Kyrgyzstan: Part 2

PART 1:

Back to Bishkek, and back to bedlam. We spent a couple of days in the capital city again, running errands and getting teeth examined. Literally, one of my tasks was going to a dentist, on account of some mild tooth pain. But I shan’t describe this any further. Other tasks included fixing a problem with my laptop, buying shoes, and picking up a visa – all very boring things that we wanted to get out of the way as quickly as possible so we could get on with the rest of our itinerary.

And get on with the rest of our itinerary we did. After those couple of days, we packed up and left for the touristy town of Kochkor. This town must win the award for the most unexpectedly awesome place in Kyrgyzstan. Since Kochkor is essentially billed as a springboard town for horse treks to the popular Lake Song Kol, I was not expecting much from it at all. I was pleasantly surprised.

We arrived in the unassuming settlement in the late afternoon, as sulky storm clouds scudded across the mountain backdrop. After finding our homestay, mum and I set out in search of the town centre, and along the way, every child under the age of twelve who was playing on the street sang “Hello!” As adorable as they were brazen, these children really brightened up the stormy settlement.

Soon we arrived at a park, which we had been instructed to pass through to get to the town centre. This park should immediately be brought to the attention of location scouts looking for a horror movie setting. Never in my life have I seen a park so deliciously creepy, and I’ve lived in some pretty low-socioeconomic areas. The air was dead quiet as we ambled along the tree-lined paths. I shivered as I saw a small playground consisting of just a rusty slide and a few old monkey-bars. In other sections of the park, Soviet relics like an urn-shaped water fountain and a disused swimming pool further contributed to the eerie atmosphere. Still further into the park I saw a concrete bunker, underneath which was a dark pit filled with stagnant rain-water. And the icing on the cake was a bloodied horse skull lying on the grass nearby, grinning at us with morbid malice from the afterlife.

We were somewhat glad to get out of the park, even as we had enjoyed its ghoulishness. Soon afterward, we found the main strip, and bought dinner, before catching a taxi back to the guest-house. The following day, we had an eclectic activity schedule that included two museums, a Muslim cemetery and a bike ride. The cemetery was fun, as always. Muslims definitely splash out when it comes to the deceased, and the cemetery was full of large gravestones and occasionally walk-in tombs. The West’s approach to the dead seems rather half-assed by contrast; you simply incinerate the person and then sprinkle their ashes into some body of water. I guess it leaves more empty land to build golf courses.

Kochkor was genuinely an excellent town, and had a likeable understated panache. However, pressing matters beckoned us away from the town proper. It was now time to undertake a horse trek to Lake Song Kol, the real reason everyone comes to Kochkor. The trek goes from a road end a couple of hours from Kochkor town, leads through several yurt camps over a series of two days, then arrives at the lake. Having not ridden horses much before, mum and I were ever so slightly nervous about the equine expedition. However, we had nothing to worry about, as soon after setting off on the horses we found our groove, and the sure-footed creatures generally did our bidding. 70 per cent of the time, at least.

We ended up, regrettably, with a not very good guide – a young man the same age as me. He lacked experience in the field, having only been guiding for a month, and wouldn’t say boo to a goose, unless the goose was Kyrgyz. Indeed, he was conspicuously silent around us most of the time, which could conceivably have been due to his middling English, but was more likely due to an inherent lack of interest in the tourists he was leading. At any rate, he did a bare minimum job, and the enjoyment we got from the trek was entirely our own doing.

A few hours into the first day, we hit some nasty weather. A hailstorm with serious anger management issues struck us on a pass, and our horses refused to continue; they understandably turned around to shield themselves from the gigantic ice pellets that were pelting into their eyeballs. Our guide unwisely suggested we continue after the hailstorm abated, but we insisted on returning to the previous yurt camp we had passed. A herder family took us in, and we stayed the night. Herders – even the children – are so easy to entertain that they would be content to stare at a pot for five hours. We, however, became rather bored and stir-crazy, and were frankly glad to be setting off again the next morning.

Inside a lunch yurt

The weather the next day was much better. A blue sky extended across the valleys, soiled only by a few anarchic clouds on the horizon. We resolved to continue the trek and push for the lake, even as it required seven hours’ solid riding. Our guide was probably pleased we decided not to turn back, though his pleasure was concealed behind a cloak of quiescence, as usual.

Today we felt more confident on the horses, and were more used to their idiosyncrasies. Mine responded quickly if I whipped him, and had no objection to cantering if I requested he do so. The trade-off was that he farted almost non-stop throughout the trek, a habit that was less than ideal in terms of my olfactory well-being. Neither my mum’s horse nor the guide’s was nearly so prolific in its execution of that biological process, but the trade-off for them was less speediness. Our guide had to whip his horse quite aggressively at times to coax the beast into doing more than a slow trot, in spite of it being a perfectly healthy adult horse with normal musculature. Perhaps there is a horse’s union in Song Kol, which quietly conspires to organise strikes that involve refusing to canter, in order to induce riders to allow more grazing sessions.

Well, we eventually made it to the lake, after many hours of riding up devastating mountain passes and across plunging steppe. This was a true ‘story from the steppe’ – maybe the first of this blog. The lake view was consistently lovely, even if it didn’t quite stand up to the magnificence of Ala Kul. Kyrgyz nomad teenagers galloped across the grassland near the lake, and Westerners wandered along the lakeshore, looking contented. This was by all accounts a fine destination for a horse trek, providing a calm, clean atmosphere that made a nice change from the hustle and bustle of city life.

