Once upon a time, Nora the Donkey Rider, Emily the Tattooed Lady, Jesse the Bearded Lady, Lynne the Australian Aquawoman, and Bruno the Flying Frenchman loaded up on some horses and rode into the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. There they encountered scorching sun, torrential downpours, and tempestuous blizzards. Travelling from yurt to yurt they sampled local cuisine such as kumuz (fermented mare's milk) and galloped across alpine meadows shared by cows and sheep. In the end they all emerged alive and have gone their separate ways to continue the adventure.
The above is a somewhat abbreviated version of Nora and my's adventures in Kyrgyzstan, the small country nestled on the southern border of Kazakhstan. It was well worth the process of acquiring visas. After a day or two in Bishkek, meeting travel partners, extending visas, and enjoying snazzy coffee shops, we hopped a taxi with Jesse and our new friends Lynne and Bruno to the small town of Kochkor. It's basically a small grid of streets huddled in a flat valley between two looming ranges of mountains. That same day we arranged to go horse trekking, and the next morning we set out on our trusty steeds. I named mine "Tortuga", because he often seemed more tortoise than hare.
The mountains of Kyrgyzstan remind me of plenty of places: Alaska, Colorado, Montana; but are made entirely unique by the people living in them. We stayed in yurt camps, buried beneath heavy duvets and looking up at the wooden frames supporting the felted roofs. The families were lovely and incredibly tough for eking out a life there. Even in the summer, it snowed in the peaks and hailed in the valleys. The money they bring in from tourism buys education for their kids, supplies for their camps, and makes a hard life a little easier.
After returning tired and dusty from the trek we continued to Tamga, a little town on the southern coast of Lake Issy Kul. The mountains of Alaska mellowed to the arid rolling hills of eastern Washington, and ended in a beach straight from Hawaii, minus the palm trees. On our hike into town we got picked up by a Russian gentleman in his pimped-out tour van (lace curtains and tiger seats, can't go wrong with that) and we ended up staying at his family's dacha, a neat little house with a gorgeous walled-in garden full of fruit trees. It was easy to while away a day and a half sunning on the beach, cooking up snacks in the kitchen, and even going for a run in the dry hills behind town. Haven't done that for two months, hoo boy!
To the right I've added a list of somewhat relevant blogs: you can track the rest of Jesse's trip through central Asia before he heads to Boston to start grad school, or see where Bruno is on his overland journey from France to New Zealand, and brush up on your French. And of course, read up on Nora's two years of being a tri-lingual threat in Kazakhstan, or peruse Mego's selection of poetry. Enjoy!
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