I was going through a really fucking difficult time in my life and needed to get the fuck away from comfort.
Due to corona and other constraints I was limited where I could go. First, I’m not a wealthy person, so the airplane ticket had to be cheap. Plus the country had to be open to tourists. Kyrgyzstan ticked both boxes.
I booked the flight and began planning what to do once there.
Better not tell my parents though, lest they worry what might happen to me traveling through an ex-USSR country. On multiple occasions I was told that I'm crazy traveling through Kyrgyzstan by myself. But I never felt unsafe, not even in Bishkek at night.
I don’t mind driving a car, so I rented one for the whole trip. I wanted to be flexible, stop wherever I wanted, to drive to places regular busses wouldn’t go. As far away from civilisation as the road would take me.
And I did go to places – places so incredibly beautiful that I wanted to stay there forever. Places I didn’t want to leave even though the sun was already setting behind the mountains and I knew I had to get back to town.
Driving in Kyrgyzstan is an adventure on its own. What looks on Google Maps as a regular, paved highway may in fact be a gravel road. To deal with the many potholes, you can either drive very slowly around them, or fast enough to fly straight over them.
Some roads are covered with fresh Chinese asphalt. The lane markers are just decoration though. You simply drive wherever you see fit. Nobody will be mad at you for driving on the left side of the road because you're trying to avoid hitting a cow.
Livestock – horses, cows, sheep – is everywhere, wandering around the countryside, roads, and wherever they see food. It takes a certain amount of courage to trust the animals not to suddenly run into the middle of the road while you speed by them at 90 km/h.
They are more used to cars than I was to them.
I highly recommend getting a 4x4 car. Not only because of the gravel roads, but also to avoid getting stuck somewhere. My rental company included some tools and a shovel with my car. The shovel proved useful on two occasions.
The country has a reliable, fast, and cheap cell service (4G), but not deep in the mountains. If you plan on getting stuck somewhere, better get a PLB or satellite phone.
Winter days are short, and that doesn’t leave much time to drive if you don’t want to drive at night. And not driving at night is generally a good idea. Cars do have headlamps but turning them on is optional, or so it would seem. The police certainly don’t care about that. They do care about speed limits though.
The poverty gap is pretty big. On one side you see Lexus cars driving around, on the other side you see people living on less than a dollar a day. A lot of it is due to corruption.
Speaking of corruption, it’s there, but not well distributed. Perhaps the politicians in Bishkek are susceptible to it, but not the police in Karakol. I couldn’t get them to write me an important police report of a car crash, no matter how hard I pressed. Given that everybody was telling me how corrupt the country is, I was surprised about the integrity of the police there. This made me both happy (police has integrity) and sad (no police report for me) at the same time.
I spent half a day at the police station and that was the end of that episode. During my time there, I felt strangely relaxed and not all bothered about what was happening around me. Deep inside me I knew that there was nothing that I could do, that I could say to advance my situtation. So why bother? Be happy, smile, and accept.
While driving around the countryside and smaller towns, I often saw people waiting by the side of the road and flagging down cars. They usually want to go to the next town or be taken however far you can take them in that general direction. Whenever I could I stopped and took them along for the ride. How could I not, seeing a young woman with two children standing there in freezing temperatures, or a young boy sitting on the side of the road wanting to be taken to the playground a bit outside of the town?
We didn’t communicate much beyond their hand gesture pointing towards where I should stop. But it felt great being part of the local culture where people help each other out whenever possible.
The first words out of my mouth when I met someone were usually «Я не говорю по русски» (I don't speak Russian). The rest of the conversation was then done through broken english on their side, hand gestures, or with the help of google translate. Only few people speak english, fewer still speak it well.
I had a few places I wanted to visit, and then whatever I would have time for in between. Even before I set off, I had a feeling that my plans wouldn't remain set in stone. That proved true just two days after I arrived.
One of the places I wanted definitely go to was Karakol, and spend a day on the slopes of their ski resort. My first surprise was the fact that there is no paved road to the ski resort – just a gravel road.
The ski resort itself was in ok shape. The ski lifts were running, which was a good sign. And what more should I expect from a ski resort which hasn't invested in its infrastructure since it was built? I had a good time, and that is all that counts.
Also, I now have first-hand experience of how skiing was in USSR back in the 70s. To be honest, it wasn't pleasant and I prefer the swiss style.
