And That’s Travel in Kyrgyzstan

Oyv arrived in Bishkek early one morning; I came back from nomading around Lake Issyk-Kol and walked into the hostel we’d agreed on to find him sleeping off his middle-of-the-night flight.

We were hungry. I’d been eating cheap; a lot of unidentifiable stuff, mostly lumps of dough concealing meat I didn’t recognize but just bit into, hoping for the best. I’d read somewhere that nobody other than wolves eats more meat than the Kyrgyz people. It was much later that I realised the meat-surprise in my mystery meals usually involved horse. The issue is partly language – I’d noticed it when I asked for water at my very first guesthouse and needed a translator app to get this request across. It’s also partly that the food is generally bad.

But in the capital city there are options so we thought we’d give the national cuisine another go. We discovered a liking for manty – fried or steamed dumplings stuffed with meat and even the odd snippet of greenery.

Plus, the Kyrgyz seem to have a deep affection for salads and at any meal you can end up with three or four small plates full of crunchy beets, walnuts, carrots, cabbage and boiled quail eggs.

We had other important business in Bishkek too, such as shopping for vodka:

And we sought out the local Lenin. A throwback to the good old days, most every town showcases at least one.

Bishkek’s sprawling Osh Bazaar is a great place to visit. Eastern bazaars are not new to us, but this one was different – nobody pressured us to buy tea sets, huge ceramic platters, hookahs, hideous wall hangings, carpets, or any of the other impossible souvenirs that vendors usually try to foist on foreigners in more touristy markets.

Our first real stop together was Kochkor. This inauspicious town boasts a Lenin statue and not much else, but it’s a handy starting point for one of Kyrgyzstan’s most popular activities – horse trekking.

Together with our guide Jomaart, we spent a day riding our rented horses through high mountain passes heading for the alpine Lake Song-Kol. At 3016 meters, it’s frozen for much of the year and too cold for permanent settlement but herders bring their animals here from June to September, and migrate from pasture to pasture taking their yurts with them.

It was a beautiful day – until it wasn’t, when in a series of unpredictable events my horse fell and then kicked me and dragged me at a gallop, while Oyv watched in horror. Miraculously, apart from some pretty bad bruising (not to mention a terrific scare) I was ok.

We found an unexpected use for our vodka – Oyv poured it over the bleeding gouges on my fingers where the reins had scraped off layers of skin.

The expression ‘You have to get back on the horse’ suddenly took on a very literal meaning for me – halfway to Song-Kol our options were limited to a long ride in the gathering darkness to the closest yurt camp by the lake, or an even longer ride back to the village.

At camp, ducking under the heavy felt curtain and into the main yurt for dinner we discovered that I already knew four of the six other travellers there. That’s Kyrgyzstan – hang around a few days and you’ll get to know pretty much everyone else in the vicinity.

Keen to put the lake behind us, we moved on to Bokonbayevo and checked into a homestay run by Gulmira and her husband. Eating dinner with them that night (‘Like a family’ said Gulmira) our hostess pointed at the virbrant purple bruise on my arm. As I sniffled through our horse trekking tale, Gulmira spoke to her phone in Russian and pointed it at me. ‘Do not cry’ translated the robotic voice from the phone, while its owner nodded sympathetically in a motherly fashion.

We were really, really over horses so it seemed natural to turn our focus to birds of prey. Eagle hunting – that is, hunting with eagles, not for eagles – is a Bokonbayevo tradition, still practised by a few men who hand the skill down from one generation to the next. Gulmira called her neighbor Talgart and we met him in the garden with his eagle Tumara.

Talgart birdnapped Tumara from her nest when she was just an eaglet, and she’s lived with him ever since. On autumn weekends they ride together into the mountains to hunt for foxes, rabbits and other small animals – Tumara gets the meat and Talgart is after the skins. Today it’s more of a cultural hobby than a means of sustenance, and Talgart trains other eagle rulers to compete in hunting matches with their birds.

That afternoon Talgart drove us to the main street to catch a mashrutka. Sitting in the back of the car (which Talgart started by jamming a screwdriver into the ignition) I noticed Tumara was along for the ride, too.

Getting to the southern part of Kyrgyzstan is easier said than done: the options are a dubious domestic flight or an endless twelve hour ride in a share taxi through the mountains, with a driver whose skillset includes things like speeding wildly and overtaking other vehicles just before the entrance to mountain tunnels, on roads so bumpy in parts that Oyv’s fitbit recorded the journey as steps.

It was well past dark and raining when we finally climbed out of the car in central Arslanbob – a deserted town square in the woods. In a country which otherwise offers little to no infrastructure for travellers, Kyrgyzstan has a network of CBT (Community Based Tourism) homestays. It’s a good way for us to travel and for small communities to profit from our presence. Finding the local CBT office we called the number painted on the door; moments after that three men pulled up in a jeep and we climbed into the back. A short ride later, the men dropped us off like a delivery at one of Arslanbob’s homestays.

It’s possible that Arslanbob is one of the weirder towns either of us has ever been to, and that’s saying a lot. Back at the main square in the light of day, we discovered a busy transport hub almost hidden by the trees, filled with marshrutkas and the men who drive them, and a lot of depressing shops selling the same terrible selection of dusty biscuits and candy. But we did not come to Kyrgyzstan for a lively urban experience or to shoot the breeze in the town square, so we were fine with that.

Wandering past the last of the shops we hiked into the surrounding forests and misty hills.

We had just a day or so left before Oyv’s flight home. Over shashlik and shots of vodka in Osh, the country’s second biggest city, we talked about the day-to-day experiences we’d had, the things that make up a trip.

There’s the abiding fear of never eating a meal you like or even recognise, ever again. And that moment when you find yourself taking a selfie with a Lenin statue. It’s wandering in a crowded bazaar where the only attention you draw is friendly greetings. Or shivering in an alpine meadow, dousing your lacerated fingers with vodka, and then riding to a yurt camp on the shores of an icy lake – to find people you already know gathered around the table and then drinking the last of the vodka with them. It’s kind concern from a stranger you can barely communicate with, expressed via Google Translate. There’s sharing a ride in a battered old car with a majestic eagle. Or finding a comfortable bed at a homestay in an isolated village after a long day’s travel, and hiking in peaceful forests and beautiful mountains.

And that’s travel in Kyrgyzstan.

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For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Kyrgyzstan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.