Random Rambles

Currently travelling through Mongolia in a rented 4X4, we don’t have much access to WiFi. Here’s a quick entry into our latest doings.

From Semey, we take another overnight train to Karaganda. Probably our final railway trip.

Karaganda is a coal-mining town. Even our guide’s father was employed in the mines. (We hire a guide to access places that are hard to get to on our own.) The Miner’s Glory monument takes pride of place in the city.

We visit a mining museum attached to a college that specializes in the mining sciences.

We also visit Vvedenskiy Cathedral, an Orthodox church in Karaganda. Maria needs more modest accoutrements to enter and is provided with a scarf and full-length skirt of heavy material.

The area is also infamous for its history as an enormous Gulag (one of many in the USSR) known as the Karlag In the nearby town of Dolinka, we visit the Museum of Memory of Victims of Political Repression.

Really, to hear citizens speak of Canada these days as a ‘settler colony’ built on the crimes of genocidal maniacs is pretty comical when you consider the sky-high mountains of corpses – millions – left in the wake of history as unfolded in the non-Canadian rest of the world. Get a grip, people.

Finally, we fly back to Almaty for our flight to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia two days away. We take the cable car up to the Kök Töbe recreational area. It’s surprisingly modern.

So we spend our first days in UB (Ulaanbaatar) arranging the rental of a vehicle and camping equipment. We set out for a 16-day trip of wild camping and off-roading.

Sight or Insight of the Day

We wrap up our travels in Kazakhstan and head for Mongolia. It’s been a fun three months in the ‘stans.

Some final issues about Kazakhstan – first, do ‘Cossacks’ in Russia have anything in common with ‘Kazakhs’ in Kazakhstan? According to AI:

‘Cossacks and Kazakhs share an identical linguistic root word that originally meant a “free man,” “wanderer,” or “adventurer”. However, they are two completely distinct groups with different ethnicities, languages, and histories.’

‘Both words derive from the ancient Turkic word ‘kazak’. Historically, the Russian Empire used this term to describe wanderers or people who lived free from the control of any state or overlord. Eventually, the Russian convention split the term to differentiate the Kazakhs of the Central Asian steppes from the Slavic Cossacks serving in the Imperial Russian Army.‘

Second, what’s the deal with Borat and Kazakhstan? As someone who enjoys offbeat humour as much as the next person, I find the character of Borat hilarious. Bur really, it’s not very representative of Kazakhstan. The Borat persona is more like an exaggerated Balkan/East European satire, rather than Central Asian. Maybe Sacha Baron Cohen should have come up with an imaginary country to use as his cultural pincushion?

My goodness, how’s that for an unsettling title?

Our flight from Aktau to Semey goes via Almaty. Almaty airport is a bit of a noisy Hellhole at the moment – lots of construction going on in the Domestic terminal.

What is now the city of Semey in Kazakhstan was known as Semipalatinsk when it was part of the Russian empire. Russian novelist Fyodor_Dostoevsky was exiled here for four years. His house is now a museum. We like visiting the houses of well-known writers.

When I was younger, I enjoyed reading the long drawn-out psychological tales that Russians were so good at writing. (Especially the Constance Garnett translations.) Less popular today because, I’ve been told, people have a hard time keeping track of the many triple-barreled names that pepper these novels by the score.

According to AI: ‘There are seven major literary and memorial museums in the world dedicated to Fyodor Dostoevsky. Six are located in Russia, and one is located in Kazakhstan.’

This one is pretty good. It’s a nifty old wooden house, common in this frontier town.

Even the mosques are made of wood.

An excursion to the Polygon region – we arrange a tour to the formerly secret city of Kurchatov. This is where the USSR developed and tested its nuclear weapons.

The site was selected in 1947 by the infamous Lavrentiy Beria, political head of the Soviet atomic bomb project. (This was in addition to his duties as head of the NKVD, incarcerator of millions and murderer of tens of thousands. A busy man.)

The town was named after Igor Kurchatov, the ‘father of the Russian atomic bomb’.

Gulag labour was employed to build the primitive test facilities. The Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk from 1949 until 1989. (The first hydrogen bomb was tested in 1953.)