Mum, the rider

Yurts

Lake Song Kol

The following day, we had a taxi ride to a small town called Kazarman, a stopover on the journey to our next itinerary destination of Arslanbob. Our driver was crazy and arrived in Song Kol at 4am to pick us up, sleeping for four or five hours until we were ready to go. I chatted with him a little in my best Russian, which involved correctly using about three out of six grammatical cases, and taking five seconds to form the past tense of a regular verb. But I think he appreciated my effort, and the conversational interludes provided a respite from the incessant Kyrgyz pop music he blasted through his car stereo.

I’m not normally one for tangents, but I must briefly elaborate on Kyrgyz popular music. It is sometimes quite nice, but eventually becomes repetitive and almost depressing. For a start, every single Kyrgyz pop song without exception is in a minor key, which could not depart more from the tropes of Western pop music, which leans heavily on major tonalities. You can only listen to so many minor-key songs before deciding that the Kyrgyz must be a bunch of Central Asian emos.  

Secondly, it is all in four-four time, with a thumping drumbeat and accompaniment from some instrument that sounds like a beaten-up piano accordion from a 1920s Parisian salon. Most of the vocals are a twenty-something woman singing in quavering Kyrgyz, which is not the most mellifluous language to begin with. The melodies begin to sound very similar after a while, and seldom vary much in pitch. Overall, Kyrgyz pop music suffers from the same trappings of repetitiousness and mass-production as its Western counterpart.

I must apologise for being the Moaning Myrtle again, but when we arrived in Kazarman, I was not inspired. As a town, it was destitute, disorganised, and deathly dull. The only semblance of a centre was a street with a couple of convenience stores and a small supermarket, plus a bank that was closed. Most other streets were filled with Soviet-era apartment blocks so heavily coated in rust that you could get tetanus just by looking at them. We stayed at the only guest house in town, which we eventually discovered was run by a small-time female con-artist who was in cahoots with the boss of the town taxi-stand to rip tourists off by pre-empting their actual taxi with a more expensive taxi hailed by her. It was an old-school short con that caught us out on our trip from Kazarman to Jalalabad.

After arriving in Jalalabad, we soon had to transfer to a marshrutka to some random place called Bazaar Korgon, from where we then had to transfer again to a marshrutka to Arslanbob. As a 21-year-old male, I was at the bottom of the pecking order in terms of getting a seat, so I was standing on the cramped minibus as it lurched along the highway at 90 kilometres an hour. One over-zealous step on the brake from the driver would have terminated my existence.

Fortunately, Arslanbob changed everything. Driving into this town was like entering a fairy-tale. Home to the world’s largest walnut forest, this Uzbek enclave village is replete with leafy walnut trees that line the streets, as well as other lush samples for the arborist. Notably, it is set against a gorgeous mountain backdrop that lures you in; there is something about their proximity that makes the whole atmosphere of the town truly enchanting.

We headed straight to the local CBT office. For those who are not autistically knowledgeable about acronyms, CBT stands for Community Based Tourism, and is a national network in Kyrgyzstan that works with local homestays and local workers to provide tourist services for travellers. The CBT outfit in Arslanbob is particularly excellent – run by a friendly, sharp Uzbek-Kyrgyz-Russian-English-speaking man of around 50, it can line up almost any excursion you’d want to do in the town.

The following day, we did some independent stuff around Arslanbob. There is a small waterfall up from the town centre that attracts crowds of locals and tourists alike, which we paid a visit to. Beyond that lies the famous walnut forest, though we didn’t manage to find it until the following day, when we did a horse trek.

That’s right, we ‘got back on that horse’ again in Arslanbob, with only a couple of days having elapsed since the completion of our last horse trek at Song Kol. Horses are an excellent mode of transport in many rural and scenic areas, where paths are often steep and precipitous, making for difficult walking. While horses slip occasionally, they never fall, and are on the whole very sure-footed. Our guide for this trek was in his early-mid forties and had over a decade of experience in the business, as well as speaking pretty decent English. And thus, the slightly sour taste left in our mouth by the guide from the previous horse trek was replaced by a sweeter taste – more in line with Kazakhi candy.

In many ways, the most interesting aspect of Arslanbob was its Uzbek culture. Situated very close to the border with Uzbekistan, Arslanbob is a heavily Islamic village where the balance of men wear skullcaps, and few women walk the streets without a veil. The language spoken in the town is for the most part Uzbek, in contrast to the rest of Kyrgyzstan, where it is Kyrgyz. I was also surprised by how many people spoke either poor Russian, or none at all.

            Many other quirks or cultural aspects of the town stuck in my mind. Raw cuts of meat hanging off hooks in the full heat of the sun are everywhere, the visceral manifestation of a vegan’s nightmare. The cuts are usually swarming with flies, who cannot believe their luck. In the markets, old ladies sell little white yoghurt balls, which I never dared try, but which I hear are quite repulsive. In terms of religion, women above the age of about twenty-two are all married off and are starting families, while many men follow suit closer to their mid-twenties, due to the conservative social fabric of the town. A significant portion of the population observes daily calls to prayer, and the town mosque is never empty. Old men on pensions dominate the town centre, chatting amongst themselves for hours on end, as many of the working-age men are forging a livelihood in Russia. The town demographics skew young or old.

Mmm...meat hung up in the heat of the day with flies swarming all over it...

Anyway, I must plough ahead with the narrative, lest my blog turn into a thinly-veiled info-dump. The following day we packed up and left Arslanbob; now we were bound for Osh, the second-largest city in Kyrgyzstan.

