Bishkek

We’ve spent the last few days in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. It’s a small city with not a great deal going on. We were done with the sights in a few hours (one museum (in Russian) one monument and mutiple statues of Lenin, which have been moved to less prominent positions sinc independence, but still dominate the must-see list). So then there was nothing much left to do but set about developing a taste for Russian caviar and Georgian wine (which turned out to be far superior to Moldovan).

The restaurats and vodka cocktails were excellent and except for a huge storm on Sunday night, the weather was perfect for sitting in the sun and enjoying both. And for the first time on the trip I could choose my outfit safe in the knwledge that the sizeable local population of Russian girls would be sporting far skimpier outfits than I could ever rustle up from my backpack.

The floor-madam in our hotel did all our landry and we feel refreshed and ready to goagain. We’re now en route to Karakol, close to Lake Issyk-Kol, where we’re hoping to get in some beach time. The name translates as ‘warm lake’, so let’s hope it’s accurate this time! After that it’s probably about time to start heading West...

Gemma

Our plans

We've begun to realise that we've been heading in the wrong direction. We've managed only to progress from 77 degrees longitude in Delhi to 74 degrees in Bishkek over the last 22 days. At our current rate of westerly progress it will take around another 543 days to get back to London. Whilst our employer is usually willing to be fairly flexible about such things, we'll probably need to return to work before mid-2011. Also, although Gemma's Mum can no doubt cope with all the preparations, our wedding in May is (arguably) going to be less successful if we don't actually attend.

So, we've decided to change our plans slightly. We'd originally been planning to head South out of Kyrgyzstan into the Eastern part of Tajikistan. This would take us back to slightly nearer to Delhi than Bombay is and to within a few days walk of where we were in Pakistan a couple of weeks ago, which slightly defeats the point. We're now going to head into the northern part of Tajikistan, and only spend 7-10 days there in Khojand, Dushanbe and the Fan Mountains.

More significantly, in terms of an overall route, we've finally given up on ever hearing back from our agent about an Iran visa. Instead, we're planning to get an Azerbaijan visa in Tashkent and travel through Turkmenistan to the Caspian Sea and take a ferry from there.

We'll try to update the map up top at some point. In the meantime, we're heading even further East to Karakol (78 degrees longitude) on the shores of Lake Issy-Kul tomorrow. Apparently, there are vodka stands on the beach. I'll let you know how/if this manages to be compatible with the Russian habit of sunbathing standing up....

T.

Horses and yurts

The last couple of days have been spectacular. We hired horses and a guide through CBT from some shepherds close to Kochkor and rode them over a mountain pass to Song Kul, an alpine lake (translates as ‘Convenient Lake’, which it certainly wasn’t!)

On the way we ate and slept in yurts belonging to shepherds. They are made of felt and smell a bit muttony, but are surprisingly cosy (at least they are once they’ve piled 7 duvets on top of you).

Having pretty much had our fill of mutton and noodles, mutton soup and mutton kebabs, the lake provided some excellent barbequed fish for the meals on the second day. That feeling of congealed mutton fat on the roof of your mouth is not something I’ll miss about Central Asia. Homemade cream and strawberry jam on freshly baked bread to finish every meal I think we will miss.

The horses were well behaved – the only scary moment was when mine bolted at the sight of a shepherd walking towards us carrying a calf over his shoulder. Apparently the sight of a man-cow was just too disconcerting to stay calm, but I stayed on. Later the sound of putting on or taking off my coast would have a similar effect. Twice

Apparently the Kyrgyz don’t name their horses, but when pressed, the shepherds told us we could call them Blacky, Patchy and Farty. In Kygyz, of course.

Arriving back in Kochkor yesterday we took a shared taxi to Bishkek, where we arrived last night (hence the sudden flurry of posts). Somewhat saddle-sore but clean and learning to enjoy $2-a-bottle Moldovan wine, first impressions are positive.

Photos of Song Kul to follow (when Trevor stops reading about Michael Jackson and gets on with uploading them).