The first Soviet bomb test, Operation First Lightning, was conducted in 1949, in an area that would become known as the Opytnoye Pole (experimental field).

The Opytnoye Pole test site is 45 KMs away, straight down this road.

This is a video showing some of the early nuclear tests at the Opytnoye Pole test site, from nearly the same vantage point.

You used to be able to visit more sights in the area, including the actual test sites. Since 2019, these have been closed again.

Fortunately, a Swedish engineer, Martin Trolle Mikkelsen, specializes in chronicling abandoned Cold War sites. He took hundreds of photos of the area before it was closed down, You can see them here – pretty fascinating stuff.

In Kuchatov, there is a museum of the Polygon housed inside the National Nuclear Center, but it’s also no longer open to the public. Too bad, because it has a lot of interesting exhibits, such as:

• An AP-2 control panel from 1955

• A map of the blast radius. To see the effects of the test, Ground Zero would be surrounded by buildings (including a replica Metro station), military and civilian equipment, and live animals (described on the map as a ‘Biological Reserve’.)

• A model of blast radius effects. It looks like a sort of diabolical board game.

The plaque on a memorial shows the layout of the different test sites. Maybe this is where the name ‘Polygon’ come from.

All of this had a predictably negative effect on the health of local people over time. Al Jazeera (!) made a documentary about this ongoing disaster. There’s a monument to the victims in Semey itself.

We also stop at the ruins of the (formerly secret, now abandoned) Chagan air base. This base was the home of long-range heavy bombers, ready to unleash their cargo of nukes on us bourgeois imperialists at a moment’s notice from the Kremlin.

It’s eerie to walk through these streets that once thronged with Russian servicemen and their families..

It reminds us of walking around Varosha in Cyprus.

Apparently, the near-total demolition isn’t an effort to protect state secrets – it’s due to armies of looters taking everything they can sell to ward off the economic collapse after the Soviet pullout from Kazakhstan.

The garrison town was about 10 KMs distant from the actual air base and runways. There were two runways, both 4 KMs in length, now being slowly reclaimed by nature.

Imagine these runways bristling with Tupolev Tu-95 bombers.

The hotel we book in Semey is an old Soviet pile. It has hundreds of rooms.

Ours is a spacious suite, with TWO bathrooms and a nice view of the park across the street.

Sight or Insight of the Day

Funny story – the day after our Polygon tour, we are in our hotel in Semey. Late in the morning, an air-raid siren begins to wail. (Maria doesn’t hear, she has her earbuds on.) For a brief moment, given our visitations of the previous day, the thought passes through my mind: ‘This is it – the Trump-ocalypse has begun. Donald nuked Tehran, missile silo hatches are clanging open around the world. We’re all gonna die.’ It was nothing, of course. I still don’t know why the siren went off at that time in the morning.

All these resources poured into the creation and production of nuclear weapons. There exists an illusion about the end purpose of these devices. It’s not a matter of ‘gaining a strategic advantage over an opponent’ or ‘ensuring battlefield superiority’ or ‘neutralizing the enemy’s command & control capability’. Basically the result of this technology is the potential extermination of all life on Earth. Every man, woman, and child. Every puppy and every kitten. All the fish in the sea and the birds of the air. (OK, cockroaches would probably survive.)

I read an interesting book last year, Nuclear War: A Scenario. (Warning: Not good reading for the anxiety-afflicted.) It sets out step by step how within a couple of hours in any 24-hour cycle, a chain reaction of missile exchanges could result in an unstoppable Armageddon. Thankfully, half the world would be asleep through it all.

And all this satanic power is in the hands of a few dozen men – not a single woman – most of whom are ruthless aging dictators, and at least one doddering vindictive idiot on the cusp of extreme dementia. What a strange species we are.

A quick update: from Turkistan, we continue our train journey 1560 KMs to the city of Aktau on the Caspian Sea.

The Kazakhstan stations we’ve seen have been traditional, as opposed to the sleekly modern ones in Uzbekistan.

Unusually for Kazakhstan Railways, our train is half an hour late. But hey, we’re going to spend 36 hours on board, so what’s a mere half-hour?

Finally, our train pulls into the station.

It’s 1560 KMs of almost unrelieved flatness. After spending many weeks in the high mountains, this takes some getting used to.

