Karakol, Kyrgyzstan

When I was tetrissing my movements through this part of the world, I knew as if by instinct that Karakol was going to be my kind of place, and I scheduled a prolonged time here. And indeed, it is my kind of place. I freaking love Karakol.  I’ve already taken to calling it Cedar City, Kyrgyzstan:  about the same population as that Utah town, about the same altitude, relative position to the mountains/nature/red rocks, bunches of outdoorsy types milling around, a few Subarus, lots of sheep.

It’s also a much more traditional town, and by “traditional” I mean that Kyrgyz nomadic culture is very much a part of the governing ethos of the place.  There are a lot of people on horses, even in town.  There is a very lively weekly livestock exchange.  There are plenty of yurts in people’s yards, in which they hold social gatherings.

(A very nice yard-yurt)

There’s also a long history of welcome.  The most prominent populations of the welcomed include the Uyghurs and the Dungans.  The Uyghers are perhaps better known to westerners:  Chinese Muslims who’ve fled over the border to the west to escape reprogramming in a crisis that is onoing even today.  The Dungans are probably less familiar.  They are also a community of Chinese Muslims, but their exodus from China was keyed to persecution by Confucianists in the mid-19^th century.  The Dungans arrived in Karakol in large numbers, and brought to this area on the eastern corner of Issyk-Kul an expertise in agriculture.  Where the nomadic Kyrgyz people had primarily lived on livestock and dairy, mushrooms and orchard fruits, the Dungans brought a robust cultivation practice including tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, peppers, cabbage.  They make noodles from wheat and also from bean starches.  The fusion of these two cuisines—the nomadic Kyrgyz and the agrarian Dungan—has led to a very rich culinary culture, of which the Karakol residents are rightly proud.

(Karakol's Dungan mosque, built all of wood, without any nails)

There’s an organization in town called Destination Karakol, which helps connect (mostly English-speaking) tourists with local activities, giving guidance on logistics, marshrutka (minibus) schedules, etc. I was able to book through DK a dinner at a Dungan family’s house.  The family taught the small group of visitors to make some dishes, then served a 6-course meal most of which was grown about 20 steps from where we sat. Dinner was accompanied by a history lesson about the Dungan people, their migration, the cultural practices, their distinct religious observances, and so on.  I’m so glad that I got this opportunity to learn not only about the Dungans but also about Karakol, at the beginning of my time in this community.  It helps me to understand that when I feel welcomed here—and I very much do—I’m part of a very long story of strangers being made at home.

(My hostess teaches guests to make ashlan-fu, which deserves its own post at a later time)

(Dumplings filled with the greens of green onions and garlic)

I’ve flown a long way to hang out in Utah, part 2

Barskoon National Monument, Kyrgyzstan.  A series of three main waterfalls cascade from the heights to the valley floor.  That trail just gets steeper and steeper as you go higher and higher.  

 The whole canyon looks to me like the Alpine Loop.

 

Also, this area was apparently where cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin chose to recover from his space flight.  Which is cool, because: space.  I, too, would commemorate that with a sculpture.

I’ve flown a long way to hang out in Utah, part 1

Skazka (Fairytale) Canyon, Kyrgyzstan, is filled with red rocks, hoodoos, fins, and small-scale painted desert formations. 

There's even Mormon tea growing all over the place here, though they don't call it that. (Don't ask me what they call it. Ephedra something something, no doubt.)

Skazka Canyon sits in the foothills on the south side of Issyk-Kul, which is, yes, a great salt lake. [It’s visible in the photo below, behind all the red rock, stretching off to the horizon.] The lake is about 120 miles long by 40 miles wide and is 2200 feet deep (which Utah's Great Salt Lake is definitely not). Issyk-Kul lies in a basin ringed by branches of the Tian Shan range, the Celestial Mountains.  

With endless snowy peaks topping out from 13000 to 24000 feet, the Tian Shans are the reason I’m here. I suspect there will be more mountain photos in this blog's future.

 

NBD just me and my hunting eagle

 

Following the Lake

Clearly the move is to get out of Bishkek.  Turns out, once you leave the city, Kyrgyzstan is just one wondrous landscape after another. 

Here’s a lake called Song Kul (“Following Lake”).  It sits at about 9800 feet, about 23 miles by 12 miles.  Not super deep—maybe 45 feet.  But high and cold and pretty much unpopulated during the winter.  There are petroglyphs and burial mounds along the shoreline. During the summer, there’s a modest scattering of yurt camps along the shore, combining herding with giving travelers like me a place to sleep. 

(My yurt, kept toasty warm by a metal stove stuffed with a 
combination of coal and cowpies, is sunlit on the left.)

It’s a long and terrible road to get up to Song Kul, and along the way it crosses over a pass at 12500 feet (3800 m).  I saw, but did not successfully photograph, yaks.  

