Olé olé Alay (Kyrgyzstan)

This final episode of my travels begins and ends in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. My friend Nikhil remarked, on receipt of an email from me, that Osh is “somewhere that sounds like it was once at war with Narnia.” In fact, it’s Kyrgyzstan’s second city after the capital, Bishkek. It’s older than Rome, they say, and was once a major trading post at the midpoint of the ancient Silk Road. But Kyrgyzstan is a country where nomadic pastoralism has been the going game for thousands of years so city-building hasn’t been high on their list of endeavours. Osh has a population of nearly half a million, and while it’s not a bad place to spend a few days, it’s pleasant rather than thrilling. And despite its claims to antiquity, it’s hard to detect anything in the built environment that pre-dates the Soviet Union.

 

I had a quiet first day in Osh, which mostly involved sitting in a café and taking care of various things that having a reliable WiFi connection for the first time in a week would allow me to take care of. My girlfriend Nis was arriving very early the following morning, so I wanted to get things like a Pamir Highway blog post and the monthly newsletter for my philosophy business squared away before she arrived.

 

A Day in Osh with Nis

 

It turns out there are daily direct flights between Osh and Istanbul—one upside to living in Istanbul, I’m learning, is that its airports are convenient international hubs. The catch is that the Istanbul–Osh flight is a red-eye with a 5:50am arrival time and the return flight leaves at 7:10am.

 

Being the exceptionally well-behaved boyfriend that I am, I set my alarm for 5am so that I could pick Nis up from the airport. Shortly before I went to sleep—and shortly before Nis boarded her flight in Istanbul—I felt some shaking in the hotel room. It turns out there was a 4.6-magnitude earthquake near Sary-Mogol, where we would be heading in a couple of days. This is the third earthquake in my life that’s been big enough for me to really notice it and the second in the past year. Clearly the gods portended something momentous from Nis’s arrival in Kyrgyzstan. Fortunately there was nothing more to it than a bit of shaking.

 

Nis’s flight was a little delayed—and happily I learned this before going to sleep so that I could set my alarm back by half an hour—but we were back at the hotel by about seven in the morning. Both of us were pretty wiped so we snoozed till late morning before setting out to see a bit of Osh.

 

Osh lies near the border with Uzbekistan and the city is ethnically mixed, with nearly equal numbers of Uzbeks and Kyrgyz. That makes Russian the lingua franca in the city, which works out well for me. If you look at a map of Central Asia, you’ll see that the borders of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan all get knotted together in strange ways in the area around the Ferghana Valley. This is a legacy of Soviet map-making that’s created all sorts of problems between and within these three countries since. Although Osh seems like a peaceful and harmonious place, ethnic violence in 1990, and again in 2010, left several hundred dead.

 

The streets of Osh are mostly laid out in a grid-like fashion with an uninspiring mix of Soviet and post-Soviet architecture. Nis was struck by how much the city reminded her of her hometown of Karaman, a city about a third the size of Osh in the conservative Anatolian heartland. A kind of bland scruffiness pervades the streets, with incomplete sidewalks and gestures toward prettification, small shops selling uninspiring cheap goods, mostly imported from China or elsewhere. Although you see young people in Western dress, most women over thirty wear a headscarf and many of the older men wear the traditional ak kalpak, a charming tall brimmed white hat (ak kalpak literally means “white hat,” and you might recall that my visit to the Aral Sea took me to Karakalpakstan—literally “land of the black hats.”) I didn’t get any ak kalpak shots on the streets of Osh but you’ll see one later in this blog post.

 

The highlight of this first day on the town was a wander through the central Alisher Navai Park, which features an old-school amusement park. Fairground rides and games, with various opportunities to shoot air guns at targets, bumper cars, and a creepy octopus overseeing what I think is supposed to be a fun children’s play space. We took a Ferris wheel ride that gave us a view over Osh (the poor man’s London Eye) and played a few rounds of table tennis.

 

The amusement park at Alisher Navai Park

Definitely not creepy

Nis Tuğba Çelik: ping pong pro

 

Kyrgyz-Ata day hike

 

The main item on the agenda for Nis’s visit was a trek in the Alay Mountains. Her method of preparing for mountain trekking in Kyrgyzstan was to read A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros and novels by the great Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov. I thought it might also be a good idea to practice some actual walking, and in particular to give Nis a head start in acclimating to the altitude (having recently completed the Pamir Highway, I was already acclimated). Osh itself is only about 900m above sea level, but it’s a two-hour drive from Kyrgyz-Ata Nature Park, where we could go on a day hike that would take us to about 3000m.