For a day and two nights, we read, chat, sleep, or watch the countryside roll by. It’s very relaxing – for us, that is. Some people would find it boring.

We see isolated small towns and groups of camels. (The one-humped kind.)

Aktau is as far as you can go before getting wet in the Caspian Sea. It has beaches, but they aren’t really inviting. At least around Aktau, there’s lots of industry.

Even Maria barely dips her toes in. This doesn’t stop the locals from gathering on a Saturday afternoon.

We see the Aktau coat of arms on all kinds of city furniture, like these park benches. We recognize the salute to the oil & gas industry, the local uranium mining industry, and the shipping industry. Not sure what the bottom right corner represents – looks like a garden gnome with his hat pulled low.

Speaking of city furniture, another mounted fighter jet looms over this particular park.

It’s a MiG-21. Apparently the USSR produced over 10,000 of these.

These fish probably come fresh from the Caspian. We see them at the Sary Bazaar.

…which has all kinds of stuff. Like these musical instruments. The dombra is the ‘national instrument of Kazakhstan’.

(I still haven’t found a camel bell, by the way.)

Some things we notice in Aktau – English here is practically non-existent – which results in a lot of amusing lively dumbshow and fumbling for Google Translate on the phone.

Also, there are a lot of Georgians here. (From Tblisi, not Atlanta.) Not sure why, besides the poor state of the Georgian economy since they decided to go back to being Russia’s sidekick.

One nice feature of Aktau is the Skal’naya Tropa, a scenic boardwalk by the sea.

Like many cities here, Aktau boasts some badass murals from the Soviet times. One housing estate has a matching set of three.

(This text isn’t actually on the murals – I just grabbed it at random from a search of trite Soviet-era slogans.)

Sight or Insight of the Day

Completely by accident, we check into the same hotel in Aktau as Norwegian writer Erika Fatland did in her book Sovietistan.

This was the first book we looked at when thinking about this trip. We’re happy to report that even though the book came out in 2018, many things in the area have changed for the better since that time.

We fly from Dushanbe to Almaty, the former capital and main city of Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan is supposed to be the most prosperous of the ‘stans’: it’s resource-rich. (Tajikistan, where we have just come from, is the least prosperous.) Almaty is certainly a modern, thriving place.

At first glance, KZ also looks like the most secular of the ‘stans’ we have visited so far. The vast majority of people are ‘normal-looking’, which admittedly to us means ‘non-religious’.

Especially in cosmopolitan Almaty. The name ‘Almaty’ comes from the Kazakh word for apple (alma), and it literally translates to ‘rich in apples’ or ‘father of apples’. AI adds this:

‘The Birthplace of Apples: Scientific research and DNA sequencing have proven that the region around Almaty is the ancestral homeland of the modern apple (Malus sieversii).‘

Of course, that’s according to AI, so it might be total slop.

One of our first stops is the impressive Almaty Museum of Arts. It’s brand new (opened in 2025).

Among its collection is a signature gigantic iron sculpture by Richard Serra. (There’s also one in Pearson Airport.)

We also visit the Central State Museum of Kazakhstan.

Like the other ‘stan’ dwellers, Kazakhs are crazy about horses. This goes back to their history of nomadism and early horse-taming, stretching back millennia. One exhibit displays a replica of the Berel burial, where a chieftain was found buried with his wife and favourite horses.

Another thing about Kazakhstan: they have the funkiest currency, the tenge. It takes 470 tenges to make a US dollar.

Almaty has an enviable amount of green space and parks. It’s very civilized.

Kazakhstan is an enormous country, the world’s ninth largest. Fortunately, it has a really good rail network and good flight connections with national discount airlines, so the long distances are not a problem.

Like we did in Uzbekistan, we travel by public transport, mostly by rail. But now we increase our comfort level exponentially by purchasing all four places in a four-place sleeping compartment, an affordable extravagance.

KZ is famous for its almost unlimited flat steppes, but our window is still full of mountain views duringour first day on the train.

Our first destination is Turkistan. It sounds like a country but is, in fact, a city.

Turkistan’s claim to fame is the mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, a Sufi poet of the 12th century.

It’s a site of pilgrimage. Especially for women, it seems.