Gemma

...and on to Kyrgyzstan

The Kyrgyz visa was the very first one that I got in Delhi. At the time, the Ambassador's wife spent significant time and effort telling me how similar to Switzerland it was. Having never been to either country I nodded and smiled. But now that we're here, I can confirm that Kyrgyzstan is very green and drizzly, full of sheep, the men are all on horseback and the people live in yurts. The only thing missing is some smoked cheese.

Tuesday started early with us leaving the Kashgar hotel at 7.30am local time in a jeep to the border. Customs opened at 11.30am Beijing time (everything in Xnijiang is given as Beijng time, but locals set their watches 2 hours later, with the effect that standard opening hours are 11am-8pm Beinjing time, i.e. 9-6 local). We were first through customs and needless to say the Chinese officials were much less rigourous with their checks on the way out that they had been on the way in.

It was then a 3 hour, 100km drive to the Kyrgyz border across no-man's-land. We were under strict instructions to "not stop or take photos but toilet break behind rock is OK". We arrived at the border just in time to see it closing for lunch, so sat in the jeep for 90 minutes waiting for them to get their fill of noodles.

The Torougart pass is one of Asia's most notorious and unpredictable border posts and we'd heard and read plenty of horror stories about travellers having made careful arrangements only to be thwarted by logistical gridlock or unpredictable closures. We had hired a jeep in both China and Kyrgyzstan and an agent just for us, and we got lucky... after the lunch break nd then a further delay while they ransacked a couple of trucks, we were through and nto Kyrgyztan.

After we had crossed the pass the scenery changed pretty quickly to green rolling hills, replacing the more jagged mountains of China. There were lots of marmots on both sides, but no Marco Polo sheep.

As soon as we had entered no-man's-land the road had changed from the excellent tarmac of China to a gravelly track, reminiscent of the Pakistan roads. This continued into Kyrgyzstan, except for a wide smooth 4-lane superhighway for about 3km just over the border: a military airstip, apparently never used. It was another 3 hours of driving to Naryn, which we reached just before 8pm.

Naryn is derived from the Mongolian for 'sunny' - a rare moment of Mongol irony accordnig to the guidebook. In reality it is a cluster of soviet era concrete blocks in some of the prettiest scenery we've seen so far. Finding a room was easy through CBT (Community Based Tourism - an NGO that essentially connects tourists with a network of guides, drivers and families willing to take in guests across teh country). We were placed with the high school history teacher's family in an apartment in one of the aformentioned concrete blocks. It was actually pretty pleasant; much like a B&B in the UK.

Wednesday we donned our backpacks again and caught a lift to Kochkor, where we arranged to take horses for the 2 day ride to an alpine lake, staying in yurts on route.

And then we just kept our fingers crossed that the Swiss drizzle would abait for 48 hours!

Gemma

Kashgar posts

We seem to have chosen a route through the areas of the world with the worst internet connectivity. This is the third time I've started a post about Kashgar but, if you're reading this, the first time that anything has made it out into the ether.

As a result I'm getting a bit fed up with all this blogging business and we're getting further and further behind our actual location when writing entries. This can only negatively impact the already fairly low quality of our writing. I'm now trying to write something interesting about a surprisingly modern Chinese city on the edge of a desert whilst wrapped-up warm in a yurt halfway up a mountain in Kyrgystan. By the time this gets posted we'll probably be in Bishkek, which will hopefully be a whole new story.

I think the best way out of this is to do away with prose and write some entries in bullet point form. For any of my consulting comrades reading, these will be neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive. I'm on holiday.

Some good things about Kashgar:

• Being in a modern city for a few days. Amazing how developed Kashgar is, given the distance from anywhere and particularly from Beijing
• The contrast between the old and new cities: Maze-like mud-built Muslim areas are hidden behind a one building deep layer of shiny malls, banks and government buildings
• Diversity of the local Uyghur people: Everything from 100% oriental to plenty that would pass for Spanish or Italian (if they kept their mouths shut and dressed a bit differently)
• The Sunday market: Not as chaotic as we were expecting, but great to see locals and country folk going about their business buying goats and kebab sticks
• Uyghur women's fashion: There is no such thing as too shiny, with head to toe red sequins being particularly popular
• Uyghur architecture: No spectacular buildings, but a colourful take on islamic style, with Chinese touches
• Great peaches, plums and apricots