What can I say about Osh? Surprisingly little, actually. As Lonely Planet notes, the city is primarily used as a springboard for trips to the Pamir Highway or China, rather than being selected as a travel destination in itself. Truth be told, the city is fairly non-descript for the most part, with the only real exception being Sulaiman-Too, a series of large rocky crags rising above the city. And indeed we did pay that geographical feature a visit, getting nice aerial views of the city from the summit. Still, such trifles were not our main priority here – we had business to attend to!

 It was incumbent upon us to find two other people to share a car with for the Pamir Highway, since doing the trip without being able to split the costs is prohibitively expensive. Despite crawling with backpackers, Osh failed to yield us two willing co-travellers in the two-day window we had hoped would suffice. Alas, we stayed a third day, waiting for Lady Luck to work her magic.

I use Lady Luck as a pseudonym for the travel office at the Osh Guesthouse, where we were staying. As usual, it is humans, rather than deities, who do all the dirty-work. After much toing and froing between various guesthouses, websites, and other nodes in its elaborate network of contacts, the travel office managed to organise two single individuals to join my mum and me on our Pamir trip. One of these was a German woman we had already met back at Song Kol, and the other a Taiwanese woman whom we did not know. Relieved to have assembled this ragtag band of Pamir travellers, we got packed up, and after breakfast at the guest house the following morning, set off in our contracted jeep for Tajikistan.

Having spent a month in Kyrgyzstan, I consider our departure for the next ‘Stan’ to mark the end of an era. The luxury of time afforded us the opportunity to survey an excellent range of Kyrgyzstan’s offerings, and most of them were definitely worth seeing, even as we spent many tens of hours sitting in maniacally-driven road vehicles.

 I’ll miss gazing existentially out at the Kyrgyz countryside from the window seat of some long-distance marshrutka as it speeds along the highway, blasting melancholic local pop music out of its speakers. I’ll miss seeing Kyrgyz men and women as young as thirty open their mouths to smile, only to reveal a row of gold teeth that, if melted down and sold to a jeweller, could probably secure them an early retirement. I’ll miss being asked where I’m from in every single interaction with a stranger, only to be met with glazed eyes when I answer with the Russian translation of ‘New Zealand.’ Truth be told, I’ve become rather attached to this big ol’ visa-free Stan, and it will be with a definite bitter-sweetness that I leave it behind.

So long, Kyrgyzstan. 

Kyrgyzstan

PART 1: CHAOS IN THE CAPITAL

Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek is surprisingly close, geographically, to Almaty, Kazakhstan. Were it not for the Soviets' arbitrary border-drawing in Central Asia - which in most instances did not map to any real geographical features like mountains or rivers but instead consisted of geopolitically conniving land-border demarcations designed to create conflict-provoking allocations of resources and ethnic distributions that played into the hands of central rule from Moscow - then our four hour bus ride between the two cities might not have involved a border crossing.

We ran into some...trouble at the border, though I cannot possibly elaborate on this. For reasons. Anyway, we eventually got into Kyrgyzstan, and caught a taxi to Bishkek, which lay only half an hour away. As our taxi drove through the city periphery, I saw a suburban squalor that reminded me of Delhi. Dusty streets lined with bilingual facades were bustling with Kyrgyz families who would not have looked out of place in the countryside. Once we made inroads into the city centre, things lightened up considerably, and I detected more of an Almaty vibe. Areas of greenery punctuated the streets in the style of that other city, and pockets of modern buildings were interspersed with more traditional Soviet-style structures across the board.

Soon, we arrived at our accommodation. An externally drab but internally classy apartment, this Air B & B number served us well for our first few nights in the city. Comfortable living quarters were a blessing, as we had much business to attend to in the capital, and little of it was pleasant. It was not that we had to wade through sewerage pipes to escape from a secret police outfit, or join the Kyrgyz circus as sword-swallowers to make extra income for the next leg of our trip. In actual fact we had a far worse institution to contend with: Iranian bureaucracy.

Getting into the Islamic Republic of Iran requires a visa. We were savvy enough on the general ins and outs of the procurement process to have arranged a letter of invitation previously, and one that was valid for long enough to allow us to get the visa in Bishkek. This aspect of things was fine. The predictably annoying side of things came immediately after arriving at the consulate, which was a small, uninviting, one woman-manned room that closed for two hours each day between 1 and 3pm - itself a problem, as 1pm was the precise time we arrived to do business on our first day. After coming back in the late afternoon, and attempting to get the process underway, we were informed we needed hard copies of our LOIs, as well as our insurance policy. Setting aside my incredulity about the fact that a physical piece of paper was required for such a simple task in the year 2017, I - the one with the (bad) Russian - set off down the street in search of somewhere to print the documents.

The universe, apparently, did not find this situation sufficiently hapless. So it decided to make rain pour from the Bishkek sky. I upped my pace to a fully-fledged run as I navigated the Bishkek streets, scouring the signs to my left for any indication of the presence of a printer. As I ran, I opened up Google Translate and looked up the verb for 'print', which I realised I did not know. Being careful not to trip over pavement irregularities or middle-aged Kyrgyz men, I located the appropriate word, and repeated it to myself out loud over and over. RaspeCHATat, raspeCHATat, raspeCHATat... I poked my head into a shop that looked like it held some promise. I was referred to a small-time translation agency further up the street, which was said to possess a printing machine. Non-descriptly called the 'GLC', it was a miracle I remembered the correct sequence of letters to look out for. It must have been the rain pelting down on my head that induced my memory to perform well. Wet and bothered, I staggered into the translation office, whose primary function was rendering Russian and Kyrgyz documents in Turkish, or vice versa, and not helping a New Zealand tourist to print Iranian visa documents. Still, the woman was pleasant, albeit bewildered - particularly after I attempted to compensate her with a Kazakhi coin - and I left with what I needed.