The mausoleum is part of a complex that includes an underground mosque and the archeological remains of the old town within a stretch of restored city walls.

Sight or Insight of the Day

KZ doesn’t have the many historic towns that Uzbekistan has, so they’re keen on developing Turkistan as a destination that attracts visitors beyond the pious pilgrim sort. There is now a ‘new town’, built in the style of a Silk Road city, complete with an IMAX theatre in the shape of a golden Roc’s egg.

It seems strangely devoid of visitors. Maybe it’s too earl in the season to expect throngs of tourists?

A few interesting facts about Tajikistan:

• The other ‘stans’ speak Turkic languages, but Tajik is essentially the same as Persian/Farsi/Iranian
• Politically, Tajikistan has much more of a Stalin-esque cult of personality, with images of the leader everywhere
• Many Tajik women wear ‘modest’ clothing, but with lots of colour and bright patterns, covered with sparkly stuff (at least in Dushanbe)
• 47.9 percent of Tajikistan’s GDP comes from remittances by Tajiks working in Russia (where they are treated – big surprise! – very poorly)
• It’s illegal to have a dirty car in Dushanbe

Our journey continues. Some parts pass through quaint, leafy villages every ten KMs or so.

Other parts, you can drive for hours without encountering a soul.

We visit the Yamchun Fortress.

Remember we mentioned ‘cyclists with a masochistic streak a mile wide’? Imagine cycling up vertiginous, stony mountain tracks like this.

(We drive through such lonely territory all day. When we arrive at Murghab, the car goes completely dead. Luckily, it was just the cables vibrating off of the battery due to all the, um, turbulence – an easy fix.)

We cross paths with a Bactrian camel.

At first we think it must be a wild camel, the locale being so very remote. But apparently, genuine wild Bactrian camels are virtually extinct. If you see a camel – even in the remotest of places – it belongs to somebody.

In the distance, we also see some nomads. Like, REAL nomads – not the ‘come into my tent and I’ll serve you tea for 10$’ kind of nomad.

They are shifting their herd of yaks.

(Incidentally, ‘Yak’ is also a popular brand of beer here.)

We mention in passing that travel in this region is subject to having a GBAO special pass, which we obtained in Dushanbe. The Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) covers nearly 45% of Tajikistan’s territory.

We have to go through eight checkpoints and present a copy of our passports and GBAO permits.

So why is travel so controlled in nearly half the country? No doubt it has something to do with the Tajikistan Civil War (in the 90s). The opponents to the then-ruling clique were mostly from the GBAO. So the locals here are kept on a tight leash.

Toss in the proximity to Afghanistan and you’d expect a seething cauldron of unrest and instability. But being here, all seems calm and serene. People are friendly and helpful. The grandness of nature makes the affairs of mere humans seem petty and forgettable.

The furthest point on the Pamir Highway (for us) is the town of Murghab. Some people continue on into Kyrgyzstan and end their trip in Osh. Been there, done that.

Murghab has the forlorn, shabby look of an Arctic outpost. It’s at an elevation of nearly 4,000 m. above sea level.

(Regarding elevation: we both take medication to avert altitude sickness. It seems to have hallucinatory side-effects. Driving through boulder-strewn landscapes, we both keep seeing people, things, and animals in the shapes of the rocks in our peripheral vision. Very entertaining.)

About the stickers on the windows of our hotel: it’s a thing for travelling groups of motorcyclists (mostly) to leave their mark by plastering them onto every available surface.

Time to make the return trip to the fleshpots of Dushanbe, this time via the Koitezek Pass. (On the journey here, we took the Wahkan Valley route.)

The first 100 KMs or so south of Murghab are a practically undriveable minefield of cavernous potholes. Probably the second (or third?) worst potholes we’ve ever experienced.

On the way north, we notice intriguing side roads. Maybe they’re private? Or for military use?

It turns out they were probably used by the people responsible for constructing the road. But nobody uses them now. So they have NO POTHOLES. (They cross deep ditches, so big trucks can’t use them.) We gratefully take them wherever we find them and shave at least an hour off of our travel time.

OK, just a few more scenic shots of the Pamir Highway.

Just before arriving back in Dushanbe, we pass the Nurek Reservoir.

