We arrived in Bishkek after a pretty much non stop journey from Glasgow. We had stayed in a few favourite places for a week or two - Samos in Greece and Istanbul and Goreme in Turkey - but apart from that it had been nearly four months of continuous traveling.

 

The plan had always been to stop in Kyrgyzstan, ‘the most beautiful and friendly (and cheapest) of the Central Asian countries’, and Helen had been googling NGOs in the area for a while. She made contact with one called the Alpine Fund that ran mountain trips for ‘at risk youth’ (orphans and kids working in the markets) and when Arianna, the Alpine Fund’s one paid member of staff offered us an apartment to live in we thought of little else. The image of a clean bed and a kitchen stocked with our own food fixed in our heads and we travelled to Bishkek as fast as Central Asian public transport could carry us.

 

We arrived to find a city only slightly more attractive than the other former soviet capitals we’d seen already. Lots of trees helped soften the edges and on the South bound streets you could see the line of huge mountains that border the city. But on the whole it was a familiar soviet grid system of big, soulless streets and grey, post war buildings. I think its the way that the buildings and streets are so widely spaced and separated that kills off the hope of having a city centre with any sort of energy or atmosphere.

 

 

At the weekends we headed out of the city. There were several memorable trips to Lakes. The first to Lake Issyk-Kul, a huge bit of water taking up a big chunk of Eastern Kyrgyzstan. The soviet navy once tested their weapons on this sea away from seas. It’s warm in the summer and has big mountains all around it. We went there twice, it was nice. We also went to Lake Song-Kol. A smaller lake but much higher up at 3000m. Up there you get to stay in yurts with shepherd families who spend the summer in the high pastures around the lake. The best lake was Ala-Kol, a small mountain lake at 3400m. We had three great days walking up and down from there. Our most regularly visited bit of wilderness didn’t have any lakes though. The Ala-Archa national park 40 minutes from Bishkek was where we spent many a weekend either on our own or with a  group of kids from the city.

 

It’s difficult to sum up the whole 16 week stay. I suppose we simply went from being backpacking tourists to ex-pat NGO types. There were stories along the way - the giant eagle that tried to carry off one of the orphanage kids; the Kyrgyz police chief who offered the Swedish police chief a free prostitute in the pub after the international anti human-trafficking conference Helen was working at; the night the changing room of the Kyrgyzstan International Fashion Week was brought to a standstill by the smell of 10 orphanage kids all taking off their shoes at the same time... Perhaps just the outings we had in our last week might do to help give an impression of life in Bishkek.

 

On the Thursday before we left town Irina invited us to dinner. I had met Irina, a Bishkek geography teacher, at a mountain skills camp for kids. Her husband Viktor had shown us how to get down a cliff without many ropes and Irina had taught us what meals gave you the most amount of calories in your belly for the least amount of weight in your pack. She had also promised to show me her personal shell collection - ‘the largest collection of sea shells in Central Asia!’

 

When we got to their apartment Viktor answered the door and his bushy beard broke into a smile as Irina emerged from behind him making a deafening trumpet noise with a giant pink shell. Irina’s parents had been the first tourists into Castro’s Cuba. She had a picture of them with Fidel at a May Day celebration. They brought back a Cuban shell for 12-year-old Irina and she’s been collecting ever since. We spent hours looking through the boxes and cases of shells stacked up on display in her bedroom - an incredible shell made by an animal that sticks other shells together, an intricate shell that looked like a large penis made of cobwebs and a shell that was actually part of a whale’s inner ear.  After the shell fest we sat down to a feast. Plov, salad, cake and more cake. Viktor, who called everyone comrade, lead the toasts and when the cognac was finally finished we stumbled our way home wondering why it is so easy to say ‘colourful shells’ in Russian but difficult to translate the phrase ‘colourful people’.

 

The next night was disco dancing with our American chum, Scott, and a group of international students. On the way home at 5am we remarked that the Russian disco tunes had sounded pretty good. After a short silence in the taxi we decided that it was probably a good thing that we were setting off for the bright lights Beijing.

 

Saturday night was Jason’s Birthday at the ex-pat pub. Jason, the head of DFID for Central Asia, was the ex-pat football team captain and a regular at the late night World Cup rugby watching sessions. His birthday do was attended by the sporty half of the Bishkek NGO community. The UN folk, the diplomat types and Milutin - a Serbian guy working on a big HIV health project and a regular goal scorer - all grumbled about lack of progress with the Kyrgyz government. The billions of dollars Russia and China flashed at Kyrgyz leaders for roads and trade got things done. Those working on EU funded health and anti corruption projects were banging their heads against a brick wall.

 

Sunday we slept and on Monday we went to Adilet’s house. Adilet was one of the older kids who helped at the Alpine Fund. We had known that he and the other kids came from a poor village on the edge of town, the visit just added the cold, muddy details.

 

We took our soil caked shoes off the at the door. Inside, the dirt brick house was immaculate. It had two beds, one Adilet’s the other his Mum’s and on the floor was a small table covered with bread, sweets, fruit and cheese. His Mum served us the Kyrgyz national dish ‘besh barmak’ (meaning ‘five fingers’ - the way it should be eaten. It is noodles and horsemeat but this time we were lucky, she’d made it with beef). As she served the food Adilet’s Mum told us of how she and her husband had worked on a collective farm in the North of the country. When the Soviet Union collapsed the farm managers took the machinery and left the workers with no jobs and worthless land. The family moved to Bishkek in search of work. They lived near Dordoi - a huge bazaar (Central Asia’s biggest apparently) - and found occasional work unloading trucks and moving boxes. Adilet’s dad became ill and couldn’t work so it was up to 12 year old Adilet and his brother to make enough money for the family. School wasn’t really an option.

 

Adilet now gets some money for helping at the Alpine Fund and it looks like he’ll go to college next year. His mum recently found work preparing food in a cafe. We were shown old black and white photos of Adilet as a toddler with his Dad and the rest of the family posing next to a nice car and their old countryside home. Adilet’s Dad died two years ago and Adilet’s brother and sister now work abroad and send money home. Their house has no water or heating but they don’t see themselves as particularly poor by Kyrgyz standards, when the economy collapsed it was a long way to fall for everyone in the country.

 

So what do we think about Kyrgyzstan? We agree with the guidebook, it’s easily one of the most ‘beautiful and friendly’ countries we’ve been to. All that we might add is that in addition to the memories of perfect alpine valleys and wide gold teeth lined grins we were left with a slightly sad impression. A typical taxi driver rant would run “we don’t have anything in this country to build our economy on and without a better economy people will continue to choose between unemployment or jobs that barely pay enough to live off… People without proper pay usually end up joining in with all the corruption, it just gets worse from top to bottom… Better leadership might help but right now it’s worse than ever. We thought we changed the government with the revolution in 2005 but Bakiev is now has power hungry and corrupt as anyone we’ve had before… All the brightest kids leave the country. I don’t blame them…”

 

Like the taxi drivers most people smile when they’re talking about the Kyrgyz countryside but sigh when they think about the future of the country. We do too.

 

J