It was back to bedlam then, as various other bureaucratic hoops were held in front of us to jump through. I will not torture you with the details, both for the sake of brevity, and also because the longer one probes into the finer details of bureaucracy, the deeper one becomes lost in a dystopian, Kafkaesque labyrinth of inefficiency and meaninglessness where the rational mind is bludgeoned repeatedly by cackling goblins holding reams of paperwork and rejection stamps. Instead, I will skip to the happy ending of that subplot, which is that a couple of weeks later, we successfully collected our visas, and thereby secured our entry ticket into Iran.

After the trials and tribulations associated with acquiring the visa, mum and I decided we should try to enjoy Bishkek, and see some of its sights. It is a self-consciously Central Asian city, whose main square would provide plenty of clues to an extra-terrestrial that had swotted up on earth's geography that he had landed in a Stan country. Towering over the plaza is Kyrgyzstan's distinctive flag, whose yellow softball-in-a-sunflower gets squashed up into a xanthic mess as the wind makes the flag ripple. Trying to photograph the flag on a breezy day involves snapping dozens of pictures, and hoping to catch the flag at least once when it's unfurled. To boot, a giant statue of the Kyrgyz folkloric hero Manas looms in the background, offering our learned alien further hints that he is in Krygzystan. Manas was a young warrior who rode on horseback, and did all sorts of ethnically important stuff, the details of which are concisely described in a 500,000 line epic poem. Also, the centre of the square is occupied by rows of illustrious water fountains that appropriately reflect Kyrgyzstan's rich water resources. Overall, it's a memorable affair.

Another notable attraction of Bishkek is the Osh Bazaar, a typical Central Asian marketplace named after a different city in Kyrgyzstan. The Bazaar is the sort of place where one goes to collect vivid memories, since much of the merchandise is of dubious quality, and was probably sourced from a sweatshop in Uzbekistan. Walking into the bazaar, one is struck by the amount of throughput. Hundreds of Kyrgyz shoppers wearing kalpaks or headscarves mill about the market, as established sellers hawk their wares and shout special deals in the guttural Kyrgyz tongue. When I went, my main aim was to buy a new belt, as my previous one had broken and I'd gone for several weeks looking like a poster-boy for hip hop subculture. It didn't take long for me to find a shop that sold them; the belts were conspicuously hung on the walls, flopping down like dog's tongues. All of the belts without exception were several sizes too large for me, but the shopkeeper was happy to help in this regard, and snipped my favoured belt down to size, before pressing several additional holes into it. And for the accessory and his troubles combined, he only charged 150 som - three dollars.

Other memories of the bazaar include listening to a blind accordionist serenading market-goers in one of the main areas, and waiting half an hour in a shoe store for the staff to locate the partner to the shoe we wanted to buy, all the while refusing to give us our money back and let us leave. At the Osh Bazaar, the paraphernalia is cheap, but the memories are priceless. Ka-ching.

PART 2: AROUND LAKE ISSYK-KUL

After five days in Krygyzstan's capital city, which as far as cities go is pretty hum-drum overall, we were ready to move on. Bigger and better things beckoned us yearningly from afar. Specifically, it was time to head east from the capital, and begin a two week excursion around Lake Issyk-Kul, a massive saline lake that never freezes over, despite being surrounded by snowy mountains.

Planning a trip around Lake Issyk-Kul is a slightly strange experience. As opposed to being a continuous series of beach-style holidays, as you might expect, it does not turn out like that at all. The reality is that many if not most towns 'around' the lake are not actually by the lake at all, meaning they afford no access to the beach, and so they're really only 'lake towns' by some figurative stretch of the imagination. The Lake serves more as a conceptual identity point for the towns than a practical place to have a swim.

Nevertheless, our first destination - the town of Tamga - was situated right by the lake, on its southern shore. I will always remember our arrival in Tamga as feeling like we'd been dropped off in an abandoned ghost town from the old American West. Long, empty streets stretched in every direction - the only protagonists in sight were lumps of gravel. Mum was not impressed, but I felt instinctively that there must be more to this town than met the eye. This premonition was less to do with my having a sixth sense, and more to do with having seen various recommendations of the town from travel bloggers. And yet, I could still tout an 'I told you so' over my mum later on.

We soon found our guest house, called 'Askar and Tamara's', and after a dinner of Kyrgyz food, got to know one of the most ebullient women we'd ever met. Tamara, a sixty-something Kyrgyz lady who used to work as a teacher and is now semi-retired, talked to us mirthfully and at length about her life, our lives, the town of Tamga, and - as they say - 'everything else inbetween.' Her eyes could be single-handedly used to deduce her emotions, so full of character were they. Over the course of our three days in Tamga, we would spend many hours in conversation with the female half of the guest house couple, and learn a lot about Kyrgyzstan in the process.

So much, then, for the personnel. As we soon discovered, there were several things to do in and around Tamga, and my premonitions were avered. At the top of our agenda was getting down to the lake shore, which lay on the far side of town. Tamara well-meaningly spent ten minutes delivering a list of memorised navigational instructions of which, after the fact, neither of us retained more than a handful. The recitation involved specific houses, paths, forests, gates, cardinal points, and several other referents that would have overwhelmed even the talented army recruit. We set off with the few scraps of information we could recall, and eventually - by asking a few locals and using our common sense - found our way down to the lake.

