Cholpon-Ata... back to Bishkek... and on to Osh

Cholpon-Ata, on the North bank of Lake Issyk-Kul, is a holiday destination for Kazakhs and Russians, and the President even has a holiday home on the Lake. For us, it was supposed to be a couple of days in the sun on the beach, but the drizzle set in before we even left Karakol.

We got a lift with a middle-aged Kyrgyz woman and her dad. There was only room for one backpack in the boot as a dead goat was taking up most of the space. They fed us kymys (mildly alcoholic fermented mare’s milk), which was foul. It tasted OK, but had the consistency of sick with lumps of gelatin in. The woman kept herself amused the whole way with our Central Asian phrase book; who knew that reading out ‘I am menstruating’ in various languages could cause so much hilarity?

We couldn’t find the hotel we were aiming for, and ended up in a dirt cheap (and unsurprisingly not very nice) room. With the drizzle still coming down and the town already explored (think Southend-on-Sea before they redeveloped the shopping centre, or Morcambe pre-Blobbyland), it was clearly good form to hit the bottle and sit it out. I don’t think licensing laws exist here - every imaginable retail outlet sells booze, mainly vodka (either by the bottle or by the shot).

When the rain finally stopped we headed up the hill behind town to view the petroglyphs – a bunch of rocks with drawings of goats scratched on them, dating from the Bronze age. These may have been more impressive if I wasn’t cold and grumpy, with an evening hangover starting to set in.

Sunday dawned bright and sunny with temperatures in the low 30s and we took a picnic to the beach for breakfast. Droves of fat Russians and Kazakhs, wearing unbelievably tight swimsuits, were already staking out areas of the beach. The house music was pumping and I’m sure it wouldn’t have been long before the vodka came out again. We decided to press on to Bishkek, where we arrived late afternoon.

We took our finished paperbacks to the one place we’ve found in Kyrgyzstan with English Language books in order to swap them. It’s a café called Fat Boys and seems a prime expat hangout (not that there are many expats in Bishkek – the British presence is only an Honorary Consulate). There was an Ozzie expat at the table next to us whose conversation we could overhear… I think being a gold explorer might be a much better job than being a management consultant.


Before we left Delhi, we had said that we’d go for sushi in Bishkek, which is about as far from the sea as it’s possible to get. So last night we dutifully went and sampled it. The restaurant was reassuringly expensive and the sushi was great, although atmosphere somewhat lacking (we were the only people in) and the Kyrgyz waitresses all looked a bit silly in their Japanese dressing gowns.

(Yes, TJ, we know your friend got sick from sushi in Russia, but we didn’t think that should stop us…)


Then this morning we were up early and caught a shared taxi to Osh. It’s supposed to take 10 hours to cover 600km, for which we’re paying 10 quid a seat in a normal car; excellent value (especially considering the zebra print interior and the fact that Trev’s scored the front seat).

In Other News, we have now learnt to read Cyrillic, which is making ordering in restaurants a much less random experience!

Gemma