Follow the Race, Find the Real...

Last week, the Race Across the World contestants reached Istanbul - one of the great cities of human history - checking in at one of its iconic minarets, the slender towers that have defined the city's skyline for centuries.

It's a fitting checkpoint. Istanbul has always been a place of arrival. Straddling the Bosporus where Europe meets Asia, it has drawn travellers, traders and conquerors for two millennia. Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul - the names have changed, but the city's hold on the imagination never has.

Turkey, though, is far more than its greatest city. Beyond Istanbul lie the ancient streets of Ephesus, the calcium-white terraces of Pamukkale, the haunting battlefields of Gallipoli, and the extraordinary volcanic landscapes of Cappadocia - a region so otherworldly it barely seems real.

If the race has stirred something in you, we have a tour that takes you deeper.

Treasures of Turkey is a 15-day classic tour that follows the country's greatest sites from Istanbul to Cappadocia, with expert guides, all meals included, and access to places most visitors never reach - including the rarely visited ancient city of Magnesia, where our local partner sponsors the ongoing excavations.

Turkey rewards those who take the time to understand it. This tour is built for exactly that.

The race moves on to Georgia - and if Turkey felt like a collision of worlds, Georgia feels like a world entirely its own.

Tucked between the Greater Caucasus and the Black Sea, this is a country that rewards the curious. Ancient monasteries perched on impossible gorges. Medieval tower villages surviving in Europe's highest inhabited settlements. A winemaking tradition that stretches back thousands of years - Georgia is, by most accounts, the true birthplace of wine. Food that people travel specifically to eat.

The contestants will have glimpsed it in passing. There's another way to do it.

Our Georgia, Armenia & Azerbaijan tour spends 23 days going deep into the Caucasus - crossing three countries at the point where Europe meets Asia, taking in everything from Azerbaijan's burning hillsides and Baku's Silk Road old city to Armenia, the world's first Christian nation, whose ancient faith is carved into the landscape at every turn. Along the way, the lush mountain town of Dilijan - known as the Armenian Switzerland - offers a moment to breathe before the journey continues to the extraordinary tower villages of Upper Svaneti.

This is a Go Beyond tour, built for travellers who want more than the headline sights. Expect home cooking with local families, a masterclass in Georgia's famous cheese bread, a 4x4 journey to one of the most remote villages in Europe, and moments that no itinerary can quite prepare you for.

Uzbekistan has its ancient cities. Kazakhstan has something wilder.

This is Central Asia at its most elemental - vast steppe landscapes, snow-capped peaks rising from the Tian Shan Mountains, and a canyon so dramatic it stops people mid-sentence. Charyn Canyon stretches 150 kilometres through the desert, dropping 300 metres to a river valley sculpted over three million years. It is one of the most extraordinary natural sights on the race route so far, and one that most travellers outside the region have never heard of.

Kazakhstan is a country that rewards those who venture beyond the expected. Almaty - the former capital, still the country's cultural heart - sits beneath permanent snow-capped peaks and carries the layered character of a city that has been Soviet outpost, trading hub, and modern metropolis all within living memory.

The race is passing through this week. But Kazakhstan is really just the beginning.

Our Journey Through Central Asia tour spends 27 days crossing five of the most extraordinary and least-visited countries on earth - from the alpine valleys and eagle hunters of Kyrgyzstan and the ancient Silk Road cities of Uzbekistan to the marble boulevards of Ashgabat and the Darvaza Crater, a burning gas crater in the Karakum Desert that has blazed continuously since 1971 and is known simply as the Gates of Hell.

This is a Go Beyond tour at Physical Level 4 - built for travellers with a genuine spirit of adventure, a good level of fitness, and a willingness to be surprised. Yurt camps, remote mountain passes, border crossings on foot, dinners under desert stars. The kind of journey that changes how you think about the world.