If you are in need of paper maps, buy them in advance when you can. Amazon, Stanfords, the Map Shop and Omnimap have the biggest range online for English-speakers. Mapstor is best for digital maps.
Maps sold in Central Asia are hard to find and will often be in Cyrillic. Exceptions are Markus Hauser’s maps of Tajikistan, available at PECTA offices in Khorog and Dushanbe, and trekking maps of Kyrgyzstan.
Hiking maps
Paper-based hiking maps are usually still the old Soviet maps, so you need to be able to read Cyrillic to use them. You can find many of them online for free. The JPEGs are best printed on 4 pages to get sufficient detail: we use the Rasterbator. Soviet Maps has background info and extra resources on the Soviet mapping project.
Exception to the rule is Kyrgyzstan, where new trekking maps have been produced.
Apps
2GIS is a brilliant app (also available for the desktop) which has mapped Russian cities in extreme detail, and cities in Central Asia are coming online now. It shows you which companies are in each building, where to enter, finds GPS satellites very fast, and it works offline.
Google Maps has its strengths and weaknesses. The Organic Maps app (an Openstreetmap client) is our go-to resource for general navigation if 2GIS is not available.
iOverlander is perfect for people with their own transport since it maps a lot of camp spots, petrol stations et cetera, but there’s also border crossings, laundromats and migration police offices on it that make the app useful for backpackers on public transport.
When it comes to hiking, there are plenty of options, you probably know better than us which one suits you best. The Soviet Maps app is one that you perhaps did not know about yet.