 

We arranged for a driver through the Visit Alay office, the organization through which we’d booked the Alay trek, and which had also arranged my Pamir Highway trip. Our driver Bayish was the first of many people we encountered that week who knew a little Turkish. Very few of the Kyrgyz people we met had ever been to Turkey but they all watched Turkish TV shows and movies. Turkish TV doesn’t make a huge impact in the Anglophone world, but Turkey is the third-largest exporter of scripted TV series after the United States and United Kingdom. They produce glossy dramas that are big hits in the Arab world and, evidently, Central Asia. Nis cringed a bit as people talked about their love for shows like Abdulhamid and Diriliş Ertuğrul, historical dramas with a conservative and nationalistic bent. They tend to be produced by the Turkish state TV channel, which is very much aligned with the authoritarian government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

 

Kyrgyz and Turkish belong to the same language family but not in such a way that they’re mutually intelligible. I can pick out a few individual words, and Nis can only manage a little more than that. On occasion, we played a game of collaborative deciphering, where I could read out signs written in Cyrillic and Nis could make informed guesses as to what they mean. The proximity between the languages at least makes it easier for Kyrgyz people to pick up Turkish by watching Turkish entertainments. I suppose this is the Central Asian equivalent to meeting people who speak decent English thanks to Hollywood and pop music. Interesting also to learn that Istanbul represents the metropole in this part of the world at least as much as Moscow does. A lot of people were both pleased and impressed to be meeting a Turkish woman from Istanbul.

 

Bayish drove us up out of the plains around Osh and into increasingly hilly country. He pulled up at a dirt road heading up the valley of a small river and told us this was the start point for our hike. A little way up the road, a path would turn off to the right and we should follow that, he said. Come back in four or five hours. And with that, he sent us off into the hills without a map or any phone reception.

 

Fortunately it turned out that the route was pretty straightforward. The path he mentioned was easy to find and there weren’t any real opportunities to get lost along the way. We ascended steadily but not steeply. Nis needed to stop periodically and felt a bit nauseated but was impressively strong on her first hike at altitude. This was the highest she’d ever been in her life.

 

It was a perfect day for a hike: warm but not hot with clear blue skies. The landscape was a mix of well-grazed grass and juniper trees, which provided welcome shade during breaks. We passed some yurt camps that seemed geared more toward hospitality than pastoralism, as well as a few grazing horses.

 

Yurt camps on the hike up through Kyrgyz-Ata Nature Park

Some of the grazing horses in Kyrgyz-Ata

The most obvious goal was a mountain peak that was in view for the second half of the hike but that would have required more time and better acclimated lungs so we just carried on as far as we could with the time that we had. Nis was happy to turn around at a grove of trees that we snacked under but I felt a bit unsatisfied turning around without getting to the top of anything. I asked if she’d wait while I clambered up a nearby hill.

 

The trouble with getting to the top of one summit is that you have a better view of the ones further along. I resisted their siren song and headed back down. I saw down below that Nis had started to follow me up but then lost sight of her. There was a brief period of worry when I called out to her only to have my voice got lost in the wind. But I found her soon enough, reclining in the shade of a tree. We made our way down and found Bayish sleeping in the backseat of the car.

 

The view from the top of one hill to some higher ones beyond

Nis reclining under a tree

Sary-Mogol

 

We were up early the next morning to head out to the Visit Alay office, from which our trek would depart. Eight of us were booked on this four-night trip. Besides the two of us were Søren and Jakob, a middle aged Danish couple, Will and May, a pair of Australians living in Germany, a young German medical student named Serafina, and an American nurse named Elizabeth. Our guide Batyrbek had a lean and serious face, and he was assisted by a junior guide, Sherip, a sweet-natured nineteen-year-old who had an easy and unselfconscious smile.

 

The plan for the first day was simply to drive out to the village of Sary-Mogol and spend the afternoon there, giving us all a chance to adjust a little to the altitude before we undertook any real hiking. Sary-Mogol is situated in a valley at about 3000m with the looming white peaks of the Kyrgyz Pamir to the south and the less imposing Alay Mountains to the north.