(Altitude, baby!)

Song Kul is described as one of the more beautiful lakes in Kyrgyzstan, but Kyrgyzstan (like Utah) gets a little brown in September, so it doesn’t currently have any glorious green grass framing the blue water, or any wildflowers.  But I rode a horse on a saddle made of wood with a bone pommel, so I am satisfied. 

Ala-Archa 2

I dig this national park so much I went immediately back again the next day.  Second day:  hiked to the Ratsek Hut above the waterfall.  Maybe a 6- or 7- mile hike one-way, steep and challenging.  But no grand views from the top, alas, due to the snow that was falling all over me!!!

Aaaaah-la-Archa

Ala-Archa National Park (or as they call it in Kyrgyzstan, Natural Park) sits about 15 miles from Bishkek.  

(Ak-Sai Waterfall)

Bishkek is fine.

It has some monuments, it has a pretty cool national museum (I especially enjoyed the floor that focuses on nomadic Kyrgyz culture through the last couple of millennia), and it has Indian and Korean restaurants where a vegetarian can find sustenance. It’s very walkable once you get to the center, and it’s about 15 miles away from some serious nature.  Do I want to spend a ton of time in Bishkek?  No. But I will say this: it’s the first place I’ve been in Asia where I wasn’t conspicuous.  I am a tall fair woman and I tower above all the Turkic peoples and the Arabic peoples and the Asiatic peoples whose bloodlines have circulated throughout this region.  But Bishkek has a fair number of Russians, or Russian-extracted citizens.  And—unlike the pretty universal traditional dress of woman in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan especially (and to a lesser extent in Uzbekistan too)—the women in Bishkek are wearing…whatever.  Tank tops.  Short shorts.  Miniskirts with Chuck Ts.  Green mohawks.  No one looks at me at all, and that’s a relief after so many weeks of feeling like I had a giant neon arrow reading OUTSIDER pointing at my head.

Statue of national semi-legendary hero Manas, subject of a massive epic poem that runs to 20x the length of Homer's Odyssey, which not only narrates Manas's deeds but also reflects thousands of years of Kyrgyz history.

Ala-Too Square, the central public gathering place in Bishkek

Monument of Friendship, a nice Soviet commemoration of 
that one time when Kyrgyzstan gave itself over to Russian dominance.

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Our household tries to be good eco-citizens.  We recycle.  We take the old fluorescent lights to one place to be disposed of properly and the dead batteries to another place.  We save up plastic films to drop at the supermarket in the perhaps naïve belief that they will be turned into flip flops or something.  My thermostat in the winter is set to 60 degrees, and my swamp cooler only runs at night during the summer.  We turn the key to be idle free. 

One disheartening thing about my journey through the Stans is seeing how meager are our dutiful household efforts beside an entire continent of indifference. At the supermarket here, you get your orange in a plastic bag, that gets weighed and put into a plastic bag with a price sticker on it, and then the cashier puts it into a bigger plastic bag.  The cars here, many of them holdovers from Soviet times, with their Soviet emissions systems still in place, spew particulates gleefully into the atmosphere, such that it is both visible and chewy.  As I arrived in Bishkek, my throat actually closed up, refusing to allow me to inhale.  Anywhere there is traffic—and there is traffic everywhere in Bishkek—there’s a murky, sallow, asthmatic’s-nightmare of gloom hovering around head-high, just where the nostrils sit.  And this miasma is kept in place by the heavy coal smoke sitting like a lid on this whole basin, snug against some truly beautiful mountains that, most days, cannot be seen from the heart of town 20 miles away.

I have never felt such an immediate, visceral loathing of a city as I feel for Bishkek. It’s the air.  It’s the plastic garbage everywhere along the roads.  It’s the surprising poverty of vegetarian food.  It’s the enduring Russian-ness of it all, which has apparently overwritten Kyrgyz heritage and language. 

I know that Kyrgyzstan is more than this city.  I’m looking forward to getting out of this city and into the rest of the country.  In the meantime, you’ll find me in the corner café eating a small bowl of vegetable soup.  If you can see me through the haze.

(Bishkek from a distance)

Gusgarf Waterfall, Tajikistan

Well, I hiked here.  It’s about 15 miles north of Dushanbe.  The hike was fine, the waterfall was a little anemic, and after winding for about 2 steep miles through a village the trail became rather a suggestion through boulder fields.  But I did see a big bear poop.   

(Check that air quality in the background. Sheesh.) 

The most remarkable thing about this hike, honestly, is that I made it back.  I took a taxi out to the trailhead.  When I finished in the evening, I walked out to the highway (the main road into Dushanbe from the north) and wondered how the crap I was going to get back to the city.  I was in the middle of a gestural conversation with an old Tajik man on the roadside about how there are no buses that I can take from this location into town when an empty taxi sped past! And it stopped for me!, my very own miracle ride back to Dushanbe.