Some less good things about Kashgar:

• Less friendly than Pakistan, by some measure, although nothing like the rudeness that I'd been led to expect from China
• People minding their own business on public transport: The contrast between everyone sharing food and chatting non-stop on the Pakistan bus from Sost to Tashkurgan and the nice, polite, modern Chinese bus from Tashkurgan to Kashgar was a bit sad
• Not being able to speak the language, read menu or even make ourselves understood with the phrasebook (tonal languages must only have evolved to stop anyone else ever understanding you). As some indication of the depth of our underacheivement, I still have no idea how to pronounce the word 'Uyghur' other than it involves a whining noise and can only consistently make one word (hello) understood in Mandarin. At least in Russian the phrasebook is fairly effective
• How much of the old town has been knocked down since our guidebook was written (published in 2007!)
• No yaks or bactrian camels at the animal market
• Segregation of Han Chinese and Uyghur neighbourhoods and shops
• 'Meat' pies consisting entirely of mutton fat

A first load of photos of Kashgar is up at http://picasaweb.google.com/trevorcot (or whatever it was before). There will be some more whenever it is raining hard enough to spend all day in an internet cafe. All the PCs we've met for a while speak only Russian or Chinese, so I've no idea how to compress the files from my camera to make them uploadable in any sensible timeframe. If anyone can tell me which menu options to choose (in either language neutral terms or cyrillic), there will be a special reward of a bottle of fermented horse milk. That is assuming it is not intercepted by Kyrgyz or British customs. The former at least seems unlikely, given our customs check on arrival consisted of the guard waving at our driver from across an empty car park.

T.

Pakistan photos

 
We've had a great few days in Kashgar and now it's time for us to head over the border to Kyrgyzstan. I'll write some more about what we've been up to here soon. In the meantime, here is a first batch of photos from Pakistan. Uploading them is painfully slow, so there is not too many. We've not been able to put them on the blog, since Blogger appears to be blocked from China, so they are on Picasa, at:
 
http://picasaweb.google.com/trevorcot/pakistan
 
T.
 

China Lesson #1: If you don't speak the language at least learn to interpret mime

FINALLY arrived in Tashkurgen after the most thorough customs searches either of us have ever seen. Three times the entire bus had to empty all bags (except for me - they took one look at the box of tampons at the top of my bag and said they were done checking).
At the Chinese border they handed out thermometers and had us all take our temperature for swine flu. This caused much hilarity amongst the Pakistanis... Three of whom had to take theirs a second time because the original reading was too low as they'd been joking about with the thermometers so much.

Crossing the pass was in the company of hundreds of marmotts, but unfortunately we didn't see any Marco Polo sheep.

Tashkurgen is the first town on the Chinese side and although beautifully located, there's not much going on there. We couldn't find a single restaurant in the town with an English menu, so we resorted to pointing at what other people were eating. Trev pointed at some pork ribs and I chose a dish of sliced mushrooms. At this point the girl whose dinner I was pointing at kept miming at my earrings. Somewhat naively, I thought she was saying she liked my earrings. Trev thought she was explaining the food and the mushrooms were named after ears (he claims such a mushroom exists...) When dinner came, it turned out the real meaning of the mime was 'are you sure you want to order sliced pig ears for dinner?' Nice. They actually didn't taste too bad, but the chewy cartilage put us both off after a while.

Now we're in Kashgar, where we're staying for 3 or 4 days to take in China and take a break from buses.

I am enjoying wearing a T shirt rather than a kurta and seeing the female half of the population out and about. Chinese wine is nothing to write home about, however.

Thanks for all the comments... especially TJ saying Skardu(sty) was smart - I knew I was onto a winner with that title!

Gemma

Ni hao, China!

Made it across the Khunjerab pass. Looks pretty similar to the Pakistani side so far, except for we're now driving on the right!

Will post more later, but wanted Matt and Mums to breathe easy asap...

