An astrologer warned me against traveling around my 40th birthday. I didn't listen and booked a trip to Uzbekistan.

13.09.2024 - 14:47 / insider.com

When I was 38, an astrologer in New York City warned me about traveling around my 40th birthday. "Stay close to home," he said.

While I'm all for letting the stars decide where to travel next and have been intrigued by astrocartography — a type of astrology that tries to determine the best places to visit — on that day I was seeking love and career insights. I wasn't there seeking travel advice, and I found his ominous words triggering.

According to family lore, a psychic told my mother when she was in her 20s that she would experience a terrible loss at the age of 40, and two months after she turned 40, her youngest brother, my uncle Howard, died of AIDS.

More than a prediction, it felt like a curse. I spiraled. Am I not meant to travel because, God forbid, my plane could crash? Is nuclear war imminent? Or, worse yet, might something happen to my parents?

But as my birthday loomed, I, a longtime travel writer and semi-nomad, was too eager to re-explore a place that has had such a strong impact on me.

And so, I decided to flout his advice and booked a last-minute trip to Uzbekistan.

I first moved to New York in 2007 after earning a graduate degree in Middle East and Central Asian Security Studies from University of St. Andrews in Scotland. It was a summer language program I attended in Samarkand, a legendary Silk Road city, that always left me wanting to return to Uzbekistan.

Back in New York, I pursued opportunities to keep the country in my life, from adding it to The New York Times list of 52 Places to Go in 2019, to recently taking on the job of English editor at The Bukharian Times, a Bukharian-Jewish newspaper published in Queens.

That new job opportunity landed on my plate a few months before my 40th birthday, and I took it as a sign.

I booked a $1,100 ticket to Samarkand on Turkish Airlines, with a free stopover in Istanbul. I then convinced my boyfriend to do the same and join me on the trip. Despite being just six months into dating, and in an age-gapped relationship — we're 14 years apart; I'm older — he was totally down for the adventure.

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While my birthday trip was my fourth visit to Uzbekistan, it was the first one I'd planned and organized myself. A lot has changed since my first trip to Uzbekistan in 2007, when I flew on a hand-written airline ticket my dad got for me with a money order at a Brooklyn travel agency because Uzbekistan Airways didn't accept credit cards.

Now, thanks to a series of economic reforms, you can book flights and apply for visas online.

It was also my first international adventure with my boyfriend. I made sure we'd hit all the top sights, like Samarkand's Registan Square (we slipped the guard about $20 to climb to the top of the crooked