So in town, we prepare for our flight to Almaty in Kazakhstan. Хайр, Тоҷикистон!

Sight or Insight of the Day

We mentioned that Tajikistan has the most serious personality-cult leadership style we have seen so far on this trip. Its leader, Emomali Rahmon, is so beloved by his people, they keep voting him into office.

Just kidding. Now that we’re out of the country, it can be safely said: he’s an asshole. According to Wikipedia:

‘Rahmon heads an authoritarian government in Tajikistan. Political opponents are repressed, violations of human rights and freedoms are severe, elections are not free and fair, and corruption and nepotism are rampant.’

To be honest, sounds like the Trump administration. But he’s an asshole that the American electorate, in its infinite wisdom, freely elected.

People here, like the other two countries we’ve visited, are so kind. How the Tajiks end up with such a brute as a president is a mystery. (Like Chile during the Pinochet regime.)

After arriving in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s modern-ish capital, we find a vehicle for rent to travel the Pamir Highway. That seems to be what people do when visiting this part of the world (that is, people usually hire someone else to do the driving, but we value our independence), including cyclists that we can only surmise must have a streak of masochism a mile wide.

We come across a tank-like 2004 Toyota Land Cruiser. He’s a tough guy, and a Diesel, so we name him Vin.

If you want to know more about the Pamir Highway, there are plenty of documentaries on YouTube. It’s definitely not for the faint-hearted.

Gradually, the quality of the surface degrades.

From time to time, we come across some stretches that are narrow tracks. Occasionally a giant truck appears around a bend, so someone has to move.

If you’re lucky, you’ll be close to a wide spot to pull into. Otherwise, you may have to reverse a bit down the guardrail-less mountain.

Another regular hazard are rockslides spilling down over the road, making the passage even narrower.

It’s the spectacular scenery that makes the minor hardship worthwhile.

On the other side of the Panj River is Afghanistan.

It’s always interesting to see what the neighbours are up to.

Across the river, a group of men are involved in some unidentified activity. Maybe a market for motorcycles?

We eventually cover two thousand KMs on this trip. The freedom to stop where we want is a bonus. Besides, we see 4X4s that we suspect are foreign tourists driven by locals who drive like madmen – not something we’d be comfortable doing.

Sight or Insight of the Day

After a few days of travel in Vin, we and our belongings are covered in dust. I wonder if Gurkha, the manufacturer of my travel bag, would be interested in using it in some promotional material?

It may look like it’s been through the wars, but it’s still in great shape.

Almost everywhere we go, we’re beside soaring mountains and rushing alpine streams. The scenery is breathtaking. Unfortunately, this doesn’t show up in photos, but all this magnificence is stored in the old silicon chip <taps skull>.

On the outskirts of the village of Kojomkul, we see a strange temple-like object. It’s a memorial to a legendary strongman, born in the nearby village of Suusamyr.

So we have dozens of mountain photos. We’ll just select a few.

We mentioned before that Kyrgyzstan is ‘all about the mountains’. It’s also all about felt. (As in, the material made from wool.) So many things here are manufactured using felt; carpets, clothing, footwear, yurt material, headgear, bags and other containers, blankets, and more.

(We remember there was a German artist, Joseph Beuys, who made a career largely out of his felt creations.)

We go through one pass which is completely covered in a blanket of show (except for the road). It’s like driving a highway at the top of the Himalayas.

We spend a few days in the snicker-inducing town of Arslanbob, popular with hikers. Many of the buildings in town look like mangers from the middle ages.

The road winds along the Naryn River, a bright teal colour in this section. (yes, the same river we saw in Naryn town in previous entries.)

At one point, we pass through a series of four tunnels. These are kind of scary – the lighting is bad, and for a few brief seconds, we can’t see anything in the dark.

Apparently, in Tajikistan there’s a tunnel known as the ‘Tunnel of Death‘. You can be assured we aren’t going anywhere near that one.

Most of the places we have been staying at include breakfast. Usually with an assortment of chocolate bars and other sweet things. Like this surprisingly familiar item, a KatKit bar.

Our last stop before returning to Bishkek is the Belek Dream Hotel, one of the nicest places we’ve stayed so far. Gourmet food, lovely location on a mountain stream.