Gemma

Passu and Sost

It's our last evening in Pakistan, most likely. We've had a great time here and would definitely come back if we wanted to do any serious trekking or when new parts of the country become safe. The scenery is spectacular and the people have been amazingly friendly. I can't think of anywhere else in the world where people with no connection to the tourist industry have been so interested in meeting and helping tourists, except perhaps Cambodia. The Pakistani people have been very polite and calm so this has never seemed like hassle, as it can in touristy parts of India. I'm sure some of this is due to the relative lack of tourists here. We've often been the only people in our hotels and have only once had another foreigner on the same bus trip as us.

We've spent the last few days making our way higher into the Karakorum Mountains towards China. The valley has grown steadily steeper, the mountains closer and sharper and the tributaries of the Indus narrower and more feeble. We've not really been up to much beyond sitting on buses, staying in small villages and walking. We had a longish walk along the side of a glacier and across to a lake yesterday and a shorter walk this morning along the river.

The travel has been a bit slow. The Highways Agency is paying the China Road and Bridge Company to upgrade the Karakorum 'Highway' to something more worthy of the name. It seems like an endless task. All along the road you can see gangs of ten Chinese labourers in red boiler-suits building a twenty metre wall in the middle of a five mile stretch if similarly exposed dusty cliff-side track.

The bus trips haven't been too uncomfortable, despite the lack of legroom and capacity being four-aside in the width of a standard estate car. Women can claim front row seats, as can men and children travelling with them. It wouldn't be appropriate for me to sit next to any local women, so we usually get the two end seats on the front row. This has a bit more space than sharing with three other guys and has some useful extra leg space on the step inside the door. It also gives me the responsibility of opening and closing the door, which breaks the tedium. 

We're now in Sost, the last 'town' before the Karakorum National Park and then China. Its really just a row of dingy concrete hotels, shops and restaurants before Pakistani customs and immigration. There is only one proper road and other buildings are strewn across a trackless field of pebbles behind the main strip. A memorably ugly place, and a big contrast from the peaceful and green village of Passu that we woke up in. Sost is the only edgy town that we've stopped in. We're only 45km from Afghanistan (vs. 85km from China). One of the roads from town leads to the Wakhan Corridor - a finger-like extension of Afghanistan that reaches to China and once served to separate the British and Russian empires. We should be nearby again, on the other side of the Wakhan Valley in Tajikistan, in 3-4 weeks after a big loop through China and Kyrgyzstan.

For those of you who were particular worried for our safety in Pakistan (Matt, all our Indian friend), we'll confirm that we have actually made it to China either tomorrow from Tashkurgan or the next night from Kashgar.

The picture shows Gemma crossing the Hunza River near Passu this morning.

T.

P.S. For any Mum's reading: The part of Afghanistan that we're near and will be seeing again from Tajikistan is fairly safe. It is ethnically Tajik and was a stronghold of the Northern Alliance that fought against the Taliban.

The Hunza valley

We made it to Karmabad in the Hunza valley late Saturday night. The road from Skardu to Gilgit was fine (although a bit scary), but once we were on the Karakoram Highway... well let's just say "Karakoram dust path with lots of craters in it" might have been a more accurate name!

Hunza is beautiful. As we hoped, the women here don't have their heads covered, which means I don't have to, which is MUCH more comfortable. The scenery is very spectacular, with snow covered peaks all around. We hiked up to Ultar Meadow today, which involved a lot of scrambling up scree, but was worth it.


The food in Hunza is different to anything we've ever tried before. Current favourite is Hunza Pizza - kind of a chapati sandwich with miced meat and veg inside. And apricot kernel soup was a surprise winner last night.

There are hardly any tourists around and lots of empty hotels. The place we're staying offered us a 60% discount without us even asking. It's sad that a lot of these places may well go out of business. (In Skardu we paid published price because the guesthouse owner was the Baltistan coordnator of CAI (of Three Cups of Tea fame), so we thought we were supporting a good cause).

The people are much less pushy than in India - walking through town they stop to say hello, but don't ask you to come in their shop or hotel or restaurant. Even when we walked outside the airport in Skardu there were a buch of guys standing there with hotel fliers, but noone aproached us until we went and asked them to see the leaflets.