 

Dushanbe, Tajikistan

The best thing about this city, aside from the ubiquitous green electric taxis that charge almost nothing for a ride, is the evening walking culture.  There’s a long pedestrian boulevard spangled with LED lights leading to the central square of the city, and there are families out there every night once the sun goes down: kids on tricycles, friends strolling with their arms around one another, matrons with canes and ice cream cones.  Every nightfall there’s Tajik music pouring from the sound systems in the public square and near the parliament building.  It feels small-towny in the middle of a large city.  

The worst thing about this city is the air pollution, which is oppressive and especially visible around all those LED lights.  The culprit is not entirely emissions, though it is certainly that too; it’s also that the country’s main natural resources are underground.  Lots of mining here—gold, titanium, silver, *coal* (used for electricity, with all the foul haze that entails), etc—and the particulate matter that gets hurled up into the atmosphere from all those mines settles on everything in a whisper of dust.

Speaking of underground, here are some paleolithic artifacts from the National Museum of Tajikistan, mindblowingly dated to 950,000 BCE.  

There have been people in this part of the world for an incomprehensibly long time.  Layers and layers of civilization, empires overwriting empires overwriting empires.  The time scale is so long and the history so complex that I actually cannot keep all the narratives untangled in my mind. Like, I begin to get a sense of the relationship between the Samonids and the Mongols, but then I have to add in the Sogdans and the Zoroastrians and the Achaemenids and and and.  And I give up taking notes, knowing that I'm not going to be able to account for any of it.

***

Pro tip: If one should find oneself weary after traveling for an extended period in foreign countries, far from friendly support and real-time conversations with loved ones, far from English-speaking pharmacists and western toilets, I highly suggest checking into the fanciest hotel you can find and spending a few days getting pampered, having your laundry cleaned and pressed and returned to you smelling only of soap, enjoying afternoon tea and pastries, setting the A/C to 16C (around 60F), and frequenting the infinity pool and the Finnish sauna.  Not every minute of every day needs to look like the centerfold of Outdoor magazine.

Hisar Range, Tajikistan

 

So many glaciers, so many rivers and lakes with glacial effluvia!

Fann Mountains 2: Iskanderkul

The pride of the Fanns, where the longtime president of Tajikistan (whose face is everywhere, in unofficial dictator style) has his dacha.  This large glacial lake is the big outdoor visitor draw of western Tajikistan.  Its name is the Tajik/Persian form of Alexander, who dragged his armies (and their genetic material) through here a couple thousand years ago.  The big peak at the focal point of the lake is called Alexander’s Head.  

There are some challenging hikes up from the lake and some easy strolls along the shore. There’s also a nice (shortish) hike to a waterfall called—no kidding—Niagara Falls.  

I have to say: this place should be a climbing destination.  These walls are so impressively tall and threaded everywhere with cracks and chimneys and this very grippy igneous rock.  And have I mentioned that 93% of Tajikistan is mountains?!  But there’s really not much of a climbing culture here, from what I can tell.  I spoke to a Russian climber at the lake, who’d just done a route about a mile from the lake.  He said that he hadn’t really ever seen any other climbers than his small group; he also indicated that it’s pretty much all trad climbing and that Tajiks don’t have the cash for trad gear, so it takes a pretty determined effort to hit those walls.  I’m just saying: Tajikistan should consider investing in recreational tourism more than it has.  In some ways, it’s an outdoor paradise.  And yet, there are so many obstacles to casual travel here (little English, low connectivity, no intercity public transport, the water situation, mostly cash economy, police corruption [search online for tales of police demanding bribes of travelers]) that I fear this country will continue to be outpaced by other Stans in attracting foreign travelers and their money.  Uzbekistan is totally ready to receive you, intrepid explorer; Tajikistan needs you to think hard about it and do a lot of planning in order to visit.  And you still might get super sick.

Fann Mountains 1: Seven Lakes

 

After a comically serious land border crossing from Uzbekistan, I enter western Tajikistan’s main town, Panjakent, to find…a far different circumstance than I left in Uzbekistan.  The humorless passport control officer and the scrutiny from the troupe of headscarved matrons with whom I stood in line should have clued me in.  In Tajikistan, I will not be inconspicuous.

Panjakent bears the hallmarks of a post-Soviet bust town, with a slightly scoured out aspect.  There’s a lively bazaar down the town’s main street selling melons, grapes, tomatoes, pumpkins—all manner of produce.  There’s also a UNESCO site in town, Ancient Panjakent, which is a ruined city dating from the 6^th C BCE, of which much remains of the Zoroastrian cult that flourished here: fire altars and ritual clayware.  There was also a 1600-year-old fresco found in the central structure of the town, but (of course) it’s in Russia, at the Hermitage.