The country gets surprisingly little snow during winter. It’s cold for sure – -30 degrees celsius is not uncommon – but there is very little precipitation. And whatever snow falls to the ground is so incredibly powdery that it doesn’t compact well and is blown away in just a few days. What is left is a brown landscape with few patches of white snow few and far apart. Only in the mountains above 3500 you see permanent snow.
A day before I arrived in Jyrgalan the whole region saw heavy snowfall and I was greeted with a beautiful snow-covered landscape. A few days later most of the snow was gone.
I felt like the only western tourist in the whole country, I certainly have not seen any other foreigners except a few people from Russia. Whoever I met though was happy to see a tourist come back into the country after such a long time. It's been close to a year since people saw foreign visitors.
My original plan included going to places where no-one has ever gone to before in winter. Kyrgyzstan has vast swaths of land which are hostile to life during the winter months and few locals dare to go there. Sounds perfect for an inexperienced traveler, right?
But it was in those places where I felt alive like never before. There is something really profound in being surrounded by nothing but pure nature for miles in all directions, under clear skies, with everything that you see illuminated by the power of a thousand suns.
Kyrgyzstan is a country where you can go to without any prior plans at all, except having a first night booked in a hostel, and still manage to have a good time. The owners of hostels and guesthouses are happy to organise whatever trip you can imagine for you. Or perhaps I was lucky because there were no tourists and pretty much every guesthouse was empty, and every tour operator happy to have a customer.
That brings me to the aforementioned change of plans. I had heard of this wonderful place called Song Kul Lake before going to Kyrgyzstan, but hadn’t planned to go there. But when I was offered a multi-day horse trek to go there, I accepted.
Song Kul Lake in winter is a deserted place. The high altitude (3000m) and mountains all around it keep the cold air trapped in. Temperature at night can easily fall to -30, and that’s not including the chill factor due to wind.
But all that doesn't matter the slightest bit.
For when you step out of the yurt at 10 pm to take a last piss before going to bed, stand there in the middle of wherever you want, because it doesn't matter where you do the deed, and look up into the sky, see every single star in the visible universe, see the milky way as clear as a stroke of titanium white across a black canvas, that very moment you forget that you are exposed to the elements. You simply stop caring about everything.
The horse trek was not the typical tour anyone else would have experienced during the previous years, or at least it didn’t feel like it. It wasn’t season and none of the regular infrastructure was available. It felt more like the horse guide taking me along for a visit to his friends. We stayed at their houses, helped them out tending to their livestock, cooked and ate together and we then continued with our trip the next day.
I got a strange request from one of the nomads we were staying at. He wanted to borrow 1000 som (ca. 10 USD) so he can buy a bottle of vodka. I didn't hesitate.
I'm grateful to have been given the opportunity to be part of those people's lives, even if for just a day. They are living a hard life, high up in the mountains, without electricity or connection to the outside world for days at a time, in -30 degree nights, with only a small stove for cooking some food and warming up hot water for tea.
Only after I came back I was told that fishing in Song Kul Lake is illegal. I was staying at an illegal fishermen’s camp, helped them pull fish from the lake, and we then ate that fish for lunch. Wow.
On that day, we actually ate their whole catch of the day. Every single fish they pulled out of the lake.
Let that sink in for a moment: they knew they are doing something illegal, yet they were selfless enough to share their catch with us without regard for their own profit from the day’s work. And I didn’t even realise what was going on around me at that time.
Even though they were doing something they clearly know is illegal, there are few alternatives in the region. High unemployment and no job opportunities push people to do these things.
On the last day before I was flying back to Switzerland I was driving into the mountains, once more in search of a place far away from civilisation. On my way I spotted a group of children playing on an ice-covered slope, and spontaneously decided to join them.
That little detour, that change in mind, led to one of the happiest moments during the whole trip. One of those moments in life which make you rethink your whole existence, if you know what I mean.
That place. That view. The children. And me in the middle of all of that. Even more, I wasn’t just an outside observer, I played an active part in shaping that moment, together with everyone who was there at the same time.
Children are born same everywhere on earth. Innocent, playful, happy. They have no destination they ought to arrive at, they just want to be.
They want you to have fun with them together, and don’t care that you don’t speak their language. It’s up to you to accept that invitation into their little bubble of happiness.
By pure chance I had bags of chocolates in the back of my car. I will never forget the looks on their faces when I showed them and told them to take as much as they can carry.
We don't get a say in when it ends. We never have. But we can control how we live.