In all, we are very pleasantly surprised by Northern Pakistan and would certainly come back. The weather is amazing (cool enough to hike, yet sunny enough to sit outside), the people are great and we're having a superb time. If only wine were as readily available as dodgy Chinese beer, we'd all be happy...

Gemma

Skardu(sty)

We're now on our way from Skardu, the capital of Baltistan in the far NE of Pakistan, to Karimabad on the main Karakorum Highway to China.

I've been to some dusty towns, but Skardu beats all of them. The Indus river makes a wide meandering river bed in the Skardu valley and, between the time that the valley itself thaws and the snow and glaciers high in the mountains start to melt, it leaves hugh expanses of sand and silt exposed. This gets whipped up into the air by the wind for a few hours every afternoon, blocking views across the valley and covering every surface. Really unpleasant, especially for contact lens wearers.

Its not like there is much to see in the town, either. The bazaar is at best passingly interesting and the local beauty spot, a lake in the hills above town, has been disfigured by the ongoing construction work for a Chinese-funded dam. The lake was pretty enough if you only looked in one direction and the trout and chips we had for lunch were good. It's quite a conservative shiite town and there were no women around at all, so Gemma wore a head-scarf for the first, and perhaps only, time in the trip. The rest of the places we're heading to in Pakistan are largely ismaili muslim and supposedly she won't need to cover her head.

The main attraction of Baltistan is the scenery. The area is home to something like 5 of the world's 20 highest mountains, and the views are awesome. There are also some nice villages nearby, with old forts and wooden mosques, and good walking. Balti food has nothing to do with the dish of the same name in UK Indian restaurants, but is really good. My lunch yesterday was the best of the trip so far, despite the unpromising menu description: "Local bread cooked in mutton broth". It turned out to be tasty pasta-like pieces in a spicy and nutty sauce with pieces of meat.

Baltistan became part of Kashmir when the British sold it to the Maharaja of Kashmir after capturing it during the Sikh Wars, and Skardu is only a couple of hours away from the Line of Control between India- and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Surprisingly, there is not a heavy Pakistan army presence in the area - in contrast to the other side of the border in Ladakh and the Kashmir valley itself. I guess that, unlike the Indian army, the Pakistan army have got bigger problems. The locals here have some strange ideas about the Taliban (although people in Islamabad were well informed). One of our fellow bus passengers today, like many Europeans, thinks that America is to blame for all the world's problems. Our American friends will be glad to know that I lept to your country's defence; pointing out that at least Kashmir isn't America's fault. He claims that America are both (still) funding the Taliban and the Pakistan army. He didn't have a particularly strong view on why America would want to do this. I guess general malevolence would need to be invoked. More extraordinary was the owner of the restaurant we ate in a couple of days ago. He told us that his 'friend in the Pakistan army' had told him that the insurgents he had killed in Swat are uncircumcised and therefore obviously Indian soldiers pretending to be Taliban. The Indian press have claimed things at least as extraordinary as this about Pakistan, so perhaps this kind of thing is to be expected here also. I was more concerned about the removal of enemy casualties' undergarments. I doubt this is specifically covered in the Geneva Convention, but it is clearly against the spirit of the agreement.

Getting to Skardu ended up being a bit easier than we'd feared. The landing involves circling down within the valley and has to be done visually. It wasa tterrifying. Sensibly, they cancel the flight when it is windy or cloudy, and the flight had been cancelled on 5 days of the week before we wanted to travel. There was a big back-log of people with tickets wanting to travel. Luckily, we got chatting with the manager of the main PIA ticket office in Rawalpindi and she managed to find 2 seats on the next flight.

Finally, apologies for the title of this post. Gemma insisted and I'm an indulgent kind of guy.

We've now enabled comments on this blog. This is somewhat ambitious, given that we only have one reader that we're aware of (hi, Vanessa!)....

T.

Things BBC World is consistently getting wrong today

1. They are out on 'local time' in Pakistan by an hour. No wonder hapless travellers miss border opening timings when they are reporting the time difference incorrectly (and it's totally counter-intuitive anyway);

2. Security in Islamabad is not exactly 'beefed up'. We have seen a few traffic policemen lounging in the shade and a lone sniper hanging over the wall of the sister hotel to the one in Peshawar.

