Range Rover Hybrid Silk Trail expedition. The pictures so far have been pretty good, but as they pass the half way mark, travelling this week through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, they are getting truly epic. We’ll post more through the day.

Temperatures have ranged from 17 to 43 degrees centigrade.

Range Rover says its new Hybrid – which mates a three litre V6 diesel engine with a 35KW (47bhp) electric motor – has achieved over 40mpg on the highway sections.

To something probably more like 40,000 gallons a mile on the river sections.

The landscape of Kazakhstan (the same size as Western Europe) and Uzbekistan varies enormously. From over 400ft below sea level in the east to well over 20,000ft in the west, with desert, lowland and plateaus in between. And they are not even at the Himalayas yet.

The route takes them in an inverted S through south east Kazakhstan, between the Caspian and Aral Seas, before driving virtually the full length of Uzbekistan. The final stop before the Kyrgyz border is Tashkent, a modern, industrial city of nearly 2m people.

Possibly the hardest part of the expedition is stepping out of the cosseting luxury of a Range Rover to spend the night in a tent.