A record of a twelve-day expedition to a small country called Kyrgyzstan, which is twice the size of our cosy Czech hollow and chiefly famous for not having a great deal to offer international trade — apart from some mining of shiny things and what appears to be industrial-scale straw export. It makes up for this commercial shortfall with landscapes, lakes, the Tian Shan mountains and a cunning native population employed in the taxi profession, who have carried the noble art of screwing the customer over to a completely new level.
Flights to Kyrgyzstan
Our journey began where else but over a beer in the local drinking establishment in Trutnov. At the beginning of April, a respectable Turkish Airlines offer appeared online: Prague–Istanbul–Bishkek return for about CZK 7,800. The other one — Vojcek — spent so long calculating how many piggy banks would have to die that by the time he had finished, the price had reached roughly CZK 8,500 each, including the charming little fee of CZK 250 for the outrageous luxury of paying online by card.
Tickets can be found even cheaper outside the season. The catch is that “outside the season” in a country with an average elevation of 2,750 metres means not everything is accessible and quite a lot of everything is frozen. Mountain lakes, for example, will be under ice, and in winter the road to Song-Köl is buried under snow. So, you know. Tiny detail.
Everything was “prepared” and departure set for Sunday, 5 July, at precisely noon. On Sunday, 5 July, at precisely 12:21, our aircraft left the ground and the tour was officially under way. Prague to Istanbul takes about two and a half hours, and back then the connection took place at Atatürk Airport — the large one in the city. The only Wi-Fi capable of carrying information without the use of pack animals was behind Starbucks!!! Everything else cost money, unfortunately. Three and a half hours of loitering, then onwards to Bishkek.
Istanbul to Bishkek (FRU) takes around four and a half hours, so the whole trip is not especially painful; it depends mainly on the Istanbul wait. It is not often that I praise anyone or anything, but Turkish Airlines provided genuinely good service and even the food could be eaten. A clear improvement over Czech Airlines, which had begun saving on hot meals by replacing a boiled potato with the cheapest petrol-station baguette available — for an additional fee, naturally.
Operation Kyrgyzstan commences
English does not enjoy a particularly large fan club here. Knowing at least a little Russian is useful for haggling over the price of everything — food, beer and, above all, taxis. The better your Russian, the more you save and the more you learn. The worse your Russian, the more comprehensively you will be fleeced.
At about half past three in the morning we touch down at Manas Airport, pass through passport control — which does not speak English — and meet another pair of Czechs with whom we fill the wait for our domestic flight south to Osh.
It is something of a miracle that the second unit in our tandem made it through passport control at all. Before departure, Vojcek had equipped himself with a vocabulary of five words: dog (собака — sabaka), flag (флаг — flag), beer (пиво — pivo), lake (озеро — ozero) and possibly thank you (спасибо — spasibo), although without “please”. Manas is fairly dull: a standard Socialist Realist box. One must remember that Kyrgyzstan is a former Soviet republic, which means the buildings look rather like concrete interpretations of things from IKEA.
Osh / Ош
The domestic flight costs USD 20 per person and takes less than an hour; by road it is twelve. You fly over the mountains and arrive in Kyrgyzstan’s second-largest city. Osh is a larger sort of backside near the Uzbek border, equipped with a museum, a mountain and a bazaar which closes every Monday. Naturally, we arrived on Monday. Instead of rummaging through bazaar debris, we spent the afternoon exploring the city and sampling the first culinary creation from one of the local gourmet kiosks.
Notable delicacies included a broad spectrum of pies, melons and a solid beer selection. Osh also contains the perfectly decent Biy Ordo Guest House, complete with acceptable facilities and a security chap who speaks English and can direct you to nearby shops for urgent beer-supply replenishment. Otherwise, it is a classic eastern city: a little grubby, urban detritus around the edges, dogs, cats and, as the garnish on top, taxi drivers in Ladas.
To help you imagine Osh, here are a few exhibits. Had we possessed more time and not spent Monday wandering around a city whose bazaar was not even functioning, I might have taken more photographs. We did inspect the bazaar, obviously, but empty sales counters are not premium photographic material. Worse, the images might have resembled the Kaufland supermarket in Trutnov one hour before closing, and nobody needs that kind of emotional damage.
