Chapter 1: Bishkek: the Kyrgyz Capital (days 67 to 71 - 23.06. - 27.06.): three full days in a city where there is actually nothing to see, or: the discovery of "slow travelling"
I stayed in Bishkek for 4 nights in the end, somehow changing to a mode of "slow travelling", a term I use in reference to the slow food movement... Taking the time, enjoying local ingredients / local life, talking to people, sitting in a park, just observing people and writing my blog, etc. ;-) wonderful!
The guesthouse "Ultimate adventure" was also quite pleasant, relatively central and built around a nice garden. The first day, I needed to get some stuff organised (load credit on my local sim-card, change money, buy a memory card for the camera, buy another plug and cable to charge the iPad (have left the plug in the guesthouse in Osh..) So I walked around, looked at the shops, had a snack etc. but I could not find any shop selling electronics. All of a sudden, a guy sitting on the side of the street asked the "hi, where do you come from?" question and our conversation got started. He was from Pakistan an he spent 6 years studying medicine (and just successfully finished) in Osh and Bishkek, something quite common as in Osh alone, there are 200 Pakistani medical students, those with too low grades to get into a Pakistani university and not having enough money to study in the US or in Europe. The reason he chatted me up was that he thought I was German (I just cannot her it...) and his friend, also a Pakistani medical student, started to learn German and needed some practice.. So he called his friend Ahmed to join us in a café later. He was actually killing time before meeting a Taiwanese girl he got to know on "couchsurfing", which is not only a great internet platform to find a host, but also jut to meet people... So, in the meanwhile he helped me find all the stuff I needed and then we met the Taiwanese girl (whose name I had forgotten..). She had been studying Russian in St. Petersburg for a year and was now travelling before getting back to Taiwan. She told us that she converted to Islam 3 months ago as she felt attracted to this religion already quite a while, but agendas not yet fully comfortable with religious practice and so our Pakistani friend helped out... After a while, Ahmed joined us and we started to speak German. He was quite good after such a short period of studying. He is studying German because he wants to live in Germany, where his brother lives. He tried to get a tourist visa first, but was rejected. They told him that he could apply for a student visa if he can prove sufficient knowledge of German and that's how it started. Funnily, it turned out that his brother was living in Mannheim and that he was working in a flower shop in the same street than Anne, my friend from study times in Paris... ;-) the world is so small sometimes... Ahmed is studying really hard every day and I really hope he passes the test at the end of his course.
The next day, I went to a Russian bath, which was quite an interesting experience. The bath is separated between men and women and inside, there is complete nakedness, despite the fact that you get a towel to put around your waist. I would have been me only one wearing it so I conformed to the general practice. They have a dry sauna and a very humid sauna (but not a Turkish steam bath...) and a nice pool with ice-cold water. In the humid sauna, they use branches of birch trees with leafs on them and beat their whole body with them... If you sit next to one of those, it really makes you feel the heat even more from the wind it generates. But the weird thing I found is when they ask each other to do it, sometimes among friends, but sometimes also strangers... I have not tried this, neither myself nor asking anyone else... ;-) after the sauna then briefly under the shower and into the cold water... This almost took my breath away, so cold it was... I probably stayed in there 10 seconds, not more ... But after repeating the cycle three times, I felt like newborn... ;-)
Photos at: https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A6JEsNWnGtWIqb
Chapter 2: Bishkek to Lake Issyk-Kul (days 71 to 73, 27.06. - 29.06.): a truly local train in Kyrgyzstan, or: 13 som (0,18€) an hour and relaxing on the lakeshore beach
Our train left the Bishkek II train station on time at 06.42. This train exists only in summer and mostly on weekends, when there is at least a remote chance to fill it up. It has only two coaches, which were only half full. The landscapes were quite nice, with the mountain panorama in the back, but unfortunately the train windows were very dirty, which shows on the photos (sorry for that). In the train, things were quite lively due to one single family (a couple with three kids, two boys and a girl). Tanya (picture), a not so well behaved little girl, who - instead of being terrorised by her older brother - rather preferred "terrorising" me, much to the distress of her mother and preventing me from sleeping a bit (i got up at 5.30 after all!!!)... ;-) But Tanya kept me awake and busy, her brother also made quite a fuzz and her mother (photo) spent almost the entire train ride on the phone, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, but in any case not taking care of her children. I eventually managed to doze a little. After a while, I smelled heavy alcohol and when I opened my eyes, saw that it was the three women close by, which - I guess - were on a weekend excursion without their families. They were eating pieces of smoked sausage and drinking vodka, not from the bottle, but in style, toasting with small glasses. I think they were having a great time, chatting the entire trip and laughing a lot. After around 10 stops and 4,5 hours (half an hour less than foreseen!!!), we arrived in Balykchy on lake Issyk-Kul.