We go for a hike in search of petroglyphs. The groundskeeper has three dogs. They probably don’t get that much human attention, this being Kyrgyzstan, so when we shower them with kind words and a vigorous patting , they follow us for the duration of our hike with, well, dog-like devotion.

A couple of things we can mention about Kyrgyzstan: a lot of the men sport distinctive bell-like headgear, the Ak-kalpak.

Also, they like horses. They like to eat them, too.

Sight or Insight of the Day

We are back in Bishkek after our 16-day road trip, soon to depart for Tajikistan. We’re supposed to bring the vehicle back clean – Maria dragoons a young man at a self-serve carwash to do our car inside and out. (‘We can’t read the instructions’ we plead.)

It’s a treat getting back to our familiar neighbourhood. When traveling, it always nice returning to a place you’ve been before – like getting home.

We’ve seen a lots of yurts in the landscape: it’s time to stay in one for a few days. The yurt camp we choose is on the south side of the big lake. To get there, we drive 14 KMs from the main road down the Ak Sai Canyon.

It’s wonderfully isolated, not a soul around (almost).

Usually, small groups arrive late in the afternoon, have a meal, sleep over, and depart next morning. So we have most of the days completely to ourselves.

These yurts are almost as authentic in build and appearance as the ones we saw in the National History museum. (There are a lot of cheap versions around.)

A woodstove keeps things warm at night.

‘Woodstove’ is a bit of a misnomer: these are fueled nightly with a mix of compressed cattle dung and coal.

Meals are served in the Dining Yurt. Well-carpeted in shyrdak carpets (as are the guest yurts.)

You can get good info talking with the guides that accompany groups.

If you enjoy seeing small animals ripped to bits for your entertainment, you can arrange to see an ‘eagle show’. We skip this.

Our next stop is a couple of days in the central town of Naryn.

On a whim, we set out for a drive along the Kichi-Naryn Gorge.

It’s a scenic drive to the beginning of the gorge, but partway, we find the road still muddy and not cleared of the winter snow yet. We do the mature thing and bail.

The next day, we head south for a daytrip to Tash Rabat, near the border with China.

The road traffic is almost exclusively large trucks coming in from over the Torugart Pass. Our destination is the Tash Rabat ‘Caravanserai’.

I put ‘caravanserai’ in quotes because it’s not 100% certain what the function of this building was. (A caravanserai was an overnight resting house for traders on the Silk Road.)

Some think it may have been a Nestorian Christian monastery. Or a Buddhist monastery.

Anyway, it has dozens of small, cell-like rooms. It almost looks like a Roman fort we saw once in the Tunisian Sahara.

On the way to Tash Rabat, we see hundreds of creatures that resemble gophers or groundhogs. Turns out they’re long-tailed ground squirrels. It’s fun to watch them scurry to their burrows, their fuzzy tails flowing ‘like a ribbon on a fan’. (Thanks, Jane Siberry, for that image.)

Sight or Insight of the Day

How did we end up visiting Central Asia? We were discussing this the other day while on the road.

Way back in July 2019, we were in Bhutan, attending an activity that included a meal. One of our fellow guests was a well-traveled Hungarian woman named Anita, who worked for a Russian bank. We mentioned that we wanted to go to the Pantanal region of Brazil one day. Of course, she’d been there, and suggested accommodations at a ranch that we subsequently stayed at years later.

She’d also visited the ‘stans (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan), driving around with a companion. Not exactly a prime destination at that time. Admittedly, she spoke fluent Russian, but she thought we’d enjoy its friendly people and interesting history, recent and ancient. She planted the seed and now here we are. Just goes to show how a couple of fleeting hours with a stranger can have reverberating effects down the line.

Thanks, Anita, wherever you are!

…Kyrgyzstan, that is. If Uzbekistan is all about Silk Road cities, KGZ is all about mountains. We are seldom out of sight of snow-covered peaks anywhere in the country so far.

The first night of our KGZ road trip is spent in the jovial-sounding town of Tokmok. Its most visible oddity is an Ilyushin Il-28 bomber mounted in the central roundabout.

But KGZ does have some Silk Road sites. Burana tower, for example.

The day grows overcast. That night, we sleep in a homestay in the remote mountain village of Tegirmenti, in the Chong-Kemin Valley.

