From Kochkor we took a nice drive along the south shore of Lake Issyk Kul, which turned out to have very nice red-sand beaches and very clean water. Karakol was a bit to the east of the huge lake and above average in the sense that it was slighly less dusty and run down but still surrounded by immense, beautiful mountains. We stayed in a homestay in a nondescript Soviet appartment block and managed to find the "Chinese Mosque", built by Chinese muslims in the style of a Buddhist pagoda. Have I mention that this is a confused part of the world?
ALTYN ARASHAN
We took a trip out of Karakol to Altyn Arashan, a mountain valley south of the city, hiring a Soviet minibus, which I have great respect for. This monstrous thing looked like it wouldn't make it out the driveway move but it managed to bring eight people up ten miles up the rockiest, bounciest mountain road I've ever seen. We reached about 10,000ft elevation and came to a place with a few cabins and a bunch of sheep herders, there for the summer. We were going to hike but it started raining so we mostly just hung out with a very fun groupd of five Peace Corps Volunteers visiting from Kazakhstan. I enjoyed listening to this North Dakotan guy rant about how the Kazakh president is a dictator,etc and his Kazakh girlfriend give irrate responses to the effect of "in our country democracy has a different meaning." We spent the afternoon in a natural hot springs which was the temperature of a perfect jacuzzi. Instead of a pool we dunked ourselves in the glacial stream nearby.
We took a trip out of Karakol to Altyn Arashan, a mountain valley south of the city, hiring a Soviet minibus, which I have great respect for. This monstrous thing looked like it wouldn't make it out the driveway move but it managed to bring eight people up ten miles up the rockiest, bounciest mountain road I've ever seen. We reached about 10,000ft elevation and came to a place with a few cabins and a bunch of sheep herders, there for the summer. We were going to hike but it started raining so we mostly just hung out with a very fun groupd of five Peace Corps Volunteers visiting from Kazakhstan. I enjoyed listening to this North Dakotan guy rant about how the Kazakh president is a dictator,etc and his Kazakh girlfriend give irrate responses to the effect of "in our country democracy has a different meaning." We spent the afternoon in a natural hot springs which was the temperature of a perfect jacuzzi. Instead of a pool we dunked ourselves in the glacial stream nearby.
This thing was a tank
Thermal hot springsOver a dinner of borsh (Russian beat soup) and vodka we talked to Valentin, a 70ish, crusty Russian guy who told us how his parent had been deported from the Ukraine and about how American patriotism is stronger than Russian patriotism because we're a nation of immigrants (or something like that). All in all it was a pretty Russian evening, with the borsh, vodka and tragic stories and you may be thinking "weren't you in Kyrgyzstan"--but Central Asia is sort of like that, weird countries at the end of the world with big chunks of Russia dropped in at surprising places.
Valentin spinning yarnsCHOLPON ATA
The next day Ross and I walked about 15 miles through cold rain to get back to Karakol and then made our way along the north shore of Lake Issyk Kul to the resort town of Cholpon Ata. To most people Kyrygystan is not an obvious choice for a beach vacation but for the people in Central Asia, who live thousands of miles from the ocean, Issyk Kul is the best they've got and Cholpon Ata is the center of the Kyrgyz Riviera (I'm making that term up). There were decent resorts swarming with Russian and Kazakh vacationers (needless to say the bazaar only sold Speedo-style bathing suits), and we stayed at one of them, getting a discount by staying in an RV camper.
The next day Ross and I walked about 15 miles through cold rain to get back to Karakol and then made our way along the north shore of Lake Issyk Kul to the resort town of Cholpon Ata. To most people Kyrygystan is not an obvious choice for a beach vacation but for the people in Central Asia, who live thousands of miles from the ocean, Issyk Kul is the best they've got and Cholpon Ata is the center of the Kyrgyz Riviera (I'm making that term up). There were decent resorts swarming with Russian and Kazakh vacationers (needless to say the bazaar only sold Speedo-style bathing suits), and we stayed at one of them, getting a discount by staying in an RV camper.
Going down in the rain
The lake
The south shore in the distance
In Cholpon Ata we didn't do any site seeing, unless you count walking a mile up a hill, and climbing a barbed wire fence only to fail to find ancient petroglyphs as site seeing. Mostly we hung out by the beach which was OK but not as spectacular as the beach-starved Central Asians suggested it would be. "Issyk" means "warm" in most Turkic languages so I was really excited but it wasn't actually warm--it was just "not so cold you'd have to be crazy to jump in". I met yet another group of Peace Corps people (no. 3 for this trip) and went out with them for a few nights, to discos to dance with rather young Russian girls and their mothers and to clubs to narrowly avoid getting into fights with some unsavory Kazakh guys. (Disclaimer: Ross wasn't there for this). During the day the Peace Corps people told me stories about how they'd been promised exciting assignments in India or Peru but ended up in Turkmenistan which is really a wretched place. When I asked one of them what was "good" about Turkmenistan he responded, "Unless you're talking about the melon--nothing".
Elliot, Hans, Me, Liz, Jon Custer
Over the barbed wire in search of petroglyphs we never found
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