Category: The Stans 2024

But… our hotel last night was a big step up from the yurt camp. Comfortable room, and good dinner, but the highlight was their fabulous gardens. The couple who own the guesthouse do all the work (and all the building) themselves, I will post a few pictures but these are just a sample of the many garden areas onsite.

Today we spent time around Issyk-Kul Lake, the second highest mountain lake in the world after Titicaca. It’s big, about 75% surface area of Lake Ontario. Divers have discovered the remains of several mediaeval settlements on the lake bed; it’s not known how they were flooded, but seems to have been a natural event, not related to damming or human interventions.  Based on archeological cemetery excavations, it is thought the Black Death originated here, and was carried eastward to Europe along the Silk Road.

Stopped for a little hike through what our guide called “Fairytale Valley” (local name “Skazka Canyon”) so-named for its strange rock formations. I confess I did only the first few hundred metres, as fine scree covers the paths and I don’t have the best balance in the world, so I lifted a couple of pictures off Geoff’s iPhone after HIS hike to show you. So good to have one’s personal photographer with one at all times!

As you will gather from my many mentions, yurts are an important part of Kyrgyz culture, but fewer and fewer people now build them. We went to a workshop today in Barskoon, where a visionary named Mekenbek started an enterprise in the 90s to teach younger people the traditional yurt-building crafts. He has since travelled the world demonstrating the craft and has won several international awards and competitions for UNESCO-designated traditional crafts.  We attended a yurt-raising demo, and even with us slowing them down by “helping”, the yurt went up in less than half an hour. Impressive!

Safely arrived Saturday morning in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, and spent a bit of an unstructured strolling day before meeting our tour guide and group at 5:00 pm. We are 14 travellers — 3 Canadians, 4 Americans, and the others from Switzerland, India, Australia, and Germany.

Sunday started with a guided walking tour of Bishkek, a rather low-key city with a lot of blocky Soviet architecture, but also some pretty parks.

From Bishkek we set off for our next destination, a yurt camp on Issyk-Kul Lake. En route, we visited the Burana Tower, standing alone in a desolate place.  There used to be a city here until Genghis Khan’s army swept through around 1200 AD and destroyed everything except the minaret of the mosque.  And this lonely column, about half the height of the original minaret, is all that’s left of that now. Nearby is a field of balbals, gravestone images of dead soldiers. These are not in their original locations, but have been brought from other sites in Kyrgyzstan.

Next stop, a felt-making demo.  This traditional craft creates a material that’s  important for traditional yurts, which are covered in 7 layers of thick felted wool.  To create the big sheets for yurts, the community women work together, with socializing, singing, and dancing. The ladies prepared a small demo sample today, and started by vigorously threshing shorn wool to cut up the fibres. I didn’t try it but some fellow travellers did (causing some wool to fly about!) The cut wool was arranged on a reed mat, with contrasting wool laid on top to make a pattern.  They soaked it by sprinkling boiling water over it, rolled and wrapped it tightly, then rolled it along the floor while pressing it with their feet. Upon unrolling, the material was fully felted, and the pattern clearly visible.

Arrived at the yurt camp late afternoon; they divided us by gender to maximize space and my roomies and I spent a comfortable night. The stove is powered by dried sheep-dung cakes, which burn surprisingly well. Luckily we did not have to load the fuel ourselves, as a kind gentleman visited us to light it just in time to stave off the evening chill… 😃

So… we are officially on the first stage of the big trip. Arrived yesterday afternoon in Istanbul, to find our hotel had unexpectedly cancelled our booking — yikes! But they found us another one quickly and, once re-housed, we had time for a neighbourhood walk and an authentic Turkish dinner.

Today we strolled in the old part of the city, and took a bus tour that crossed the Bosphorus a time or two, taking us from Europe to Asia and back — they boast it is the only city tour that covers two continents, and it might well be so. Since our time was short for in-depth sightseeing after that, we decided to tour the Hagia Sophia, a very old mosque that started life as a church in 537 AD.

The old city is pretty, with lots of life in the streets, and street vendors selling chestnuts and corn-on-the-cob from grill carts. Quite a few stray cats as well, but they seem healthy and adequately fed, to my great relief.

As we made our way through this Islamic city, we heard periodic prayer calls. The sound is very haunting, and I learned something interesting today. The prayers are not always at the same specific times of the clock, they depend on the movement of the sun, so — if I understood correctly — they are related to sunrise, the highest point the sun reaches each day, the beginning of sunset, and the moment the sun vanishes. That means prayer-time shifts over the weeks by some minutes, and will be at different relative times in different time zones.

I was excited to see the Pera Palace Hotel today, didn’t get a picture because we passed it fairly quickly on a bus, but that’s where Agatha Christie wrote “Murder on the Orient Express”. She stayed here regularly when she and her husband Max Mallowan were travelling back-and-forth to Syria and Iraq for his archeological expeditions. How cool is that?

As usual, we are working to learn a few phrases in the local language, Turkish in this case, along the lines of hello-thank you-please-goodbye.  Geoff of course already knows how to ask for “a beer, please”, but he was asking the waiter JUST THEORETICALLY about how to ask for “another beer, please”, and the waiter misunderstood and quickly brought him another beer. Can you guess what happened to it? Well, I mean, it would’ve been rather impolite to send it back, right?

We are now in the airport, leaving late tonight for Kyrgyzstan, and meeting up with our tour group in Bishkek tomorrow if all goes well. There is a very surprising amenity in the Turkish Airlines Lounge. Look at this…