 

Sary-Mogol with the white-peaked Pamirs in the distance

The drive out to Sary-Mogol retraced the last day of driving from my Pamir Highway trip. That meant winding back up the precarious hairpin turns that Japar had so aggressively charged down a few days earlier. But driving uphill, and in a minibus rather than an SUV, and with a driver who didn’t think our lives were worth risking over a few spared minutes, things went considerably slower. This stretch of highway connects with the road to China and was clogged up with trucks. The trucks heading into Kyrgyzstan from China were heavily loaded while most of the trucks heading back toward China were empty.

 

Like Tajikistan, the Kyrgyz economy depends significantly on remittances from abroad. Russia is the main destination for Kyrgyz migrant workers but Nis’s flight from Istanbul was mostly filled with Kyrgyz labourers returning home from Turkey and parts of Europe. Kyrgyzstan’s principal export, aside from people, is gold, most of it from a massive mine in the country’s northeast. Until recently, I was interested to learn, it was owned by a Canadian mining company. The mine was nationalized in 2022 amidst concerns that so much of Kyrgyzstan’s economy—this single mine accounts for nearly a quarter of the country’s exports—was dependent on foreign interests. You can see how an economy based on remittances and gold mining might bring in more shipping containers from China than it sends out. Another significant contributor to Kyrgyz coffers is the importation and re-exportation of Chinese goods to countries farther to the west.

 

After checking into our guesthouse in Sary-Mogol and having a bit of lunch, the group wandered out into the village. The main highlight was the bazaar, which gave me some picture of where all the goods in those Chinese shipping containers end up. Lots of cheap clothes and plastic kitchenware as well as farm produce and other odds and ends. Like in Murghab in Tajikistan, many of the shops in the bazaar were converted shipping containers, but many goods were just laid out on tables or plastic tarps on the ground.

The Sary-Mogol bazaar: note the ak kalpak traditional hat on the man on the left of the photo

Two locals hanging out at the bazaar

We were back at the guesthouse by late afternoon and I enjoyed a couple hours of reading on the front stoop before dinner. It turned out this was a great place for watching action unfold and I only spent about half the time reading. The guesthouse is the home of the extended family that runs the place, as well as various livestock. I watched a toddler watch a donkey drink from a trough before an older boy mounted the donkey and rode off. A boy of about twelve walked by me leading a horse. This is my horse, he said proudly. Does the horse have a name, I asked. Burkut, he said with an emphasis that suggested I should be very impressed with this choice of name.

 

His younger brother, Adlet, also has a horse of his own. Adlet is ten and his horse is no taller than he is. He was brimming with excitement when Nis and I asked to see his horse. This may be the cutest photo I have on my phone.

 

Nis, Adlet, and Adlet's horse

Travellers’ Pass: Take two

 

Faithful readers of this blog will recall that my Pamir Highway trip ended with a half-day hike up toward Travellers’ Pass, which forms part of the approach to the 7134m Lenin Peak. We called off that hike before the final ascent to the pass because the weather was miserable and time was short.

 

No matter, since the first day of hiking on this Alay trip took the same route. The idea was to give us a bit more altitude exposure, with a return to Sary-Mogol in the evening, before setting out into the Alay Mountains to the north.

 

Unlike the hike five days earlier, we had clear blue skies on this occasion and no drive back to Osh in the afternoon to constrain our schedule. Photographically, the gloomier skies made for a more atmospheric journey but I was glad to get up to Travellers’ Pass and get some good views of Lenin Peak on this occasion.

 

Heading up toward Travellers' Pass with Lenin Peak in the distance

As on the previous attempt, grazing yaks and chirping marmots added to the fun. The final ascent was gruelling even for sturdy legs and acclimated lungs like my own. The pass itself afforded good views of the surrounding mountains, and the daunting approach serious mountaineers would need to make in continuing toward the peak. I also got to admire an impressive glacier that looked like a rumpled tongue extending from the mountain above it.

 

The team at Travellers' Pass. From left to right: Sherip, Will, Jakob, May, Søren, me, Nis, Serafina

The glacier viewed from Travellers' Pass

Elizabeth didn’t join us on the hike. She’d been up the previous night vomiting with some food poisoning she’d picked up in Osh. By the time we got back from the hike, she’d made arrangements to return to Osh, since she clearly wasn’t in a good enough condition to start a three-day circuit hike the following morning.