It felt strange to encounter a genuine body of water after many weeks on the dry subcontinent. Central Asia is not the place to go for a beach holiday, or to 'hang ten.' Nevertheless, Tamga's was a nice little beach. It lacked waves, since it was a lake, but the water was pleasant and the view fine. I had a ten minute dip before hanging out on the shore for a while, and watching a boat pass by.

The following day, we undertook a trip to Barskoon Valley, and then Skazka Canyon. The former was a picture-perfect valley with a mountain backdrop, filled with yurts, horses, and very young Kyrgyz boys prostituting their ponies out for cheap rides. I chatted to Tamara’s husband Askar in hackneyed Russian on the way over to the valley, and used the language again to reject the offers of horse rides we were bombarded with. Instead, we hiked up to the signature waterfall, which took all of ten minutes.

       

   

Skazka Canyon, meanwhile, is also known as ‘Fairy-Tale Canyon,’ which despite its lack of goblins, sprites, or any creatures of folklore, is indeed a magical location. This is a stark Badlands where cruel red rock formations knife their way across a desert terrain that’s drier than the prose from an R.L. Stine book. It is surprisingly easy to become lost in its labyrinthine corridors and mini-peaks, but we avoided that by always keeping one eye on the road from whence we came. Anyway, it was my first time in such a terrain, and it will stick in my mind as one of my favourite landscapes from Central Asia.

Karakol

A day or two later, it was time once again to up-and-away; our next port of call was the much-lauded town of Karakol. Upon arriving in the town, I felt a surge of disappointment, as it appeared to lack anything that would make anyone want to visit it. It is actually lauded only for its proximity to a number of rewarding multi-day treks that attract sinewy hikers from across Europe.

            I will not go into detail on Karakol town, as I found it to be nothing more than a poorly thought-out series of mundane suburban streets with no lake, park, forest, interesting monuments, or anything at all for me to write about. Instead, I will skip to the hikes we did, which were enjoyable, and made the excursion out to this eastern part of the lake worth it.

            First up was a day-trip to Jeti Oguz and back. This cute little number takes you up a gentle road in a valley for a few kilometres, before arriving at a couple of high pastures where summertime nomads ride horses and look wistful outside yurts. Since we hadn’t trekked properly since Leh, ‘Jeti’ was a nice way of easing back into that activity. Towards the end of the track, I made a side excursion up to – you guessed it – a waterfall. Halfway up I was hustled for a horse ride by a middle-aged Kyrgyz man and a young boy, and taking pity on the boy, I submitted myself to his pony. It was too small for me, and moved slower than I would have on foot, but I felt more culturally engaged. Plus, it was time to finally ride a horse in Central Asia.

    

 

      The following day, we moved onto bigger and better things. A two day trek from Ak-Suu village to Altyn Arashan and back was made into three days by a day trip I did from the latter village to a lake called Ala Kul. The trekking to Altyn Arashan was not too difficult overall, but there were more kilometres to cover, and also a couple of steep sections that taunted the tread on our shoes.

I took on the long day-trip to Ala Kul alone, as the route was too difficult for mum. I myself found it pretty sketchy at times, with the final mountain pass being plain nasty. A gradient that flirted promiscuously with an angle of 45 degrees combined with a walking surface of loose scree to form a thoroughly despicable climb. Going up, I was often on all fours to get enough traction. Going down, I was mostly on my backside, hoping I could slide down without rolling off the edge of the mountain. But I have to say, it was all worth it, because Ala Kul was probably the most incredible thing I’ve seen on the entire trip.

On the way back, I was aggressively hustled into a yurt by a couple of Kyrgyz men, to be served a cup of tea. I was not really in the mood, but gave into their macho tactics. Unsurprisingly, after I attempted to leave, one of them yelled ‘100 som!’ from behind me. I turned around with a sigh, and regarded the Central Asian scheister. As Milton Friedman once said, there is no free lunch. Conveniently though, I had not a dime on me. I searched every crevice of my pack, and found no money to pay him with. So the nefarious nomad suggested I give him my wrist watch. Considering the analogue time-piece cost over 150 dollars, I was rather reluctant to grant his request. Racking my brains for an alternative gift, I remembered that I was carrying some confectionery, for an energy boost. I offered him the rest of my candy, and he quickly agreed. Once the saccharine transaction was complete, I put my pack back on and got the hell out of there.

In sum, I thoroughly enjoyed the trek, even as it left us both quite weary. The scenery, with valleys and rivers and mountains, was good photo-fodder. And there’s no doubt that my fitness has improved on this trip, which can only be a good thing.

Cholpon Ata

Our final stop around Lake Issyk Kul was at Cholpon Ata, an oft-criticised beach getaway for wealthy Russians. I was less concerned about mean-hearted demographical insults, and more interested in the fact that Cholpon Ata actually had access to the lake, which meant there were swimming opportunities. On the first day in the town I had a solo swim at one of the beaches, and enjoyed the pleasant waters. I did not so much enjoy the swathes of pot-bellied fifty-something Slavic men who smoked cheap cigarettes as they burned on the beach. But the lake was great.

            And now, readers, a solemn tale. On the first day in Cholpon Ata, I contracted food poisoning. Mum and I had eaten lunch at a stock-standard roadside café on our street, and had had decently tasty fare in my opinion – manti, a Kyrgyz dish comprised of noodles, horse meat and vegetables. Nothing seemed off about the food to me at the time. But a couple of hours later, I began to feel very, very sick.