G

The best laid plans...

We rocked up at the airport this morning to catch our flight and were told that because we hadn't reconfirmed it in person in an office in Rawalpindi (a half hour driver from Islamabad) yesterday, our seats had been given to waitlisted passengers. Genius system. And because the Skardu flight hadn't gone for 5 days, the waitlist was LONG.

Despite our best efforts at the airport this morning, they weren't letting us on. So off we trotted to the PIA office to try and confirm for tomorrow. To cut a long story short, 5 hours later we have confirmed tickets. Now we just have to keep fingers crossed for the weather (which is why the last 5 days were cancelled).

A room of 400 Pakistanis waving tickets and trying to shout their way onto one flight tomorrow doesn't make for a very interesting picture, so here's one of Trev in front of Asia's largest mosque, a gift from King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, instead. Islamabad's sights don't get much more impressive.

Sad news this morning about the bomb in Peshawar. But for those who are worrying (Mums) we are nowhere near what we knew was a dangerous place, we're staying in a small guesthouse not a 5 star target and we're not going anywhere that has a higher threat rating from the FCO than Mumbai does. And we're being very careful :-)

And as long as the weather holds in the mountains, we'll be in the safe haven of Kashmir by lunchtime tomorrow.

Gemma

Living the dream

Beer and steak in Islamabad. Steakhouses a plenty... Beer available as long as it's ordered in a whisper.

Happy holidays!

Hello Pakistan!

(Picture of Trev exiting India)

A late arrival into Amritsar, but luckily we had booked a hotel right by this station so after only 10 minutes of fending off 'wanna rickshaw? Wanna hotel?' type requests we were in bed.

This morning we had our last breakfast in India (a disappointing, but classic, fried egg on toast) and headed to the border. The log book suggested there'd been 6 other foreigners in the last week... we are not alone!

The only other guy trying to cross at the same time as us was a Russian. He didn't seem to have read any kind of 'How to seem inconspicuous to border guards' instructions. He was still being questioned as we left the border, but his answers didn't seem to be making him particularly welcome...
- where are you from?
- Russia
- what is your profession?
- pilot
- what is your purpose in Pakistan?
- flying planes.
Right.

We had organised a car from a guesthouse in Islamabad to be waiting for us on the Pakstani side. We were 90 minutes late after messing up the time difference (who knew Pakistan would be ahead of India?) And then a power cut meaning the immigration computers weren't working. But we found the car easily and the drive was fine; on the Grand Trunk road for the most part. The standard of driving (accelerate towards the vehicle in front and beep manically until it gets out of the way) is confirming our suspician that the biggest risk to us being here is road safety and access to medical care, rather than anything to do with the Taliban.

6 hours later we've arrived into Islamabad. The guesthouse is nice, the people friendly and most women don't have their heads covered (phew!) The roads are in better nick than in India and there seems to be less rubbish around. So far, so good.

Gemma

...and they're off

It's been a crazy week and a bit since we got back from the UK. There have been lots of very late and drunken nights and very busy days as we've finished various work admin jobs, packed up and shipped all our stuff, said goodbye to friends and staff and Gemma has run around Delhi buying the few handicrafts we didn't already own.

Its quite a relief to finally be on the train to Amritsar after such an emotionally and physically tiring week, and we're even looking forward to a forced detox in Pakistan. We've been touched by the number of send-off events (and presents...) that people have organized and will miss everyone in Delhi. The prize for saddest farewell goes to our driver Prasad, who has been breaking into tears periodically all week. We've probably spent an order of magnitude more time with him than anyone other than each other over the last 3 years, so perhaps that's not too suprising.

We're staying in Amritsar tonight, crossing into Pakistan tomorrow morning and staying in Islamabad tomorrow night, then flying up to Skardu early on Wednesday. We'll then be making our way North into China for 10 days or so.

We've been monitoring the security situation closely and this route avoids Swat and anywhere else we probably wouldn't want to be at the moment. I guess we'll know for sure soon.

Trev.