The road to Osh

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May 16, 2012
Hotel: CBT Guesthouse; Osh, Kyrgyzstan; $15.95/pp
Today was going to be a long day on the road... the driver said that it was going to take at least 8 hrs driving to get to Osh. We set off after breakfast right at 9AM and started heading west through the valley towards the Ak-Bel pass. The road gradually climed up through glacial landscapes as the snow kept gettting closer and closer to the road. Evidence of previous glacial action was everywhere... erratic boulders and moraines. We stopped at the pass (10400'😉 for photos, then started the long drive down the valley. The scenery was raw alpine beauty but started to change as we kept driving down the valley. There were actually forests here, the largest number of trees we had seen since Almaty. All along the side of the road were vendors selling jars of honey. We also passed several groups of shepherds guiding their sheep up the valley to the grazing fields of the high steppe now that they were free of snow.. these flocks would block the whole road at times! At one point we came to a huge pile of snow, this was all that remained from a large avalanche that had occurred in February. The driver said that the road had been closed for two weeks, and this is the main north-south road through the country! Taxis had to drive to either side and passengers had to walk across the avalanche to continue their journeys to Bishkek or Osh.

Finally the mountains dropped away and the land flattened out as we neared the town of Toktogul and the Toktugul reservoir, having descended over 7000 feet since leaving the pass. The landscape here was much drier.. houses and walls were built of red adobe. The reservoir is huge and it took nearly an hour to detour around. The south side of the lake was nearly completely deserted.. few towns or farms here. The road continued on and on down the river valley, along the downstream lakes which were an amazing turquoise color. We finally came out of the mountains and into the Fergana Valley, the agricultural region of Uzbekistan. At one point the road was following the border with Uzbekistan, we could see guard towers and closed roads just off to our right. We stopped for a break finally, along the road were rows and rows of mulberry trees with fresh berries, delicious!

We weren't too far as the crow flies from Osh at this point, but we had to make a long detour and dogleg around Uzbekistan. The road used to continue straight here but is now closed and requires detouring out to Uzgen before turning southwest back towards Osh. Google maps still doesn't get the routing right along this road! Finally we get to Osh around 5:30 PM, 8.5 hrs after leaving the camp. It took awhile to find our guesthouse; we had the phone # but not an address and Osh is the 2nd largest city in Kyrgyzstan. Eventually the guesthouse sent someone out in a taxi and we drove back with them. We paid our happy driver and he left quick.. he was planning on driving back to Jalal-Abad that day and spending the night with a friend. The guesthouse was very nice, huge rooms for 750som/person. We planned on spending two nights here. The owner didn't speak any English but we could communicate with her a little in Russian.

Osh had been the center of destructive riots a few years previously, clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbek. There is still a lot of tension among some of the ethnic groups of Central Asia, the borders between countries were somewhat arbitrarily drawn, eg. Samarkand and Bukhara in Uzbekistan are primarily populated by Tajiks, while Osh in Kyrgyzstan had been primarily Uzbek. Hundreds of people were killed and over 2000 buildings were destroyed in the riots, and over 100000 Uzbeks fled across the nearby border to Uzbekistan. Since then things have calmed down, but we did notice a large police presence as we walked along the main road into the center of town. Still the town had a nice feel to it. We found a place to eat, the California restaurant, an American-run place serving pizzas and salads. It smelled good but the pizza is never quite the same as at home.

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