AN AUSTRALIAN cyclist trapped for three days in a hotel during a military uprising in Tajikistan has cut short his trip of a lifetime to return home.

Brian Thompson was two months and 6500 kilometres into a cycling tour along the ancient Silk Road when he and fellow travellers found themselves holed up in Khorog, near the Afghanistan border, as government troops tried to seize control of the town last week.

Mr Thompson said he heard shelling and gunfire 100 metres away as rebels resisted the army's advances. He and his touring companions desperately tried to make contact with their embassies in between periods when all lines of communications went down.

The Perth man and three other Australians were evacuated from the town by a Tajik government helicopter on Friday and were taken to the relative safety of the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, but only after Mr Thompson feared he would not see his wife and two sons again.

''When you're sitting around and bullets are flying around 100 metres away, you think 'Actually, I've got a really nice family and a nice home, so I don't want to be buried here. What am I thinking?' '' he told The Age yesterday.

''The thing that really did it for me was seeing the crowd marching down the street - they were 50 metres away from us - and there were hundreds of them and they were shouting and there were fists waving and all of that. I thought 'I've seen this sort of s--- happening in Syria and places like that and I don't want to be involved in this'.

''There were kids running down our street - 14, 15 years old - and you could hear their pockets jangling with ammunition and you could hear guns from houses just across the river from us shooting at the soldiers 150, 200 metres from us. At that stage I thought the town was out of control.''

He said the Australian embassy in Moscow helped organise for Tajik government helicopters to fly the group out. He said the other Australians were safe and planned to continue their tour.