The following morning — more precisely at 11:45 — after a substantial night of beer-assisted planning, we packed our assorted sacks and bundles for the next destination, Arslanbob. Reception had informed us that the marshrutka left at 14:20. We therefore hurried towards the bus station to arrive around 14:00: toilet before travel, water, snack and all that sophisticated logistics. At 13:55, as we approach the station, our taxi driver begins shouting that the bus to Arslanbob is passing us in the opposite direction and do we want to go there or what.
The bus system, despite being properly entered in the sacred annals of transport information — the timetable — follows a simpler law: 75% full minibus = departure. It does make a certain sense if you imagine a five-hour journey where people board and leave as required. Why wait for another pack of fools who naïvely believe the timetable when the bus can already be completely full beyond the city limits?
Anyone who owns a car is a TAXI. The price is “negotiable”; satisfaction is emphatically not guaranteed. An opening price can sometimes be divided by ten before you reach an optimum which still means you are paying at least twice the proper amount. The sobriety of the driver is also open to scholarly debate. Ask three times whether the price is final, because these local artists are capable of charging for the journey and then demanding the same sum again on the grounds that they must drive back. Beware the boarding fee, which may spontaneously evolve into an alighting fee. In remote places the departure time depends not on you but on the driver’s mood. Arrange to leave after breakfast at 09:30 and you may confidently expect to depart hungry at 07:15.
Arslanbob / Арстанбап
The first stage from Osh to Arslanbob was, in hindsight, not entirely pointless, although getting there consumed half a day. We arrived around five in the afternoon and were immediately collected by a local who commanded the English language and also appeared to be the senior capo of CBT Arslanbob, an organisation providing accommodation to specimens such as ourselves. For a modest fee they arrange lodging with one of the participating local families, who speak no English whatsoever.
In our case, “lodging” meant a place for the tent in the garden. Indoor accommodation with all the luxury and a modern privy was available, but the price — including commissions — rose accordingly. Your call. We spent the afternoon wandering around and had to admit that the hills had finally earned the title “mountains”. Our own Czech “Giant Mountains”, crowned by a mega-peak now officially measuring a heroic 1,603 metres rather than the humiliating 1,602, might look to a local like that heap of soil between apartment blocks where children go sledging.
We explored the surroundings, whose local star attraction was a half-dry waterfall not worth documenting photographically. Arslanbob is also home to the world’s largest natural walnut forest. We lacked time to reach its heart, but walnut trees grew everywhere. More distressingly, we discovered that beer was unavailable in the village because some bright spark in sandals and a towel on his head had invented Ramadan and the locals had enthusiastically adopted it.
The consolation prize for enforced sobriety was meeting an elderly Muslim gentleman who offered us tea and two pieces of bread. We chatted — not only about dogs and flags — about where we came from and other topics manageable with elementary Russian, said goodbye and retired to the tent in the garden.
In the morning, after sober consideration in the most literal sense, we decided there was no time to linger over the local mountains. Transfers were horribly long and our primary target was the high-altitude Lake Song-Köl at 3,100 metres. After the Arslanbob transport experience, reaching it first appeared difficult and then, once we remembered that no buses went there at all, gradually impossible.
The road to Song-Köl | Kazarman stopover
In the morning we buy essential plastic bottles containing, among other substances, water, and take a bus towards Jalal-Abad. From there, one must find somebody willing to carry us closer to the primary objective: ozero Song-Köl. Our naïve belief that we might arrive that evening is dispersed by the first and only carriage encountered at the alleged TAXI rank. Its owner explains that he is waiting for a babushka to reach the car and, for an ungodly sum, he will gladly take us along. One in front, one in the back with Granny and off we go. If fortune smiles, we shall reach Kazarman before nightfall.
The 140-kilometre journey consumed half a day. Our driver tried to extract information from us, but met geological resistance. We more or less understood him; producing Russian in return was the harder part. During roughly six hours we managed to explain where we were from and what we did. Vojcek emphasised that he owned a dog and that in Czechistan we had flags.
