Kyrgyz cowboys

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May 15, 2012
Hotel: Tourist camp; Suusamyr Valley, Kyrgyzstan; $21.27/pp
We had a good breakfast at the guesthouse this morning; fresh homemade preserves, bread, tea, omlette, dried fruit, yogurt and pastry filled with dulce de leche.. yum. After breakfast we ran into a snafu. I had been corresponding with the owner of the guesthouse via email, and had arranged transportation to Osh with a stop overnight at a yurt along the way. However she wasn't there when we arrived, her daughter was having a baby. So that left us to communicate with her son and husband, who didn't speak any English. I had agreed to pay a certain price for the transportation.. it was expensive and quite a bit more than a shared taxi would have cost, but we figured the driver would have to return to Bishkek without any passengers.. nothing wrong with that. Then that morning just as we were all ready to leave, the son said no.. it's going to be twice that original cost! Yikes. That left us a bit in a bind since we wanted to stop overnight, stop along the way for photos, etc. We weren't sure if we'd be able to do the same in a shared taxi. After talking with my friends, we did a counteroffer, $400, split 4-ways for the 750 kms one-way trip!

We finally set off about 10:30. We stopped to fill up with gas first, filling up a couple of jerrycans. The road headed out west of Bishkek for an hour paralleling the mountain range to the south before we turned south to the road through the pass. At one checkpoint the driver said that we were his friends if anyone asked, since he didn't have an actual taxi license. The road started going up a canyon that kept getting narrower and narrower.. then we started going up, climbing through several switchbacks as we gained altitude. We stopped at several points along the way for photos, great views out over the snowy craggy peaks, some were 12000'. We finally reached the 2.5km tunnel through the final pass at 10000'. The tunnel was dark, dusty and dripping water from above. We come out of the tunnel and are greeted with the gorgeous view of the Suusamyr valley 2000' below us.. large treeless high steppe nestled among the mountains. The far range of snowcapped mountains was on the far side of the valley. The valley was dotted here and there with yurts and old Soviet-style mobile home/trailers.

The second miscommunication then happened... the driver apparently didn't know where we were staying!! He had wanted to drive us through to the next major town of Toktogul. We said we were looking for yurt stay/horse rides in the valley here. After consulting some locals, we found a tourist camp a few kms down a dirt road off the main highway. Turns out there weren't any 'real' yurts there... just fake tourist ones, my friends weren't impressed. I think it was still too early in the year to stay in a yurt with a local family, most of those do not start until June. The tourist camp also had what looked like shipping containers converted into cabins, and indeed that is what they were. The driver said the place was expensive, at 1000 KGZ ($21/pp) it wasn't too bad.. We decided to stay there and ride horses for a few hrs.

It took awhile to get the horses ready.. the camp obviously wasn't expecting tourists and looked brand new, indeed they were still setting up the cabins with TVs, heaters, etc! Meanwhile we had a late lunch of fried egg and bologna... there wasn't much food on offer either apparently. We had to pay for the driver's accommodation and food as well. The camp had a corral for horses and several of the cowboys were trying unsuccessfully to get the herd to go into the corral. The horses seemed very skittish and kept running off, finally they ran way off into the distance. The setting was incredibly gorgeous, green grass, snowcapped mountains in the distance and Big Sky overhead.

The cowboys were mainly riding bareback but were able to find enough saddles for us to ride. One of the horses was skittish and one of the wranglers had to walk along beside it while Scott rode. We set off for the hills nearby. My horse was a bit pokey, we get to the base of the hill and my horse stood fast. I'm a big guy and the horse was like nuh-uh not going up that hill! Making noises, kicking its sides and using the reins to slap all had no effect. My friends had long since disappeared up a rise on the hill and I was about to get off and walk up the hill when the wrangler appears and led my horse up the hill! He kept having to lead Scott's & my horse for most of the rest of the way.. wading through boggy areas and all. Still it was a great experience. After a few hrs riding we head back down the hill and back to the camp. It seemed like we had been very high up the hillside, but looking back we had barely gone 1/4 up the mountain! We toasted the sunset and successfully completing our ride with a swig of brandy, it was very cold now once the sun had set. Dinner was pretty good, rice and beef stroganoff.

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