For centuries, Central Asia was the bridge linking Europe and the Far East. Now, after more than 70 years of being shuttered behind the Iron Curtain, this sprawling, landlocked region of high peaks, vast lakes, and isolated cultures is slowly reopening its doors. From booming Kazakhstan to traditional Tajikistan, our correspondents report on five of the world's newest destinations

Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, a high-stakes international struggle for influence and energy reserves has been playing out in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan—the five Central Asian countries that were for seven decades the most isolated of the Soviet republics. Known as the 'Stans, they cover a sweeping 2.7-million-square-mile expanse of steppe, desert, and mountain reaching from the western frontier of China to the eastern boundaries of Europe. In this contest, the West, Russia, China, and to a lesser extent Turkey have been vying for access to immense deposits of oil and natural gas, for strategic toeholds in the battle against Islamic extremism going on in the countries to the south, and for the allegiance of peoples who have never fully belonged to the East or the West.

It should hardly be a surprise, then, that the 'Stans surface in the news mostly in relation to hydrocarbons and geopolitics, leaving their fascinating cultural and scenic attributes largely ignored. But this is starting to change. The 'Stans are home to 58 million people of predominantly Turkic and Slavic ancestry who, for the first time since Marco Polo passed through seven centuries ago, are finding their place in today's world. In the capitals, international chains are opening hotels, and in smaller cities visitors will find more and more small hotels, apartments renovated to European standards, and homestays, even in yurts—the round, portable abodes that resemble the wigwams of North America. In the 'Stans, the buck still has some bang.

Western travelers may be starting to trickle in, but apart from a few famously exotic locales—Bukhara and Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, for example—Central Asia is a destination for the adventurous. Little English is spoken (Russian remains the lingua franca); public transport is mostly inefficient and often overcrowded; and surly bureaucrats test the nerves. It was the Bolsheviks, after all, who brought the region into the "modern" world (in the 1920s), installing a unified (repressive) government and building infrastructure such as was needed to exploit natural resources. Public relations were never the Communists' forte.

Yet the 'Stans' splendors, both natural and man-made, are unique. The searing tawny deserts of Uzbekistan offset its turquoise-tiled mosques and kebab-scented bazaars. The glittering spaceship architectonics of Kazakhstan's new capital, Astana, loom above feather grass steppes as rippling and vast as the sea. The snowy peaks and sapphire lakes of Tajikistan's Pamir Mountains offer travelers the chance to trek through lands little changed since Marco Polo's time. You can ride bareback with Kyrgyz nomads across the high pastures of the Tian Shan, devour noodle-and-mutton beshparmak in the ancient Kazakh town of Kyzylorda, or try your hand at casino blackjack in Atyrau, an oil boomtown on the Caspian.

But once you're invited into people's homes and the vodka starts flowing (as it inevitably will), your Central Asian hosts will probably surprise you, expressing, for instance, love for Beetho-ven or the Beatles, voicing nostalgia for the relative ease of the Soviet days, or proudly recounting their lands' histories—chronicles of conquest, splendor, and dispossession practically unknown outside the former Soviet Union. You will be a novelty for your hosts, and Central Asia will, most of all, give you the feeling that you are seeing and experiencing something entirely new—a sensation rare in travel these days, and to be savored while it lasts.