We asked whether his small Honda Fit could manage the next day’s 160 kilometres to the lake. His answer was half yes. The no-shaped half was the price: 6,000 som, then about CZK 2,000 for both of us. In retrospect, fair enough. Crossing several climbs of more than 1,000 metres on roads containing neither asphalt nor barriers deserves proper compensation. We passed a few cars, horses, sheep and cattle, and stopped in a field for fermented mare’s milk, popular with the locals and known as kumis.
Towards evening we reach Kazarman, where our driver arranges garden accommodation with a Muslim friend. Coarse grass inside a chicken run fails to seduce us, so we do not even pitch the tent and instead explore. The offline map claims there is a B&B nearby. Twenty minutes later we find the only functioning street lamp, illuminating a sheet-metal gate labelled B&B. A foreign head appears, speaks basic English and offers two beds, breakfast and a bathroom.
We agree at light speed, collect our things, say goodbye to the original hosts over tea and pies, repay the children with sweets and move into the B&B. Our room is small, with proper beds and a spider’s web in the corner. Outside is a little square where we sit with a Spanish couple until late at night.
After breakfast in the dining yurt, we ask the landlady whether she knows a way for two gentlemen of our calibre to reach Song-Köl. We have not rejected the original driver; 6,000 som simply seems excessive for the 160 kilometres ahead, even if once again there are no roads and a healthy quantity of elevation. She responds with the universal expression “certainly”, takes out her telephone and shortly afterwards an old Audi appears with an entirely different driver, who asks 6,500 som.
We exchange the sort of idiotic look that contains a vivid memory of the cheaper Honda Fit, agree, get in and discover that between us we do not even possess 6,000 som. To the cash machine! Kyrgyzstan in 2015 had cash machines which generally liked VISA cards and had somehow forgotten that MasterCard existed.
If you rely exclusively on MasterCard, carry a proper reserve of cash. In remote areas, money in a bank account can remain a beautiful abstract concept. MasterCard was accepted mainly in more touristy places and shopping centres, where we found portable ATM contraptions that worked. VISA was generally accepted without drama.
Fortunately, Vojcek’s VISA performed its sacred duty. Money obtained, back to the TAXI and onwards to the ozero. We spent the morning staring through the Audi’s rear windows and making occasional stops. This Russian-only driver was helpful and proactive, recommending suitable pauses for photographs, urination and cigarettes. We reached the lake shortly after lunch. He parked by one of several yurt camps, we booked a single night with an option to extend it and then confronted the central strategic question: What the hell are we going to do here?
Lake Song-Köl / Соң-Көл
The original plan to walk around the lake died instantly when we saw its actual size; it had looked considerably smaller on the map. We therefore spent the afternoon exploring and hunting a geocache about three kilometres from our yurt. At first, 3,100 metres did not feel troublesome, but the first rapid climb reminded us that somebody had removed a portion of the air.
The geocaching expedition began with a short football match against the local children. We played two against one. One goal stood between a stone and a horse dropping; the other between a rusty bucket and a recumbent dog. The Czech team’s crushing lead before half-time destroyed the morale of the sole Kyrgyz player and the match ended prematurely. Much of the credit belongs to his mother, who ordered him to fetch water from a nearby ditch. We set off towards the hills and then the box.
Geocaching intermezzo — GC59ECF
I had kept this box on the radar while travelling to Song-Köl, although we had no idea where we would sleep. Once the taxi had deposited us somewhere among the yurts, we had checked in and completed the football fixture, I activated the box-finder and discovered, to my surprise, that the cache lay about three kilometres away as the crow flies, somewhere among the rocks. The perfect excursion when you have no idea where else to go and ultimately do not much care.
An even greater surprise: the box, planted long ago by some passing German, was still there, its contents dry, with two geocoins inside and GPS coordinates accurate to three metres. Trudging to a cache at 3,143 metres and becoming only its second visitor was therefore entirely worthwhile. Final effect: priceless — literally, once the taxi fare is included.
We wandered around the southern shore all afternoon and met a shepherd with his sheep. The lake is beautiful and the surrounding mountains are acceptable too, but what exactly does one do there? High above sea level, a flat plateau surrounded by mountains, with a giant lake in the middle. We abandoned the idea of walking around it, both because of its size and the number of mosquitoes near the water. One could sit for an hour or two and absorb the scene, but another move awaited us if we were to complete at least 75% of the original plan. Back to the yurts, coffee, heat the stove with horse patties and cow dung — excellent fuel — and arrange morning transport towards civilisation and Kochkor.