 

Late afternoon allowed for a bit more time for fun and games in Sary-Mogol. Literally, in this case: I was roped into a game of volleyball with one of the boys involving a small and somewhat deflated basketball.

 

Nis and I also had a conversation with Saliha, who was helping out with meals at the guesthouse. Saliha was slight and looked young although her weathered hands suggested she was a bit older. It turns out she’s twenty-one and turns twenty-two in the middle of September. She’s the sister of the woman who runs the place and works here during the summer in between her university studies in Osh. She speaks decent English and Turkish and studies literature. She told me her favourite English novel is Robinson Crusoe. Like pretty much every Kyrgyz person we spoke to, she asked whether Nis and I were married, and remarked that it would be impossible here to have a relationship that didn’t involve immediate plans for marriage. She also remarked, more to Nis than to me, that rich men don’t want to get tied down by marriage. Saliha wasn’t sure about marriage herself and Nis and I agreed that she seemed far brighter and more sensitive than any of the men we’d met so far.

 

Saliha dressed conservatively, with a hijab covering her hair and neck. Nis recognized something of herself in this young woman from a small, conservative town with an acute intelligence and a love of literature. The following morning, as we were preparing to set off, she discreetly slipped Saliha some money to help her with her studies.

 

Into the Alay

 

That morning we set off northward, in the opposite direction from the previous day’s hike. A bumpy drive took us up a valley into the Alay foothills. A curious feature of mountains is that they appear as a vertical wall from a distance and only reveal their three-dimensionality as you approach them. Sary-Mogol sits in a valley that seems to be walled in on both sides but, in approaching both the Pamirs to the south and the Alay mountains to the north, those walls turn out to be a steadily ascending series of slopes, peaks, and valleys, with room for hikers to ascend steadily rather than vertically.

 

We’d set out early and we got out of our vehicle and started hiking just as the sun started to illuminate the mountains around the valley. We followed a steady ascent that sometimes took us several hundred metres above the river valley only to have the river catch up with our ascent by way of a crashing waterfall.

 

View back over the valley we'd started from

Despite their majesty, the mountains are in a constant state of decomposition. I was reminded of this as we hiked across musical shale that tinkled underfoot. The boulders in valleys and the fields of scree on mountain slopes bear witness to the fact that these mountains are slowly falling apart. Rock moves in only one direction, unlike water, which gets carried back above the mountains once it’s flowed down them, carrying out a relentless campaign of erosion. That said, geological forces can also push mountains in the opposite direction. Everest has grown about ten centimetres since I was born.

 

Joining the seven hikers and two guides on the ascent was a horse laden with various supplies—food, water, as well as Søren’s and Jakob’s bags (they’d paid an added fee to have the luxury of hiking only with day packs)—and ridden by a ruddy-faced boy who can’t have been older than fifteen. We saw several other horses and their boys accompanying other trekkers along the way. I got my first view of what was in those saddle bags when we stopped for lunch in a mountain meadow. Batyrbek and Sherip unfolded a picnic tarp and dished cold noodles into plastic bowls as well as offering up bread and Nutella and various snacks.

 

The lunch break was followed by a bit of R&R. A full stomach coupled with an early start led me to snooze off a little but I kept waking up to take a few deeper breaths. We were at about 4000m now and my natural rhythm of breathing when snoozing wasn’t deep enough to give my body the oxygen it needed.

 

After lunch we began the ascent to Sary-Mogol Pass, the highest point on this trek at 4306m. The final ascent involved a slow struggle up a narrow slope of loose scree that made each step more laborious. The pass itself felt like it could be at the entrance to Mordor, with a narrow resting point amidst jagged black rock.

 

At Sary-Mogol Pass

It seemed like the worst was behind us but then we saw the descent on the other side of the pass. The way down was a super steep slope of loose scree that required hands as well as feet, except there were precious few bits of firm rock to get a hold on. I mostly kept calm but I could feel my fear of heights kicking in. Søren was less fortunate and went into full panic, needing lots of coaxing and assistance from Batyrbek as he gingerly slid down on his bum. No one had an easy time of it. How the horses made it down that slope is beyond me.

 

The precipitous descent from Sary-Mogol Pass

It was early evening by the time we arrived at our end point for the day, a yurt camp overlooking a descent into a river valley. We were served meals on low tables and stretched ourselves out on piled thin mattresses. After the day’s hike I was more keenly aware than usual that all of this—the tables, the mattresses, the yurts themselves—had made it to this spot on horseback.

