Why doesn't anyone go to the most beautiful country in the world? It's far away, but so is Thailand. It's poor, but so is Cuba. Not many people speak English, but nor do they in Glasgow. And unlike any of these places it has lakes, mountains, ancient culture, saffron, dried apricots and raw tobacco to blow your mind.

So why don't people go?

I refer to Kyrgyzstan, of course, and I have a theory. Kyrgyzstan is unusual in being surrounded by territories that are also almost never visited for fun (eastern Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan). It's not a useful staging post for getting anywhere else, long-haul no longer being by camel.

And on the rare occasions when it has cropped up in the news since 1991, the news has been off-putting: a couple of climbers kidnapped; rioting after a democrat got locked up for winning an election; a lease for the US Air Force on a base near the capital soon after 9/11.

All this is desperately unfair. A long time ago I tried to do something about it by writing two books on Central Asia that aimed to lift the lid once and for all on Kyrgyzstan's beguiling specialness, but clearly no one read them. Since then the place has haunted me. Literally and genuinely, I dream of it. The dreams used to come every few weeks. They are less frequent now, but no less vivid. They always take me to the same place, deep in the mountains, where a big stone refuge stands at a branching of the ways, and the ways lead to opposite shores of a huge inland sea fringed by lush meadows and, above them, peaks hung with bright white glaciers.

I want to go back, but it's difficult with three small children, one of them a baby. So I thought I'd take them virtually, right now. Here are the highlights of the holiday we didn't have: we flew overnight to Bishkek, British Airways, non-stop, no hassle. My old friend Nikolai Shchetnikov met us at the airport in a Niva 4x4 and we headed straight for the Osh bazaar to load up with Frisbee-shaped lepeshka flatbread and a bag of those apricots.

Thence to the Ala Archa gorge. Where else can you be in pristine alpine wilderness half an hour from the international airport? We unpacked into a log cabin for two blissful days of stream-damming and piney air.

Day 3: Nikolai picks us up and drives us back down the gorge, east along the foothills of the Tien Shan, and back into the big mountains where the road winds up to Lake Issyk Kul, the inland sea of my dreams. Bigger than Lake Geneva, fed by a thousand rivulets of meltwater, it never freezes - it's so deep, it's warmed by the centre of the Earth.

A swim. A picnic in Nikolai's brother's cherry orchard. Then onwards and upwards round numberless dirt hairpins to Son Kul, a perfect disc of water lying 10,000ft up in the legendary summer pasture of the Kyrgyz nomads. They still come here to pitch their yurts and graze their animals, but there's an extra yurt for us, with a felt-lined cot for the baby and placid, sleek brown horses tethered outside for the rest of us.

There is nowhere on Earth like this. We stay a week, then head home knowing there is also no way that words can do it justice. Maybe that's why no one comes.

Extreme Continental (Gollancz) and the Cadogan Guide to Central Asia, by Giles Whittell, are both long out of print but you might get lucky on abebooks.com

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