More than 170km long and 70km across, Lake Issyk-Kul is the world’s second-largest alpine lake after Lake Titicaca in Peru/Bolivia. The name, meaning ‘hot lake’, is something of an exaggeration. A combination of extreme depth, thermal activity and mild salinity do indeed ensure the lake never freezes, even in the fierce Central Asian winters, despite lying at an altitude of over 1600m. And the mysteriously temperate waters create an ever-mild microclimate and allows the mysterious jekai, a Kyrgyz version of the Loch Ness monster, to survive (haven't seen it though...)
I continued in a shared taxi to the town of Cholpon-Ata, where I got a room in a kind of small hotel resort with a private beach on the lake. And instead of only one night I stayed two nights and spent a lot of time just relaxing on the beach, with the nice mountain panorama around. From time to time, I took a nice refreshing bath in the lake that was not as cold as I had thought and definitely not the 15 degrees the lady at the hotel reception told me.
In the afternoon of 29.06., I took a shared taxi to my next destination, Karakol, from where I intended to make some nice trekking tours in the Tien-Shan mountains.
Photos at: https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A655Z2WMGd8bCQ
I stayed in Bishkek for 4 nights in the end, somehow changing to a mode of "slow travelling", a term I use in reference to the slow food movement... Taking the time, enjoying local ingredients / local life, talking to people, sitting in a park, just observing people and writing my blog, etc. ;-) wonderful!
The guesthouse "Ultimate adventure" was also quite pleasant, relatively central and built around a nice garden. The first day, I needed to get some stuff organised (load credit on my local sim-card, change money, buy a memory card for the camera, buy another plug and cable to charge the iPad (have left the plug in the guesthouse in Osh..) So I walked around, looked at the shops, had a snack etc. but I could not find any shop selling electronics. All of a sudden, a guy sitting on the side of the street asked the "hi, where do you come from?" question and our conversation got started. He was from Pakistan an he spent 6 years studying medicine (and just successfully finished) in Osh and Bishkek, something quite common as in Osh alone, there are 200 Pakistani medical students, those with too low grades to get into a Pakistani university and not having enough money to study in the US or in Europe. The reason he chatted me up was that he thought I was German (I just cannot her it...) and his friend, also a Pakistani medical student, started to learn German and needed some practice.. So he called his friend Ahmed to join us in a café later. He was actually killing time before meeting a Taiwanese girl he got to know on "couchsurfing", which is not only a great internet platform to find a host, but also jut to meet people... So, in the meanwhile he helped me find all the stuff I needed and then we met the Taiwanese girl (whose name I had forgotten..). She had been studying Russian in St. Petersburg for a year and was now travelling before getting back to Taiwan. She told us that she converted to Islam 3 months ago as she felt attracted to this religion already quite a while, but agendas not yet fully comfortable with religious practice and so our Pakistani friend helped out... After a while, Ahmed joined us and we started to speak German. He was quite good after such a short period of studying. He is studying German because he wants to live in Germany, where his brother lives. He tried to get a tourist visa first, but was rejected. They told him that he could apply for a student visa if he can prove sufficient knowledge of German and that's how it started. Funnily, it turned out that his brother was living in Mannheim and that he was working in a flower shop in the same street than Anne, my friend from study times in Paris... ;-) the world is so small sometimes... Ahmed is studying really hard every day and I really hope he passes the test at the end of his course.