            Matters were not helped by the fact that I had left my good pair of sneakers at a hostel back in Karakol, and had to call the owner of that hostel for help, which consisted of him putting the shoes on a marshrutka that was heading to Cholpon Ata anyway. The agreed place for me to meet the driver was outside a bank on the main strip of Cholpon Ata, and I had been given a fairly specific time window. The trouble was, when the target marshrutka finally showed up – twenty minutes late – it drove straight past, and I couldn’t catch it. In the meantime, I was feeling increasingly sick, and had to throw up several times on the sidewalk.

            Indeed, the driver reneging on his promise to deliver me the shoes was a kick in the guts right after I had just chucked my guts. This was definitively the worst moment of the trip so far. Later, I got a half-hearted call from the driver, in difficult-to-understand Russian, asking where I was. He was probably going through the motions, hoping I would give up so that he could keep the sneakers, and maybe sell them to a rare Kyrgyz man with feet as big as mine. He won in the end, too, as I was too sick to locate his next suggested rendezvous point. It was sayonara to my footwear, and an evening of vomiting lay ahead.

            I threw up nearly fifty times over the course of a few hours before my stomach decided it had rid itself of what I assume was bad meat. I did not feel right in the belly again until two days later, and then I would not touch meat for a few days. Fortunately, I was in fit enough condition during my recovery to salvage my Cholpon Ata experience from misery. Mum and I visited a historical museum, as well as the famous petroglyphs – ancient drawings on rocks. Most of these were of goats drawn side-on, which became so repetitive as to be funny. I really liked the site though, and after a swim at the lake later in the day, I ended up with some nice memories from the town.

A goat drawn side-on

Goats drawn side-on

A goat drawn side-on

Yeah, you get the picture...

            After three days in Cholpon Ata, we located a shared taxi and made the three hour trip back to Bishkek. And there, I shall end this blog post. For all the dirt on the latter half of our stay in Kyrgyzstan, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the next entry!

Kazakhstan

PART 1: ARRIVING

On Monday July the 3rd, our plane soared over a vast expanse of fertile grassland, the likes of which Genghis Khan would have once ridden across, and landed in the Kazakhi city of Almaty. Arriving at the airport in Kazakhstan was a slightly strange experience for me, because most people looked Asian - which they are - but were speaking in Russian. Everything was now in Cyrillic, and enthusiastic Slavic conversations filled my ears. Leh suddenly seemed very, very far away, as we were confronted with a Brave New World.

After cancelling the flight to Bishkek that our old itinerary had us taking, we looked around for the bus that would take us into the city. Immediately, my rudimentary baby-Russian came into play. It quickly became clear to both my mum and me that we would gain little purchase here with the English language, when bystanders did not understand even basic questions like 'Where is the bus to the city' or 'How much does it cost?' I fell back on the scraps of the Language of the Bear I had picked up from a year's worth of intermittent study. I'd had little to no practice using the tongue, and had scant idea whether what I was saying made any syntactical sense. But I found myself blundering through in it, as it appeared it was the only way.

We eventually made it onto the bus, which was jam-packed full of solemn Kazakhi commuters, and was not really ideal for our multiple large pieces of luggage. The bus trip was made no better by the fact that we had no idea where we were going, and nobody spoke any English to explain to us where we were. I managed to glean enough information through my hackneyed Russian to land us within a few kilometres of the hostel we'd booked. From there we ended up needing the help of a Kazakhi woman who could speak English to hail us a taxi to take us the rest of the way.

The hostel was about the most discreetly-located establishment imaginable to have made it onto Bookings.com. When we finally arrived at number 151 Kabanbai Batyr, we were confronted with a towering, grim-looking apartment block that looked more Soviet than Shostakovich in a gulag. After reconnoitering the perimeter, we were on the verge of giving up and finding another place to stay when we chanced upon a woman who happened to know the code to the building keypad. This was a start, at least. We got through the door, then she told us we were on the fourth floor of the building, which meant we had to lug our suitcases and packs up a dozen flights of stairs. We did not find the correct floor before accidentally summoning some random Kazakhi tenant to his doorway, and apologising profusely. Fortunately, when we did find the hostel, it turned out to be a nice place, and perfectly fit for staying in.

Impressions of Almaty

PART 2: STALKED AND SADDENED

The following day, we roundaboutly found our way into the city to do some touristy stuff. Before that, though, we went to a 'Supermarket' near our hostel.

I put the word supermarket in inverted commas because I don't feel entirely comfortable gracing it with that status. We walked into the store, and were immediately instructed in Russian to lock up our packs in the safes up the front. After doing so, we were allowed in to browse for our groceries. Immediately, we acquired a diffuse but extremely conspicuous band of surveiller-helpers, who either watched our every move for no good reason at all, or offered us unnecessary assistance to find every single grocery item we were after. Most spoke only Russian and Kazakh - some knew a few words of English. One young man was doggedly determined to help us find our desired supplies, as the other seventeen idle supermarket workers stood around and stared at us.

Besides the totalitarian vibe of this small-time grocery store, the offerings were meagre and bizarre. The joint lacked basic items such as bread and potato chips, yet it seemed to offer more cuts of meat than a Hungarian butchery. As well, half the store was not devoted to foodstuffs at all, but rather clothing, and other consumer products. It was impossible to make a comfortable escape from the store, as several staff members insisted on telling me where I might find a SIM card, and it was only by uttering multiple dismissive remarks in Russian, combined with physically walking down the street, that we were at last able to put an end to the creepy experience.

