After returning to our small lakeside town of Karakol and getting a much needed shower (5 days of backpacking, snow, rain, mud, and sulphurous hot springs will do a number) we ventured out into the world of former Societ beurocracy to try and extend our visas. Some of you might remember some nightmare stories of mine involving Chinese visa extensions, or lack thereof. After several hours of walking, waiting, different offices, different miscommunications, and the usual array of stamps and papers and money - lots of money - we actually found the impossible.....a goverment official who was willing to bend and break all the rules, skip steps and do everything at triple speed, in order to help us out and save us the inconvenience of staying in town a few more days. Dare you to try and find that, even in the west. With extended visas, and after a day of laundry, we hit the road again with a determination to find some nomadic life and traditional Kyrgyz culture.


First stop, a tiny village called Kaji-Sai where we had been recommended a nice homestay with a nice family. We found the tourist information office permanently closed, searched the entire village, and found the only guy in town that spoke English - then he searched the entire village. No one knew anything about any hotel, any homestay, any families willing to take us, or any of the relevant street names (there were 5 streets in town, and everyone knew all the names, just miraculously not the ones we wanted). We explained that all we needed was a piece of dirt in someone's backyard, and we were happy to pay. We were promptly sent to the beach 3 km out of town to set up our tent. Thanks.


After a wonderful evening on the beach alone and a fresh apple/apricot delivery from the broken-English-speaker that had been helping us, we tried our hardest to sleep through what seemed like an obvious drug-smuggling deal going down on the lake in front of us. Silent hand-powered boats without lights passing in front of us, then coming to shore, then heading straight out into the middle of the lake (which is 50 miles wide and 150 miles long). We were a bit freaked out for a second, but kept quiet.


Hitched a ride to the next town and found another closed tourist information center. Several helpful people dragged me by the arm from shop to shop, calling people to come help us, having me wait in various places for various people, until finally a woman came who could speak about 12 words of English. She offered an expensive yurtstay in a nearby jailoo (summer pasture). We took it. Turned out to be a tourist yurt decorated with all kinds of pretty tourist stuff, in the backyard of a family's walled off concrete house. Nice people, but once again not at all what we were looking for.


So, we spent the day wandering around the neighboring small villages and fertile valleys, even being invited in for tea once (a first), and spent the following 3 days backpacking in the nearest green river valley amidst a sea of southern Utah-esque mountain desert landscape. We hiked up to a huge glacier and camped in the pastures of the 2 familes who were spending the summer up there - they brought us kymyz (fermented mare's milk, a national staple) which we accepted graciously and promptly poured out. Very nice people, and a beautiful valley, but they didn't really understand our presence and wanted little to do with us if we didn't want to rent their horses.

Next stop, Kochkor, our favorite small village (~15,000) in yet another beautiful valley amidst more American southwest panoramas. This is where the whole Community-Based-Tourism effort was started, and its where it flourishes today. If any of you ever go to Kyrgyzstan (looking for what we were looking for) go here first. We made a homebase in the wonderful home of a sweet enthusiastically friendly and hospitable old lady named Munarkoon, who is probably my favorite person in Central Asia, with her silly little granddaughter running a close second. We went on a couple of different trips in the neighboring deserts, mountains, valleys, jailoos, but always came back to her homecooked meals and smiles, where we communicated our experiences in cherades and Kendall danced with the granddaughter in the central courtyard.

Our first trip was an overnight in a nearby yurt with a great family who was extremely happy to have us. We watched them milk the mares, helped count the hundreds of sheep coming into the corral for the night, and after all the animals had been herded and the borscht and tea finished, slept next to them in the dung-heated yurt on a cold starry night. Our best, most authentic, most enjoyable experience by far.

The next was a 3 day horse trek to an enormous, freezing cold alpine lake at 3000 meters, which was awesome the first day and would have remained so if Kendall hadn't gotten terribly sick, just as the sun was going down on our coldest night. We descended quickly the next morning, despite Kendall's frequent trips to the bushes, turned the 3-day trip into a 4-day, and rested in a shady grove while she recovered.

Slowly back to Bishkek, where we were fed an enormous, delicious meal by 4 Israeli travelers, just as we were heading downtown to purchase our plane tickets to Israel. This confirmed we were making the right decision. After lots of research, and dissapointedly scratching both Lebanon and Egypt off the itinerary due to the usual ongoing Middle Eastern conflicts, we pocketed our tickets to Israel and hopped on the plane to Uzbekistan.

We'll try to do better about posting regularly from now on, but this will be a quick trip through our second and last Central Asian Republic. On October 3, we fly to Israel where our good friend Yael will be in charge of showing us her fascinating country, as well as neighboring Jordan. Can't wait - we've dreamed about the Middle East for years and have been trying to figure out how to visit Yael ever since our travels together in India in 2006. Plus, lets face it: every border crossing is like a shiny new Christmas present.