 

A view of the yurt camp where we spent the night

Dinnertime included our group as well as a few other trekkers who’d arrived at the same stopping point. Conversations among travellers take on a familiar pattern, which can be engaging or tiresome depending on the conversation partners. The one thing we all have in common is that we like to travel so there’s a lot of exchanging stories about places we’ve been and learning about places we might like to go.

 

In this regard, as well as the linguistic one, Nis felt herself closer to the guides and yurt camp workers. Before this summer, her only trip outside of Turkey had been to Greece and I think she felt alienated by the easy privilege with which everyone else gossiped about the far-flung places they’d been. One alleged virtue of travel is to meet and engage with local people. But Nis was the only one chatting with the Kyrgyz people in the yurt, and doing so from a genuine feeling that their conversation was more relatable than that of the other tourists.

 

The top of a yurt is called a tunduk. It’s a wooden circle where all the supporting poles converge with two trios of crossing poles to maintain its structure. The tunduk can be left uncovered to allow in light and air—and serve as a chimney in traditional yurts that would have had a central fireplace—and can be covered for protection from the elements. Yurts hold a central place in Kyrgyz national identity and, looking up at the tunduk, I realized it also figures as the centrepiece of the Kyrgyz flag.

 

The tunduk at the top of our yurt

The national flag of Kyrgyzstan

The trek ends early

 

I find I need a couple nights of sleeping in a tent before I get used to the spartan conditions and can sleep through the night. The yurt and its mattresses were more comfortable than the thin air mattress I sleep on while camping but I didn’t have a restful sleep and I wasn’t alone in this. Nis had slept poorly and felt addled as the guides hurried us on our way that morning.

 

As we descended into the valley below the yurt camp, the austere mountain meadows got greener. We walked among juniper bushes with dark purple berries. I kept looking back up the valley to admire the idyllic setting.

 

View up the valley we were descending

More pretty valley views

The lack of sleep and the exertion of the previous day caught up with Nis and quite suddenly, on a fairly even patch of the trail, she stumbled and turned her ankle. We paused to check the ankle and let her take a few ginger steps to confirm that nothing was sprained or broken. As he had at a couple points on the previous day, sweet-faced Sherip insisted on taking Nis’s bag for her and carried it on his chest with a smile. I should own up to my own responsibility for Nis’s hardship here, as it was my bag she was carrying. I’d been travelling with a new backpack I’d bought specifically for this trip and let Nis borrow an older backpack I’d left in Istanbul, which wasn’t a model of ergonomics. Part of the trouble, I think, is that this clunky backpack threw off her balance.

 

Nis reclaimed her bag from Sherip and then, on a very flat and broad stretch of path, stumbled again. It was her other ankle this time and she was in a bit more pain. We weren’t far now from the village of Ming Teke where we were supposed to have lunch. Sherip cheerfully carried Nis’s bag the rest of the way as she walked gingerly toward the village.

 

The agenda for the afternoon involved an 800m ascent toward a second yurt camp. Nis’s condition wasn’t serious—there was a bit of swelling in her ankle and she was in pain but she could put weight on her foot without wincing—but we agreed that it was better to end the trek here. We were at a guesthouse and a dirt road leading out of the mountains: better to stop here than take the risk of a steep ascent from which there’d be no easy exit. It meant missing the last twenty-four hours of the trek—the afternoon ascent to the yurt camp and then a morning of hiking the following day before reaching a road and a ride back to Osh—but it was clearly the right call to make.

 

There was no ice in the village but the lady of the house, Gulnara, applied a traditional remedy of smearing egg yolk on the afflicted area. Her mother had been a doctor and her husband, Kaldar, lauded her healing skills as well.

 

Gulnara applies egg yolk to Nis's ankle

Getting a car back to Osh from Ming Teke seemed to be no problem at all: Gulnara and Kaldar could arrange one for us within half an hour. But a little reflection prompted us to postpone the ride. For one thing, there was no guarantee that our hotel would have a free room to put us up that evening—we’d only booked from the following evening. But more important, the village was quiet and the setting was beautiful and did we really need an extra day in Osh? We asked Gulnara and Kaldar whether we could stay the night in Ming Teke and get a ride the following morning and they agreed.