The next day, I went to a Russian bath, which was quite an interesting experience. The bath is separated between men and women and inside, there is complete nakedness, despite the fact that you get a towel to put around your waist. I would have been me only one wearing it so I conformed to the general practice. They have a dry sauna and a very humid sauna (but not a Turkish steam bath...) and a nice pool with ice-cold water. In the humid sauna, they use branches of birch trees with leafs on them and beat their whole body with them... If you sit next to one of those, it really makes you feel the heat even more from the wind it generates. But the weird thing I found is when they ask each other to do it, sometimes among friends, but sometimes also strangers... I have not tried this, neither myself nor asking anyone else... ;-) after the sauna then briefly under the shower and into the cold water... This almost took my breath away, so cold it was... I probably stayed in there 10 seconds, not more ... But after repeating the cycle three times, I felt like newborn... ;-)
Photos at: https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A6JEsNWnGtWIqb
Chapter 2: Bishkek to Lake Issyk-Kul (days 71 to 73, 27.06. - 29.06.): a truly local train in Kyrgyzstan, or: 13 som (0,18€) an hour and relaxing on the lakeshore beach
Our train left the Bishkek II train station on time at 06.42. This train exists only in summer and mostly on weekends, when there is at least a remote chance to fill it up. It has only two coaches, which were only half full. The landscapes were quite nice, with the mountain panorama in the back, but unfortunately the train windows were very dirty, which shows on the photos (sorry for that). In the train, things were quite lively due to one single family (a couple with three kids, two boys and a girl). Tanya (picture), a not so well behaved little girl, who - instead of being terrorised by her older brother - rather preferred "terrorising" me, much to the distress of her mother and preventing me from sleeping a bit (i got up at 5.30 after all!!!)... ;-) But Tanya kept me awake and busy, her brother also made quite a fuzz and her mother (photo) spent almost the entire train ride on the phone, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, but in any case not taking care of her children. I eventually managed to doze a little. After a while, I smelled heavy alcohol and when I opened my eyes, saw that it was the three women close by, which - I guess - were on a weekend excursion without their families. They were eating pieces of smoked sausage and drinking vodka, not from the bottle, but in style, toasting with small glasses. I think they were having a great time, chatting the entire trip and laughing a lot. After around 10 stops and 4,5 hours (half an hour less than foreseen!!!), we arrived in Balykchy on lake Issyk-Kul.
More than 170km long and 70km across, Lake Issyk-Kul is the world’s second-largest alpine lake after Lake Titicaca in Peru/Bolivia. The name, meaning ‘hot lake’, is something of an exaggeration. A combination of extreme depth, thermal activity and mild salinity do indeed ensure the lake never freezes, even in the fierce Central Asian winters, despite lying at an altitude of over 1600m. And the mysteriously temperate waters create an ever-mild microclimate and allows the mysterious jekai, a Kyrgyz version of the Loch Ness monster, to survive (haven't seen it though...)
I continued in a shared taxi to the town of Cholpon-Ata, where I got a room in a kind of small hotel resort with a private beach on the lake. And instead of only one night I stayed two nights and spent a lot of time just relaxing on the beach, with the nice mountain panorama around. From time to time, I took a nice refreshing bath in the lake that was not as cold as I had thought and definitely not the 15 degrees the lady at the hotel reception told me.
In the afternoon of 29.06., I took a shared taxi to my next destination, Karakol, from where I intended to make some nice trekking tours in the Tien-Shan mountains.
Photos at: https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A655Z2WMGd8bCQ
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