Kyrgyzstan; what a beauty.

A country that perhaps doesn’t feature very highly on the ‘must visit’ list, we’d strongly recommend anyone with a thirst for Central Asia to start here!!

One of the smallest and most accesible of the ‘stans’, Kyrgyzstan has felt very easy compared to the endless miles of Kazakhstan.

Without wishing to do a disservice to Kazakhstan, the country of beautiful steppes and bonkers architecture, here we have found MAPS and ACCESSIBLE transport meaning we don’t spent our days lost or in transit.

Bishkek (the capital) has wide, soviet-style streets lined with poplar trees turning yellow in the autumn. You can walk from east to west in under an hour. It’s got the biggest bazaar in Central Asia offering up anything you ever dreamed of (or in some cases, things you wish you’d NEVER seen). We’ve wallowed in proper coffee and soaked up the sunshine. It’s been bliss.

The mashrutka minibuses here offer bone-rattling rides like all others we’ve patronised, though the krgyz throw in rows of germy, runny-nosed children who paw with your hair and sneeze in your face. Nice.

After 6 hours of this treatment, we arrived at Issy Kul (“hot lake”) the pearl of Kyrgyzstan for a long weekend. At over 1600m, the lake is rimmed with snow-capped mountains and is the second largest alpine lake in the world. Cool eh? A brief swim confirmed the water was anything but HOT.

We stayed in a village called Tosor which sits at the waters edge. Described as ‘uncommercial’ in the book (glorious understatement) there was only us and some horses on the beach to lap up the view. We ate apples from the orchard and drank freshly churned yoghurt – delish!

We’re back in Bishkek now, preparing for our final few days in Kyrgyzstan which will mainly be spent making our way to the chinese border. In Kashgar, we’ll find out if the Karakoram highway to Pakistan is open for travel – all info so far suggests we’re good to go.

2 countries, 3 border crossings and the Himalayas separate us from India. If you look at the map its the width of a finger. We’re leaving behind our passable navigation of the cyrillic alphabet and pigeon rootsky.

Sad to say goodbye to the stans, we feel we owe them more than what we’ve written on this blog. We’ll miss gold toothy smiles, suspicious meat products (there’s a challenge china), russian tv (which so obviously takes the piss out of the americans at every opportunity) and most of all the relaxed and friendly people we’ve met. No problem to great in helping the british idiots who can’t find their way out of a paper bag (some days).

We’re also sad as this is perhaps our final goodbye to Quentin, our cheerful french friend who we have bumped into regularly since Gul. Hopefully we’ll meet again but tonight we’re off out to celebrate our last supper with some kyrgz beer and an Indian – of course.