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.