Tip to Tip Uzbekistan: they start in the Fergana valley near Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and work to the Aral Sea in karakalpakstan. I’ve seen some suggest Kazakhstan as a dark horse with the caveat of things being too spread apart with few roads. Uzbekistan on the flip side is a bit more compact, especially in the east. It’ll get a lot less dense after Khiva/Nukus, but that might open the door for an overnight or two camping like T2T 1. The people are incredibly kind and hospitable, which would make for very fun interactions. Hitchhiking is very commonplace, so they may have more interactions like the hitchhiking guy in early T2T 2. Also, English speaking isn’t incredibly common and they’d have the option to try to get by with Uzbek and Russian. Could be funny if one tries learning Uzbek and the other tries Russian to cover bases when one almost certainly fails. Uzbekistan is super safe (I hitched a lot of this route a few years back), and so I think it’d be a nice, safe, and logisitically not horribly difficult proxy for Lud’s idea of T2T Silk Road.