Around the Silk and the Cotton Road.

It is always so inadequate to take a country and wrap it up in a couple of paragraphs. There’s the food. The language. The faces. The countryside. The horses. The steppes.

And you can’t help but glide over the surface. As a traveler you see what you are shown. The locals show you the best. The sheets are clean on the uncomfortable beds. You manage to negotiate the squat toilets, because you know when you leave you can go back to soft paper and sweet smelling soap. With the traveling I have been doing, there are always local guides. Professional maybe, but they are fearless in their dissection of the country in which they live. So it is with Kyrgyzstan. And to some extent it is with Uzbekistan. Our young guide Nasiba, is from a family who live in Bishkek. She has three sisters and a brother. Her mother is from the Talas region. The Talas women are known for their strength. You marry a Talas women so that she will organize your home. Naziba carries her mother’s strength. She is funny, unapologetic, passionate. In the Kyrgz culture, the youngest boy will stay and look after the parents. If there is only one boy then it falls to him. The girls normally follow a path where they marry by about the age of 26 and move in with the grooms parents where they will look after the household. Nasiba tells stories of her mother teaching her cooking or other skills and saying , “ this is for your future mother-in-law” or “ your future mother in law should thank me for this.” Nasiba eventually had the courage to say that maybe she didn’t want to get married. Seems her mother is fine with that. The boy has made a good marriage and already has given them twins as grandchildren, so Nasiba is off the hook. Because there is a whole tradition here of girls being stolen by men who need wives. I read a book before coming called “ Sovietstan.” In it there is a story of a young girl who went to her best friend’s engagement party and the fiancé asked her to walk outside with him when she was bundled into a car with three of his friends holding her down. She was driven out to the country, with the fiancé professing love for her and when she got to his house a feast was ready. Her own family and boyfriend had been alerted and were also there crying and begging her to return with them. It seems that when the grandmother approachs with a white shawl and covers the head of the abducted girl it means that the marriage has been agreed. This poor one was exhausted and fearful and gave in. This bride kidnapping is called Ala kachuu. And although they say it has died out as the culture has become more sophisticated it still exists. They report in 2021 one in three marriages rural marriages begin with an abduction.

The Soviet Union has it’s rubber boot all over these countries. There are many older people still sentimental about the Soviets. Health care, schooling were all free. But all of the industry and agriculture was in service to Russian growth. In Kyrgyzstan they built hydro electrical power plants. They dammed the main river and flooded valleys full of villages. In Uzbekistan. they forced all the small farmers to grow cotton instead of crops. The Aral Sea, once the third largest lake in the world, began shrinking in the 60’s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects..and all that cotton was Shipped out of the country back to the Soviet Union. That was the talk I heard, but what did I see? In Kyrgyzstan I maybe saw a handful of tourists. Lots of LADA’s these old Soviet cars that had been left behind.In Uzbekistan, There is a Chevrolet factory , and 90% of cars on the road are chevy’s. In both countrys I saw children coming from school. All neat and bright in white tops and black skirts or trousers. All the little girls have big ribbons or pom-poms in their hair. In Kyrgyzstan they people have strong Mongolian or Tibetan features. In Uzbekistan they are much lighter with features that seem to come from the other direction, Persia.

Kyrgyzstan is 90% Muslim, but most of them are not observant. Some head coverings mixed in with long black ponytails. There’s no pork on the menu, and the Imam will call from the minaret but it’s rare to see anyone heading to prayer. There are more headscarves in Uzbekistan particularly among the older women, but the younger hijab wearing girls are there too.

The table is always laden with bread. Butter. Dishes of homemade jam. Towers of sweets and pastries. It’s very important, it seems, for the table to be heaving with stuff to show welcome. Home cooked meals consist often of soup, a salad of tomatoes and cucumber, and potatoes cooked with meat. The countryside is full of cows, sheep, goats and horses. And they eat them all. Yes, even the horses. Inconceivable to think of those strong lean beauties being carved into steaks, but the herds of horses are bred for the purpose. Horse meat and horse milk are an intrinsic part of the food chain in Central Asia.

The markets are laden with pomegranates and persimmons. Root vegetables abound. And mountains of tomatoes. Spices, rice, buckwheat, teas. Wheel upon wheel of the fresh bread. Grapes. Figs. Walnuts and macademias. And everything you could want to do with milk on it’s way to butter.

And of course there are rugs and carpets. This is the world of weaving and felt making.

It seemed that everything was different. Doors. Cars. Faces. Clothes. Food. It was only in Bukhara and more markedly in Samarkand that tourists ( In which group, I know I belong) became evident. I found I was happier sitting in a park watching the locals go by, carrying or chasing their babies. I had a few words. Salaam, Rahmat…but after that it was a lot of smiling.

It’s different traveling to places untried. Time moves outside of the clock. So good to be allowed to dip in.

There are yurts and then there are yurts….