 

This arrangement made for a much more pleasant way of winding down from the trek. Gulnara and Kaldar presided over a multi-generational home—they had recently become grandparents and had at least one son and daughter-in-law working at the place—and business seemed to be good. For now, their home serves primarily as a lunch stop for Alay trekkers, with shower and cell phone access, but construction is underway on a two-story guesthouse that could put up overnight guests starting next summer. For the time being there was just one guest room with a pair of beds where Nis and I could sleep chastely side by side.

 

The setting was splendid. A stand of poplar trees made a shady spot to recline and spend the afternoon reading—and they brought out mattresses and pillows for us to recline on. The village was in a valley flanked by mountains and, at about 2400m above sea level, it was neither too warm nor too cold.

 

Reclining under poplar trees

Gulnara and Kaldar were gracious hosts. Gulnara checked in on us periodically and took time to chat with us even though running the guesthouse was busy work, with the daily procession of hungry trekkers to feed. She was fifty-five and had moved to the village thirty years ago when she married Kaldar. She remarked that life had been better in the USSR, with more opportunities and less poverty.

 

Gulnara wasn’t quite sure what to feed a pair of vegetarians and we ended up having potato soup for both dinner and breakfast. Their garden patch yields fifteen tonnes of potatoes a year and they make a tidy business selling organic potatoes at the market in Osh. They also keep livestock and invited us to check out their cattle pen. The perfect place for a group photo, really.

 

Posing in the cow pen: Gulnara, Nis, me, and Kaldar wearing an ak kalpak

Conversation unfolded in a funny mix of languages. Gulnara understood some Russian and Turkish while Kaldar spoke good Russian and no Turkish. So he would say something to me in Russian, I would translate to English for Nis, and Nis would then sometimes speak in Turkish with Gulnara. Kaldar’s father was named Davut—making him Kaldar Davutovich—and he was pleased that I was Davut as well. I got used to people knowing—or being—a David in Georgia. I hadn’t expected similar name recognition in Kyrgyzstan.

 

Back to Osh

 

Despite the serene setting, that afternoon was tinged with sadness at knowing that my trip was at an end. This trek was the last significant undertaking before I returned to Istanbul and it was over a day earlier than I’d anticipated.

 

The next morning, a driver arrived and we headed toward Osh. Most of the four-hour drive was along dirt roads that connected Ming Teke to other little villages along a steep river valley. We periodically had to steer between herds of cattle driven by teenage boys. Summer is ending and herders are coming down from the high mountain pastures toward the lowland towns and cities.

 

Driving through herds of cattle and looking up at the hills around me, I felt that Kyrgyzstan is a country I’d like to return to. I’m sure it has more than its share of problems beneath the surface but that surface is very attractive. There’s a simple kindness to so many of the people that I met here and even in a city like Osh one gets the feeling that traditional ways of life carry on as they have for centuries, enduring through the upheavals of Soviet collectivization and enforced ideology and the post-Soviet plunge into the global economy. Tourism is becoming a bigger part of the Kyrgyz economy but I think I arrived at just the right time, when the tourism sector is established enough to make it fairly easy to visit but before the place starts selling its soul to satisfy a tourist mob.

 

The car dropped us at our hotel, we lugged our things up to our room, and Nis started patting her pockets and digging through her bags in an increasing panic that she couldn’t find her phone. I remembered seeing her with it that morning so it must be either back at the village guesthouse or in the car. I called the Visit Alay office and asked them to call both the driver and the guesthouse. Neither of them could find the phone. We dug through all our belongings thoroughly while thinking through what Nis would have lost if the phone was lost—not just an expensive piece of hardware but phone numbers, photos and memories, access to online banking, etc.

 

After a fraught hour, we made our way to the Visit Alay office, where we had to return the sleeping bags we’d rented anyway. Timur at the office proposed that he could call the driver to come back so that we could search the car. The proposal seemed unpromising to me but Nis was understandably desperate and back our driver came. With her arm embedded in the rear seat almost up to her elbow, Nis’s hand hit on the phone, which had somehow fallen out of her pocket and got wedged deep in the upholstery.

 

All a bit of a roller coaster of emotion. Nis said I reacted with greater joy than she herself did when she found the phone. It definitely made the following day less tinged with anxiety. Which is just as well because it was also Nis’s birthday.