This is where the taxi-departure episode occurred. We told the landlady about our daring plan to sleep a little and leave after breakfast, say at nine. The driver, she replied boldly, wanted to depart before eight. Then she turned on her rubber boot and left. You do not negotiate the manner or hour of departure here; you are told. Goodbye and cope as best you can.
That evening I attempted to photograph the yurts beneath the stars, but the equipment was not exactly born for the task. A second-hand 18–200 mm kit lens with tired mechanical play is not ideal, and high ISO appeared quickly on the Nikon D7000. The results are noisy versions of an otherwise magnificent scene. Judge for yourselves what sort of celestial carnival the people of Kyrgyzstan receive.
Quick breakfast in the morning, pack the equipment, throw everything into another Audi and point it towards “civilisation”. Cattle, horses, yurts and mountains accompanied us, as did a larger committee of crows.
We made several planned stops and one unplanned one. Vojcek became enormously warm and pressed the appropriate button to lower the electric window. The button worked perfectly in the downward direction. Minutes later he was freezing, but the glass declined to rise by even a millimetre. A short halt to improvise insulation around the naked wires in the door, and eventually we reached Kochkor.
The magnificent dump of Cholpon-Ata / Чолпон-Ата
The scenic journey from the ozero to the first civilisation took about three hours, and after sixty hours we once again appreciated what a miraculous modern invention asphalt is. At the end of the taxi ride, in the transfer town of Kochkor, we established ourselves in a restaurant with bottled beer and possibly the deepest dry toilet on Earth. Drop any object into the opening and the delay between its departure at floor level and arrival at the geological faecal layer below was a full three seconds.
After several glasses, the day’s plan became much clearer. A minibus goes from Kochkor to Balykchy, where another can be found for the tourist metropolis of Cholpon-Ata on the northern shore of Issyk-Kul. We would idle away the afternoon, then head towards Grigorievka Valley the next day. Our expectations were based on a relatively enthusiastic travel-guide description. Upon arrival, expectation and reality did not intersect, but there is nothing in this world that beer cannot repair.
Cholpon-Ata is a tourist mega-dump offering a shopping centre, restaurants and a mega-lake with a mega-filthy beach full of Russians. An illustrative scene from our arrival: a hundred-metre avenue, a concrete pavement and bins last emptied in 2013. A healthy flow of mainly Russian-speaking tourists circulated around the most conspicuous object in the avenue — a proud father, drunk as a bucket, pushing his child in a pram and trying to reach the far end via a zigzag/slalom system. The perfect family holiday.
The single bright point was the adequately equipped Apple Hostel, where we met other unfortunate souls who had entertained the same defective idea of coming here. Evening loitering, a beach visit, the traditional five-beer planning session and an encounter with somebody sharing our next objective: Grigorievka. The third member of the expedition became Teresa, a German living in England. She promised to join us only briefly because she had to return to Russian school in Bishkek. Everybody knew the real reason was Vojcek, who had entered the hostel with horse manure distributed across his sandals. In the morning: pack, finish yesterday’s fluid-management residue, meet the third entity and head to the main road in search of transport to Grigorievka.
Grigorievka / Григорьевка
The vehicle best matched to our refined metropolitan standards and pocket money was unquestionably a luxury Lada taxi, Zhiguli class. We spent half an hour on mildly perspiring seats that remembered the collapse of the Soviet Union and arrived in the “town” of Grigorievka. But the bloody driver wished to honour his profession. Despite the absence of central locking, he rattled his keys, declared that the luggage in the back was under lock and demanded twice the agreed amount.
His justification was the obvious need to return to the original departure point — that is, back to the rear end of Cholpon-Ata. Fortunately, Santus had learnt several Russian expressions so he need not rely exclusively on “fuck”, “rubbish” and “ooh, come on”. I cursed him gently, perhaps said something inappropriate judging by his face, and secured a substantial discount: we paid only 30% extra.