There’s always a herd of something crossing the road: sheep, goats, cattle, or horses.

We are pleased to find driving in KGZ is not very stressful – traffic is sparse in most of the country.

Next day, we come within sight of Issyk-Kul, the world’s second-largest alpine lake (after Lake Titicaca).

In the town of Cholpon-Ata is an open-air petroglyphs park. Most are over 2,000 years old.

Some say that the traditional decorations on Kyrgyz carpets are derived from the long horns of these creatures. That seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

(Incidentally, this method of sewing felt on felt is called ‘Shyrdak‘. Not to be confused with the 70s novel by Richard Adams, ‘Shardik‘. The 1970s, that is.)

A pattern emerges of reserving places to stay on Booking.com that are impossible to find, don’t exist, or are closed for the season. It begins to look like we might be homeless for the night until Maria asks at a five-star resort for directions.

So we end up staying at the exclusive Baytur Resort & Spa at a severely reduced rate, thanks to Maria’s innate ability to charm, and a manager with a soft spot for Canadians.

It’s kind of like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining: luxurious but virtually empty, at this time of the year.

Maria goes for a walk along the beach and makes friend with some locals.

On our journey, we come across a team of men erecting a yurt.

Sight or Insight of the Day

In most of the Islamic world, graves are very simple affairs. Even the most eminent people end up under a plain, unadorned slab. (In Oman, we came across places where people just put a randomly-picked-up stone over the interred person, so that a ‘cemetery’ looks like a walled-in field of rocks.)

In contrast, Kyrgyzstan cemeteries are full of fancy tomb structures.

Some villages seem to have more defunct people in residence than live ones.

This is a brief entry about settling into a new country.

Besides immediately making you think of the OshKosh B’gosh line of kiddie clothes, Osh is the second-largest city in Kyrgyzstan. We end up here by default, as it’s the nearest destination after departing Uzbekistan where we did.

As far as the physical environment goes, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are very different.

The most obvious difference is that Kyrgyzstan is much more ‘Russified’ than Uzbekistan. Kyrgyz is paired with Russian everywhere, and the language is still written in Cyrillic letters.

Whereas in Uzbekistan, most sad communist-era infrastructure has been torn down and replaced with brighter, modern streets and buildings, there is more of a cultural hangover of Sovietic decrepitude and drab grayness here.

Kyrgyzstan is more Russified and less Islamified. Uzbekistan, like many Muslim-majority countries (Turkey, Malaysia, and Indonesia come to mind), tries to tie its national identity to a greater Islamic influence. This can be a bit of a tightrope-walking act – nobody wants to encourage young male hotheads to reach for their martyr’s crowns either.

Kyrgyzstan seems much more secular. It’s also an interesting mix of Asiatic and Caucasian people.

It doesn’t help that the weather is rainy and gray in Osh. In spite of these differences, we’re happy to report that Kyrgyz people are as friendly towards us as Uzbeks. Lucky us!

We opt to fly to Bishkek, the capital, rather than undergo a twelve-hour bus ride. At first we think we’re getting onto a Russian-built aircraft, because we don’t recognize the model as anything we’ve seen before.

It turns out to be an old McDonnell Douglas MD-80 (since taken over by Boeing, I believe).

Bishkek is a much different kettle of fish than Osh. It’s way more lively and modern. And way less depressing. There are still a lot of bedraggled Soviet-era flatblocks around, but in Bishkek, they add to the general interest.

We spend most of our time here attempting to amass enough cash to rent a vehicle. (The company we deal with only accepts cash. Preferably US dollars.) This means multiple visits to different ATMs.

At least one afternoon is enjoyed at the extraordinarily excellent National History Museum of Kyrgyzstan.

Unfortunately, we can’t find a link that does justice to this recently-revamped museum and its wonderful exhibits.

This is a Kyrgyz specialty – Ala Kiyiz carpets, with colourful patterns dyed into the felt with which they’re made. We’d love to bring one of these puppies home.

Sight or Insight of the Day

At last, our vehicle is delivered and we’re ready to hit the road.

We are hopeless anthropomorphisers. Our 2002 Toyota 4Runner is dubbed Sergei.