 

A birthday in Osh

 

I’d originally planned to return to Istanbul by the end of August so that I could be there to celebrate Nis’s birthday on the 2nd. But when she found time in her schedule to join me in Kyrgyzstan, I proposed making her birthday the final day of the trip.

 

Osh isn’t exactly a party town but we had a fun day structured around the goal of a spa. Was there some nice pampering we could do in Osh? It turns out there’s a swanky hotel that has a full spa, with multiple saunas (Russian! Finnish! Turkish!) and both indoor and outdoor pools. The catch is that neither of us had a swimsuit. So after a lazy morning, we set off in search of swimwear.

 

It turns out that a landlocked country more than a thousand miles from the nearest sea is not a swimwear mecca. I traced a trail to various sporting goods shops in Osh where I could have outfitted myself handsomely for soccer or wrestling but not for swimming. But the walk itself was fascinating. We got an unplanned tour of some of Osh’s Soviet era murals but without a sighting of Lenin—in a controversial move that ruffled feathers in the Kremlin, Osh removed its 23m tall statue of Lenin earlier this spring, which had been the largest in Central Asia. And we had a wander through the ruins of Osh’s old bazaar.

 

Soviet-era mural on a wall in Osh

Like the Lenin statue, the Osh bazaar has been dismantled recently enough that it still shows up on Google maps—as does the recently demolished bridge that I led us into the bazaar in search of. What you find instead is a massive demolition site with all sorts of fascinating tidbits. The frames of once-proud buildings surrounded by rubble, stacked piles of rusting scrap metal, and piles of garbage, including a charnel house of dismembered mannequins. A sign at the entrance to the bazaar still cheerfully locates the different shops and bears a sponsorship logo from USAID. Apparently the bazaar has simply been moved to a new location while this site is being converted into a park but the USAID logo over a demolition site felt emblematic nonetheless.

 

Cheerful map of the old bazaar, with USAID logo in the top left

What remains of the old bazaar

Eventually I bought some athletic shorts and Nis found a pink bikini at a lingerie store. We ate a late lunch at an outdoor restaurant. A group of three boys walked by in school uniforms. “Hello!” one shouted and waved at us. “Hello!” I waved back. And then, mustering the courage for what was clearly a dare, he called back, “Hello motherfucker bitch!” and the three of them ran off laughing wildly. I’m glad they’re learning English.

 

The spa gave us some taste of how the other half lives. Sauna and swim and sauna and swim and then recline poolside with the piña coladas we bought from the poolside bar while Kyrgyz and Russian gangsta rap assures us that we’re badasses and we’ve made it. All told a bit of a random day but Nis rated it among her best birthdays.

 

Chilling by the pool

Back to Istanbul

 

The alarm went off at 4:30 the next morning. We got to the airport nearly two hours before our 7:10 flight, which I thought was probably more than enough for a small airport like Osh’s. I hadn’t reckoned with the level of chaos at the airport. Signage vague, verbal announcements nonexistent, lines very long and with a live-and-let-die approach to queueing. We managed to get on to the plane okay despite the fact that there was no sign denoting our departure gate and no announcement when the gate opened for boarding.

 

And five hours later we were in Istanbul. I got my first reminder I was back when I exited the plane through the passenger boarding bridge, which featured a row of ads for plastic surgery clinics. Our bus took an hour crawling through Istanbul traffic and we arrived in Taksim close to noon. We’d been awake for more than ten hours at this point, with only a couple disappointing pastries at the Osh airport to nourish us, so we treated ourselves to a lavish late breakfast at one of my favourite local breakfast spots.

 

After a month and a half in Central Asia, I was struck by how louche Istanbul is. Half the city smokes, the women wear skimpy clothing, and people walk around with their pet dogs. Someone needs to explain to these people how Islam works. I guess Erdoğan’s been working on that.

 

And also the sea! I got my first glimpse of the sea from the plane, another one crossing the Bosphorus into Europe, and another view from my apartment. This morning I went for a run along the waterfront and breathed in salty and fishy smells. The answer in Vancouver to the question of whether you prefer mountains or sea is “why choose?” But, as much as I love mountains, I’m definitely a coastal creature. Istanbul is too densely urbanized to feel properly “seaside,” but after travels that took me nearly as far from the sea as one can get on this planet, I don’t even mind the humidity.

My morning run back in Istanbul