Alas, we had not escaped the unsettling feeling of post-Soviet totalitarianism yet. Our first tourist stop for the day was the city art museum, which apparently boasted an impressive collection of Kazakhi and Russian artwork. This was certainly true; the collection was more expansive than any I'd ever seen anywhere, and the paintings were gorgeous. However, the museum came with an unfortunate downside. In every single room of the museum, late-middle-aged stony-faced Kazakhi women stood sentinel, casting a baleful eye over every electrical impulse of our nervous systems, and periodically snapping at us in Russian when we broke some arbitrarily imposed museum rule. Once, as I admired a large, enrapturing Kazakhi painting, I took my drink bottle out to quench my thirst. I was promptly accosted by one of the self-appointed cultural policewomen, and ordered to put my bottle away. Another time, we attempted to enter a room from a direction that didn't precisely align with the labyrinth schematic internalised in the women's heads. Again, we were dished a telling-off in Russian, and pointed in the 'correct' direction. Fortunately, the band of menopausal post-KGB painting defenders was not offensive enough to totally spoil our visit. The artwork was superb, and we were glad to see it.

Work them cotton fields!

So much Kazakhstan, so little time

Our last stop for the day was the Kok Tobe, a hill in the central city that offers hard-to-beat panoramas from the summit. After catching a cable car up the verdant mound, we arrived at the top, where an attempt at a theme park is laid out across the hill. Indeed, the Kok Tobe is known for offering a number of carnival-style rides or game booths, where Kazakhi children can live out their Disneyland dreams, all against the leafy backdrop of Almaty city. What we experienced, however, was not enchanting, but rather sad.

What first stood out to me at the Kok Tobe was the relative dearth of people. It was a weekday, to be sure, but such temporal trifles should not have left the hill looking so threadbare as it was that day. Sparse groups of locals wandered unjubilantly around the park, seldom availing themselves of the rides and games on offer, or exhibiting any signs that the Kok Tobe was contributing positively to their existence. In the meantime, mum and I sought out icecream, and were turned down two separate times by shops that sold it, once because the icecream machine was 'broken', and the second time because the person serving icecream was 'not there.' Thus, I gradually began to pity the park, and soon afterward laugh at the overwhelming sense of pathos it exuded. After snapping some pictures and eventually finding a café icecream, we said our goodbyes and caught the cable car back down.

PART 3: A TRIP TO THE KAZAKHI COUNTRYSIDE

A few days into our stay in Kazakhstan, we booked a trip to Turgen, a town some fifty kilometres from Almaty proper. Twenty kilometres further from Turgen was a campsite that served as a popular getaway for city-slickers, and was to be our accommodation for the night.

It took a taxi and a bus from the city, followed by another taxi from Turgen, to reach our destination. Our Turgen taxi driver was a gruff, very stocky, fifty-something Kazakhi man from the country. I plied him from the street as he shot me sympathetic glances from afar. It was just as well I spoke a bit of Russian, as he knew not a word of English. Deciphering his responses was difficult, as a foreign Slavic language and a rough rural accent combined to produce a perfect storm of incomprehensibility. Nevertheless, we made ourselves understood eventually, and soon mum and I were on our way to the Kazakhi countryside.

The campsite was situated in the midst of a truly bucolic landscape. Lush, grassy hills flanked us on both sides, and a crystal-clear river roared down the valley in an endless series of rapids. Butterflies and other heart-warming insects fluttered through the air, attracted to the flowers and pollens that filled the environment. Our accommodation for the night was a pre-pitched tent divided into a small vestibule and a bedroom with two surprisingly comfortable camp stretchers. Around the corner was a large dining tent, where meals were served thrice a day. Overall, the camp was very pleasant, and we were blessed with good weather to enjoy it.

On the day we arrived, I ventured out to get the lie of the land, and search for some trails to hike up. Regrettably, there were few established trails, with most being only vague quadbike tracks long since overgrown with grass. I tried a few of these, and in each instance was forced back by the excessive length and thickness of the vegetation around my legs. Still, they were enjoyable diversions, and it was nice to find myself in such poetic terrain.

The following day, mum and I set out to walk the site's main track, which leads to a giant waterfall. After the first hour, mum peeled off and went back, while I pressed on for the remaining hour and a half. When I arrived, I became absorbed in the awesome waterfall, and it in turn became absorbed in me, via the steady spray produced by the impact of the falling torrent against the lake at the bottom. I whipped out my phone camera and took some pictures as water droplets planted themselves on the screen. Looking at photos of the beast is not the same as experiencing it in person, but I had to create some record of the moment.

After the fanboying was done, I turned around and began walking back across the bridge that had led up to the viewing point. As I was walking, two young Kazakhi men who were sitting on the ground eating their lunch waved at me, and ushered me over to them. I was ever so slightly wary, on account of my poor Russian, but I complied nevertheless. When I reached them, I immediately asked whether they spoke English - to this they both replied 'not much', in Russian. So once again, it seemed that my beginner-level Russian would somehow, miraculously, come into its own.

My two new Kazakhi buddies were very friendly, and offered me some tea as well as biscuits and fruit. I sat down with them and partook of their lunch as we exchanged cursory information about ourselves. They were friends, here for the day. One of them had a wife and a son, the other was unattached. I made use of my offline English-Russian dictionary to fill in the seemingly infinite gaps in my lexicon, and used gestures wherever possible. My companions were very understanding, and we ended up spending a pleasurable three or so hours together as we hung out at the waterfall, and then wandered back down the track to the campsite.

Along the way, the younger man of twenty-four pointed out and explained several different plants to me, one of which was poisonous and itchy. My buddies collected some berries from the sides of the path, and offered me a few, insisting they were both safe and delicious. With some reluctance I acquiesced, and sure enough ended up enjoying the small fruits. Later, they filled their bottles with water from a small stream flowing beside the path, and bade me do the same. Again with some reluctance I agreed, and drank the water, which according to them was 100 per cent pure, untainted by the evils of the city. It tasted damned good, I concede.

