kyrgyzstan

This has been one of the most unique vacations I’ve ever had. I met up with Tim and Alex after their trip to Ukraine and went directly to the Kyrgyz embassy in Almaty. After waiting for two and a half days for a visa which last year was done same-day (not to mention paying six times more than expected for it), we booked a taxi to Bishkek. We each paid about twenty dollars for the three hour ride, but the driver simply drove us to the border and transferred us to a Kyrgyz taxi driver. Naturally this new driver tried to overcharge us, saying that our original driver didn’t pay him enough for him to take us to the bus station we needed. Thankfully, we had overheard (and understood enough of) their conversation and could call him on his scam. Feeling confident and victorious, we fought through the taxi drivers outside the bus station in Bishkek. We left our bags in the bus station storage room and spent most of the day walking around the city center.

Bishkek reminds me a lot of Almaty, though smaller and therefore more accessible by foot. It’s green, full of traditional Kyrgyz monuments, and has a predominantly Kyrgyz population. The language is very similar to Kazakh, and though I don’t know much Kazakh, I was able to see similar words on signs and the “som” bills. We had been invited to a Fourth of July party that day at the US Embassy and spent our afternoon eating burgers and enjoying a live band playing cover songs. We met Kyrgyz Peace Corps Volunteers, law students and lawyers, expats and even a youth group from Texas on a mission trip. The PCVs were fun to talk to as we compared our living standards, living allowances, staff members, work relations, etc, etc. While the band transitioned from “Sweet Home Alabama” to “Layla”, we made plans to meet up again with some of the PCVs in Karakol.

We took a bus that evening to Karakol, arriving that next morning and straggling into our hostel at 7:30am. We checked into our room decorated like a yurt and slept for five hours. When we finally woke up in the early afternoon, we could take a minute to look around our new surroundings. Yak Tours is a tourist company and guesthouse that organizes trekking, camping and kayaking excursions around Karakol. The room where we woke up housed three large, flat wooden beds covered in thick pads. The walls were a adorned with colorful felt tapestries, traditional wool robes and landscape portraits featuring yurts, horses and mountains – a reference to the previous pastoral nomadic lives that both Kazakh and Kyrgyz led.

The days we spent in Kyrgyzstan were filled with hikes and day trips, going back and forth from Lake Issyk Kol, the second largest alpine lake in the world, and the beautiful white-capped Tien Shan Mountains that surround the lake. We swam and hiked, hiked and swam, and spent a night in a yurt, something which had been on my list of things to do while in Peace Corps. The food was good, the company great, and the scenery impressive. And despite the hassles with visas and taxi drivers, it was a fantastic way to spend my last days of vacation before returning to Kazakhstan to finish the last four months of my service.