In the town we arranged another TAXI towards the valley. We asked the price three times; it remained miraculously identical, so we continued. Twenty minutes later we stood at the entrance and proceeded on foot. As is customary, the lower valley was occupied by locals offering services with the appropriate surcharge: accommodation, horse rides, refreshments, fish and assorted amusements.
The valley itself is a five-kilometre natural contraption with a serious river and hills on both sides, so one mostly follows the river bed. Even from below it is splendid. Naturally, it also contains a geocache and the location is easily identified: beside the large stone, where the rubbish has been tipped, towards the little wood serving as the defecation zone. Unfortunately, the entire valley is a little grubby.
The local method is to dispose of rubbish immediately without wasting thought on the theoretical possibility of a bin. Wherever people gather, waste appears along both sides of the road — provided it is no longer on my property. Throw it towards the neighbour and it becomes the neighbour’s problem. Park or national park, plastic bags stuffed with filth are everywhere. Whatever enters the forest remains in the forest. Their nature is beautiful. The question is how long it will survive them.
Teresa preferred to sleep in a yurt, so we split halfway with the agreement that we would continue deeper into the valley and she would certainly find us somewhere beside the road in the morning. The first tent she saw would be ours. Before the evening farewell, Vojcek spotted a bird-rental enterprise and ignored Santus’s experienced advice: “Mate, do not put that thing on your arm; you’ll end up paying.” He did not believe him, fitted one bird to each arm, had himself immortalised and surrendered 100 som per bird.
Near the upper end, where Grigorievka opens out, we bought two plastic bottles — one and a half litres of beer each — and established a camp nearby. Wild camping is rarely a problem in Kyrgyzstan: if there is no fence, a tent can generally be pitched. Some guides advise against camping near villages because dogs may regard your tent as part of their territory. We had no difficulty during the entire trip; apply common sense and things usually work.
Morning: make coffee, dismantle camp, load the packs, wait for Teresa and advance uphill towards a mountain lake whose name we did not know but which the map identified as “1-e ozerko”.
The route was uphill all the way. Occasionally a Mercedes passed carrying locals with the same camping idea. Occasionally the car scraped its belly on a rock and required pushing, a spectacle we admired from a respectful distance. Then an old ZIL appeared, crawling upwards while consuming approximately one hundred litres per hundred kilometres. Seeing a ZIL was rare; seeing one driven by somebody about fifteen years old was unusual even for Kyrgyzstan.
After several kilometres the lake appeared, surrounded by marsh and mud and therefore almost inaccessible. We enjoyed the view for an hour and turned back. At a nearby yurt the group separated: Teresa returned to Bishkek and we went to eat fish in another yurt. With no clear plan, we continued down the valley after lunch. The road dragged on, and after three hours in the sun with half a litre of warm water flavoured by chemical treatment, it was not the finest journey ever devised.
A herd of cattle kept us company, the occasional car passed, but otherwise the doroga was long. At the first river we stopped in the shade, replenished and chemically seasoned the water, and began hitchhiking. Within an hour we caught a passing van driven by a Russian who agreed to carry us closer to civilisation. He loaded us among the debris in the back and genuinely delivered us to the main road. During the farewell we corrected his impression that we were “Amerikanski”, revealed our actual origin and rewarded him with a bottle of warm beer. Back in Cholpon-Ata we selected the next target: Ala Archa National Park, roughly thirty kilometres south of Bishkek.
Ala Archa / Ала-Арча
The road from Issyk-Kul to Bishkek is endless boredom. We survived and, several hours later, emerged at the main bus station. A little loitering, some rapid direction planning and soon we found a person willing to transport us for a pre-agreed reward towards Ala Archa. Since it is an excellent national park close to the capital, vehicle entry carries a fee.
The driver extracted information from us and, upon learning we came from Czechistan, announced that he had served as a soldier in Bratislava during the 1980s. We were initially sceptical, but then he began firing off beer names, Czech words and brands of Czech motorcycles. Confidence restored. One final magical sentence removed all doubt about his Czechoslovak experience.
Very many Gypsies there in Bratislava, yes?
