Karakol

We're still in Kyrgyzstan. Probably for another week or so. We're currently staying in Karakol, the biggest town near to Lake Issyk-Kul (the second largest alpine lake in the world, lacustrine-fact fans). We spent a day on the beach. The sunbathing was good, the swimming less so. 'Issy-Kul' apparently translates as 'warm lake'. It isn't. We then walked up to some hot springs yesterday and spent the night there, before walking back today. We're planning to head to a resort on the North side of the lake tomorrow for some more beach time, if it stops drizzling.

The countryside here is the big draw for tourists, and it is suitably beautiful. I don't think comparisons with Switzerland particularly do it justice. Since the low parts of the country are around 2000m, the mountains don't look so high, but provide a snow-capped backdrop for the bright green corrugated hills that make up most of the landscape.

Kyrgyz towns are very low-key and pleasantly rustic. The streets are wide and tree-lined and as soon as you are off the main street, give way to quaint cottages with yards filled with livestock. Most streets have a couple of donkeys and goats wandering about. The tourist map of Kochkor includes the town's only four-storey building as a landmark. There are no three-storey buildings and only a couple of 2-storey buildings. The map itself was somewhat superfluous.

Towns do have a few Soviet-era concrete eye-sores and usually a lot of rusty metal. The economy withered after independence, as most of the Russian businessmen, technicians, etc. that ran things left. There are now almost no working factories in the whole country. There are quite a lot of factories around, but they are nearly all slowly disintegrating. Rusty caravans are also a common feature of both the urban and rural landscape. The government gave away all the soviet railway carriages to poor families (which I think included everyone at the time) and these are now scattered across the country on street corners, in car parks and in people's gardens.

Horses seem to be a mainstream and common transport option everywhere outside Bishkek. They're not a bad idea given that the average car is a 30 year old Lada in a poor state of repair. Our taxi back from Song-Kul to Kochkor only had one handle to work the windows, so whenever another car and associated dust cloud approached the handle would be frantically passed around to wind the windows up and the passed around again less urgently once we'd passed the dust, to wind them down again. The other problem with non-equine travel is the state of the roads. It seems that, in the 18 years since independence, establishing a road maintenace capability hasn't been a big priority for Kyrgyzstan. Even the major highways are somewhere between gravel tracks and heavily cratered concrete. The police pursuit vehicles are slightly more modern Lada '4x4s' that look like VW Golfs with slightly bigger tyres. The man we discussed how to get to the hot springs with (before deciding to walk) was keen to distinguish between these '4x4s' and 'jeeps' - only one of which could have actually made it up the track.

T.