Later it was time to part ways as I returned to camp, and they to their dwelling. It had been an enjoyable afternoon all said, and it was somewhat bittersweet saying goodbye to my Kazakhi buddies and the campsite all at once. Mum and I packed up and departed the area, having acquired a lift from a kindly couple who were also driving back to Almaty. Thus ended a memorable chapter of our time in Kazakhstan.

PART 4: RAIN AND REFLECTIONS

After one day back in Almaty where we visited such attractions as a park, a church, and a folk instrument museum, we departed the city once again for a nearby resort town called Medeu, with the resort itself named 'Shymbulak.' Ski resort by winter, hiking getaway by summer, we descended upon the little village in the latter season, and were greeted by pastoral, rollicking hills and still pretty-damned hot temperatures, with only a light mountain zephyr to stop the warmth from swallowing us whole.

Firstly, some preliminary exploration was in order. Once we had got set up in our rather small hotel room, we donned our sunglasses and hats and walked out into the resort village. On our way was a modest-sized swimming pool, where mostly Kazakhi men and women were dowsing themselves to escape the sun's wicked rays. Later, mum and I would do the same. We dodged children riding on rentable buggies, passed a chained-up raptor bird, and examined the ski-lifts/gondolas that ran up the mountainside. Tomorrow, we said, we would catch a gondola up to the next part of the mountain and do a hike up there.

Unfortunately, in the evening, it began to rain somewhat, and the following morning it rained again. These periods of rain in what had otherwise been an almost exclusively sunny holiday came as something of an existential shock to our systems, and reminded us that precipitation existed. I took the time to work on writing this blog post, which took far longer than you would care to imagine, as well as download the DuoLingo language app, which I've been very conflicted about in the past, but whose pervasive influence I have finally succumbed to. With the rain temporarily bringing our Kazakhi dreams to a screeching halt, this seems a good time to mention some aspects of Kazakhstan that have not yet come under examination in this post.

Firstly, the Kazakhi people. Mum commented soon after arrival that the Kazakhis did not exude the same overt contentment as the people of Leh did. Indeed, these Central Asians' countenances are not quite as tranquil as their Ladakhi counterparts', though this is the case in most of the world, and certainly applies to my own visage, so it is not entirely remarkable. Anyway, Kazakhi people are very willing to help you if they speak English, and sometimes even if they don't. Unsolicited assistance is surprisingly common here, and as the totalitarian supermarket attested, at times it can be too much. It might also be said of the Kazakhis that they can be rather direct and serious at first blush, a manner I had already encountered in Germany years before. At times I wonder whether it really counts as serious if eighty per cent of the world behaves the same - as Syndrome from the Incredibles says, "When everyone's super, no one will be." In sum, many Kazakhis have that head-down Russian flavour to them, but I haven't found it to be unpleasant, except in the case of the Orwellian art gallery.

Secondly, the confectionery. Nestle, Hersheys, Haribo - close up shop now. It's over. After a week of indulging in Kazakhi candy, I've determined that it is chemically impossible to trump its form and deliciousness. I knew it already on the flight over to Almaty; we were served airplane sweets that came in a delightful assortment of pure, gorgeous, fruity flavours that seduced the palate before steadily intensifying in taste and then finally, for the climax, exploding into a river of sweet goo. The lollies had a better narrative structure than a Christopher Nolan film. And this supreme sensory satisfaction was conferred not just by those particular candies, but by every single different sweet we tried in Kazakhstan. The world might have a lot of work to do on climate change, hunger, and attaining global peace, but on the confectionery front, it's game-set-match.

Thirdly, Westernisation. If Kazakhstan is a Eurasian country, then nowadays it seems much more European than Asian. Restaurants specialising in Western cuisine abound, with a Burger King, McDonalds or Pizzeria never being too far away. Kazakhis drive through town in nice imported cars and listen to English language electronic music on their radios, even as they have no clue what the singers are saying. And Kazakhi women walk around with more exposed flesh than a nudist at an abattoir. It is difficult to find a presence of traditional Kazakhi culture in the city, and as urbanisation continues, the level of Westernisation seems only likely to increase.

So much, then, for reflection. The rain cleared, and we were able to ride up the gondolas and do our hike in the bucolic mountainside. There, the air was thinner and the breeze icier, and we at last escaped properly from the heat of the Asian sun.

EPILOGUE: LEAVING

The following day we packed up and left Shymbulak, having mostly enjoyed our stay at the charming, if somewhat sleepy resort. We had a half-hour taxi ride back to Almaty, carried out by a fast-talking young Russian-looking man with an affinity for Western pop music, before checking in at a new hotel for our last night. Things were coming to a close for us in Kazakhstan, as the following day we would depart the fine republic for a different one. On our last afternoon, we went for a swim in the hotel pool, ate out at a restaurant with a 90-page menu, and lounged around in our unusually spacious room snacking on sweets and enjoying the Kazakhi air-conditioning.

Kazakhstan has not always been easy to love, with its vast intra-city distances, haphazard bus routes, 10 per cent surchages and clueless taxi drivers. But every time we bite into a candy, get unsolicited assistance from a kind passer-by, or look at the mountains, we realise it isn't so bad after all. As we leave the country and press onto our next destination - Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan - I'll wistfully look out a bus window and remember all the quirks that made this republic a fine stop on our Central Asia tour.

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