centre of the city of Osh, sacred to Muslims as a place of pilgrimage and to pre-Islamic Turkic peoples as a place of worship, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009.

A fifteenth-century stone caravanserai set at 2,500 metres in a valley of the western Tian Shan, built to shelter Silk Road merchants crossing the mountain passes between Kashgar and the Fergana Valley, its massive walls of fitted stone now partly restored.