The real story of Panjakent, for my purposes, is that it’s the gateway to the Canyon of Seven Lakes.  Seven different lakes—I won’t bother naming them here because I can’t remember any but a couple of their translations (“Eyelash,” “Lever,” “Last”) and because I’m sure that information is easily googleable.  The seven lakes are famous for their being all within, say, 20 difficult road-miles of one another but each a different color, each one fed by a different glacial collection system.  So the first one is dark blue, the fourth is large and green, the seventh is classically glacial blue, like Canada's Lake Louise. 

These mountains—really spitting distance from Afghanistan—are steep and jagged and braided with fantastically twisted strata in grays, browns, whites, and reds.  The Fanns soar to peaks above 14000, with a couple over 15000.  There is pretty much no vegetation on them, not because of the timberline but because it’s so dry here.  I think the water situation is what has kept Tajikistan from surging into modernity in the way that Uzbekistan (land of so many rivers!) has.  I mean, there are lakes and rivers but they’re not easy to access and they’re also not so clean (see previous post). 

 

A post on 💩

Friends, especially my vegetarian friends, we need to discuss poop.  If you are squeamish about poop, maybe just stop reading now.

Silk Road cuisine tends to be pretty vegetable-forward.  Lots of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, peppers, lots of grains, lots of fruits throughout the region.  But outside of the big cities, it’s hard to find a lot of these foods cooked.  It’s very easy to get a plate of beautiful vegetables and herbs to eat with gorgeous fresh-baked flatbreads pretty much everywhere you go.  But a soup or stew or plov (the region’s staple rice dish) without meat?  Nope.  

This is, generally speaking, fine with me.  I love me a giant plate of vegetables with bread.  The problem, my friends, is the water.  Because even if a traveler is super careful about drinking only bottled or purified water, you can’t control how your raw vegetables have been treated before they hit your table.

And oh my goodness did I get hit with something unfriendly and microscopic.  At first, beginning back in Turkmenistan, I just had pretty consistent, garden-variety traveler’s diarrhea, or TD as they call it in the poop-problem biz.  But then I arrived in rural Tajikistan.  As I was traveling in the mountains, I was kindly offered peaches and grapes, and before I ate them my gracious host was careful to wash them…in the river.  And when I followed the river along to its lake source, I passed a number of small villages, for which the river was obviously the sole plumbing.  Uh-oh, I thought, that’s not going to be good.

I will not trouble you with my body’s response in detail, but rather offer a single word: grenade.

Fortunately, I brought a couple of courses of antibiotics with me.  I wondered if I’d know when to bring the Z-pack into service.  Let me assure you that I knew. 

So the deal is this:  travelers from the US are gonna get sick here.  Vegetarian travelers may be in a more delicate position, especially when outside of cities, and especially when the kindness of people who do not have much to share presents a gift that cannot be declined.  It is no joke.  I nearly retreated to Europe to recover.  I had to withdraw from a long road trip through the Pamir range because I was just too ill, which sucks because I really wanted to be all up in those mountains.  But I console myself that there will be other mountains, even in my near future.

The Scientist King

 

The westernmost of the three madrassas in Registon Square is called Ulugh Beg Madrassa.  

(A madrassa is, essentially, a university or academy of learning.)

This beauty was named after its founder, Ulugh Beg.  This guy was honestly pretty awesome.  He was the grandson of Timur (/Tamburlane), and rose to the station of emperor in the middle of the 15^th C.  But his true passion was chasing knowledge, especially about the sciences, and within the sciences especially about mathematics and astronomy.  He calculated sine and tangent values to eight decimal places.  Also he spoke five languages.  He was a brainy dude who just happened also to have the treasury of an empire behind him. And what he did with that treasure was invest in science.

Ulugh Beg built his madrassa decades before he reigned and populated it with the best mathematical minds in the empire. (And I went to the top of its northern minaret!)

Then he built something even cooler:  an observatory.  

 (Here's a model of the building that held the observatory, in the museum next door)

If you’ve heard of Ulugh Beg before, it’s probably because of the observatory. (Indeed, B and I spent some time with the details of Ulugh Beg's astronomical achievements at the Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam.)  At the time of its operation, it was the largest observatory in Central Asia.  Ulugh Beg used it to catalogue the movements of over 1000 stars.  He determined the length of a year on earth to just 28 seconds off of accurate (closer than Copernicus), and he calculated the angle of the earth’s tilt.  

The observatory, or at least the central sextant (the Farkhi sextant), sits right where he left it, all 36-meter radius of it, though the grand building that housed it has not survived.   

So, scroll back up and look at the picture of the madrassa Ulugh Beg built.  See the design of the ornamental tiles that grace the portal?  Those are stars.