The taxi ejected us at the park gate. We paid admission and followed the road deeper into the valley. The gate is a considerable distance from the actual park, but another entrepreneurial motorist soon offered cheap transport to the far end; the marshrutka is extremely sporadic. Agreed, boarded, delivered, paid: done. We had arrived, and we were not alone. The Germans had experienced the same excellent idea. About twenty of them occupied the same camping square but showed no desire to socialise, so we did not need to revive language skills acquired from Czech television comedy. We pitched for two nights on a concrete patch and walked up and down the valley. Since the lamps contain no bulbs, the night sky is rather good.
I must admit this was probably the first time I had heard boulders and stones rolling along a river bed. That soundtrack accompanied us throughout a valley whose end we naturally failed to reach. As in Grigorievka, one simple rule applied: everything brought into the national park for a quality picnic remains there. Bags of rubbish, loose rubbish, cigarette ends and rolling rocks welcome visitors for the first 300 or 400 metres. First the bags fade away, then the other waste and finally the cigarette ends. Once the mess ends, only a magnificent valley remains.
Ala Archa suits people with enough time, morale and provisions for several days of trekking. It is difficult to become completely lost: find the exceptionally loud river and it will lead back to base camp. We covered around seven kilometres upstream — an estimate of heroic precision. Marked paths existed, but unfortunately we were somehow on the opposite bank. A person can invent a route, although forward speed declines somewhat.
At some arbitrary point we turned around. On the return we loitered beneath a tree, refilled from a stream without chemical flavouring, watched two episodes of Red Dwarf and moved back towards camp. It is remarkable how quickly a shallow ford crossed earlier can fill to knee depth.
Near camp, some benevolent soul opened a small shop selling beer in plastic bottles. During afternoon planning we engineered a sophisticated stream-mounted cooler for 1.5-litre bottles using string and elastic bands. The water was cold enough to cool the evening digestif properly, but minor structural deficiencies revealed themselves during operation and required us to wade downstream in pursuit of escaped beer.
Fortunately, every bottle was recovered, allowing us to celebrate our contribution to the non-expansion of local litter. In the morning: pack and head for the city. The marshrutka operates at random intervals, but thanks to the previous day’s increase in karma — preventing beer from becoming litter — one arrived after only ten minutes and carried us to the capital.
Bishkek / Бишкек
Bishkek is roughly the size of two Brnos: about 800,000 to 900,000 people. As the capital of a former Soviet republic, it is properly equipped with every necessity a post-Soviet city should possess. Monuments to Lenins, soldiers and heroic collective farmers adorn broad streets, hidden corners and the walls of apartment blocks. We spent most of our time around the centre.
The outskirts did not seem to offer much, and after meeting fake policemen in a park who searched for any pretext to extract money, we abandoned the bazaar. A concrete exhibition hall filled with Socialist monuments, counterfeit law enforcement, a little filth, broad avenues and urban summer heat. Arrival fulfilled every expectation: concrete to the right, concrete to the left and concrete around the corner. Occasionally a little greenery interrupts it, but not too much, lest it damage the integrity of the continuous concrete belt.
Lenin stands in a park near a school campus, his right hand pointing towards the American university. We do not know whether the university was built first and Lenin subsequently relocated, or the other way around.
There is not much more to write. If you love concrete or admire Soviet monuments, Bishkek may be the place for you. Otherwise it is a rather concrete nothing-much. We took a few photographs so nobody could say we had not, but as morale declined, so did the desire to make pictures. Interesting places certainly existed; we simply lacked appetite after everything seen along the road. Kyrgyzstan is excellent — mainly outside Bishkek.
Conclusion
I have recently seen several reasonably priced trips to Kyrgyzstan at around CZK 9,000. The recommendation not to travel in winter still applies, however tempting a CZK 4,500 ticket may be: there is very little to do and most interesting places are inaccessible beneath snow. Twelve days were insufficient and transfers are dreadful. Perhaps the new roads and motorways will improve matters once completed. If you are considering the journey, allow at least a full fortnight.
That also leaves time for the area south of Issyk-Kul around Karakol, with treks among hills and ozeros. They have beer, it is warm, the mountains are respectable and the valleys even better. The countryside is beautiful in general. Most importantly… learn Russian — it will save you money.
To everyone who read this far: my sincere congratulations.