North east of Bishkek is the second largest Alpine lake in the world. Issuk Kul. It is right up against the border with Kazhakstan. Lightly saline and clear as glass. Many stories about it’s origins. A woman’s tears. A king with ears like an ass.

There is this lovely man called Ruslan Bayke. He builds yurts for a living. The village he lives in is known for building yurts. He is probably not very old; he is very handsome and weathered. His youngest child, a boy of seven, has just started school in the village.

His eldest boy has gone to Bulgaria to study hospitality. Strangely and maybe sadly you hear this a lot. A schoolteacher who turns to tourism to earn more money.Tourism in Kyrgyzstan means adding onto your house so that you have a room big enough for groups to eat breakfast and supper and rooms enough for people to sleep and hopefully a shower or two. They are very rudimentary. But these are the very early days of rural tourism in Kyrgyzstan. And it is mostly small companies that bring their people to this isolated places. There are no hotels, no restaurants in these mountain villages. Just locals who have the wherewithal to build on their land. To be clear there is no architectural style here. Breezeblocks, corrugated iron, cement and paint will do it. Patchworks of carpets, odd bits of wallpaper, plastic tablecloths and flowers. But more of that later. Back to yurts.

Yurt camp # one has only been open for a year. It has about 10 beautifully finished yurts laid out in a circle around a central wooden deck that has a massive fireplace.

There are wooden structures tucked inbetween the yurts that have western toilets and basins. There is a long building at the entrance which is warm and wooden with an endless supply of hot water and long tables for those meals. It has wi-fi. Shaky sometimes. But it is there. AND there are three modern showers with doors that close and water that is toasty. I wrote all this for comparison..but you may have guessed that. You can hear jackals at night braying around the outside perimeter. But the grey and white kitten still appears at the door every morning so I am assuming the green fence is holding it’s own.

The yurt itself is quite a joy to enter. You mustn’t kick the threshold and you have to duck your head when you enter. Both are a sign of respect. The inside struts and the wooden webbing around the base are both painted red. But it is the top, the round tunduk, which appears on the nations flag that is the glory point. The light seeps in and slides down the walls to the woven carpet and fabric covered metal box that stands at the back. Nights are quiet here. Stars are big. Skies are dark. I watch one night as people roast marshmallows. I hate marshmallows..here or there, roasted or not.

I learn how to make Borsok. this delicious bread, which i sadly discover is deep fried, meaning I won’t be trying it at home. I volunteer to have my head wrapped in metres and metres of white cotton to create an Elelcheck, the traditional head-dress of a Kyrgyzstan woman. I float around in a hot spring. It is all on the edge of authentic. A truly comfortable way of touching tradition whilst having clean hair. Two days later there is a drive up, up, up through the mountains.

All of Kyrgyzstan is above 900 metres, which is why the country is described as 90% mountainous. But this climb high and higher on rough unmade roads takes us to 3400 metres. Past miles and miles of golden slopes peppered with flocks of cows, sheep and horses.

An occasional shelter, many streams, no other cars, no other people. Finally we end up at Son Kul Lake. 3016 metres high, in the centre of the country. It is beautiful in it’s starkness. Not a tree. Not a shrub. Surrounded by mountains and with snow cover running at 200 days a year we are on the very edge of being able to visit here. the temperatures are dropping and the shepherds have taken their herds down to lower slopes. It is cold. Even at 3.30 in the afternoon. You know you are on a slide down to freezing. The yurts are in a semi circle facing the Lake. The beds are spread around the walls. There is a central fire which will not be lit till night falls. It is probably more authentic. There are no red ribs to follow up to the tunduk. There are no colorful shyrdak rugs to brighten the floors. These yurts will soon be disassembled for the winter. Welcome to a more nomadic life than you were hoping for. You find the 4 toilets that will serve these 28 yurts. You have been advised not to have a shower because you could get hypothermia. You decide the only thing to do is get under the bed covers and wait for the supper of sorts and the man who will light your fire.

He comes with a fire torch. He doesn’t say much. I’m sure he wants to go home and be done with all of this cosseting. He throws a bag of coal on and exits stage left. You go and get your “school dinner”. Where someone has also opened a bottle of vodka because they are Russian and know what cold nights can be like.You venture to clean your teeth and do the only thing left to you after your have marveled at the new pink moon and the Milky Way , you get into bed. In my case , because I am unable to go to bed in anything other than a white cotton nightie, I just topped it with a pair of camel hair socks, a long cardigan and a woolly hat. There was no reading, no playing of cards, it was just pull it all up and round as closely as you can and hope for the worst of times to be better than that. The night was long..the socks stayed on.. the hat didn’t. I did not need to get up and pee in the night. It was minus 4 degrees centigrade.

The following morning there was frost on the ground. I tried to clean my teeth but the water from the tap on my hands froze my fingers and the water from my bottle terrified my mouth. We drove away. I had survived. There is definitely triumph in survival and with every passing mile and every degree of warmth that the sun brought, I metaphorically lifted my arms above my head as if I had been the South Pole and back…. But that is for another time