Changing plans in Bishkek
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009The weather has more or less returned to its summer state since my last post (last night’s thunderstorm notwithstanding), although we haven’t really been able to enjoy it; rather, all the change in the weather has meant for us is that we’ve been able to see snow-capped peaks south of Bishkek from outside all the embassies we’ve been visiting.
Having done all our visa duties, our success rate stands at 3-from-4, which wasn’t bad in the end, but included within it was a significant setback: the denial of a Tajikistan visa for Wendy owing to her having extra pages inserted in her passport by US authorities. (And yes, in case you’re wondering, the only purpose of having extra pages inserted into a passport that is full but not close to expiry is so that you can continue to obtain visas and have pages stamped. But, as the embassy woman said repeatedly: “We’re a country and we’re allowed to have rules and this is one of them.”)
This knocked us around a bit as we were very much looking forward to visiting the Pamir mountain range and the Wakhan Corridor (which is split between three countries and part of which we have visited before in Pakistan), but within a few hours we’d formulated a new plan to ditch Tajikistan in favour of previously overlooked Kazakhstan, which would still allow us to make it to Uzbekistan (pending two remaining visas) and catch our already-booked flight to Europe in late September.
Fortunately, the Kazakhstan and Uzbek visas were pretty easy to obtain, though three full-page stamps in the past week (including the Kyrgyz visa extension) means I’m now over halfway through my ‘frequent traveller’ 64-page passport less than 2.5 years after I got it in Ghana. The Australian government, for what it’s worth, does not do page inserts, so I have to buy a new passport every time I run out of pages. On the plus side, this means I can go to Tajikistan whenever I want…
Visas in hand, we can now put Plan B into motion. We’ve come up with a 3-week itinerary for Kazakhstan – which is enormous (the world’s ninth-largest country), but also largely desert – that includes cosmopolitan Almaty, some more trekking in the Tian Shan, some historic sights in the south, a couple of very long train rides, and, most intriguing of all, some underground mosques in the desert in the far west of the country.
Meanwhile, we’ve been pretty inactive in Bishkek, treating it as a sort of short rest period while waiting for the visas and Wendy’s UN interview in Geneva next week, after which we will set out for Kazakhstan and resume our travelling lives. Bishkek is a very Soviet/Russian style city with a far less Central Asian feel than Osh. We see a lot of Russians walking about, almost never see women wearing headscarves, let alone veils, we haven’t seen any Asian-style markets or other signs of typical Asian life in the centre of town – though Osh Bazaar, which we haven’t been to owing to numerous reports of pickpockets and rough treatment of foreigners, in the west of the city, might fit the bill – and I can only remember seeing one mosque in the entire city. The mosque is near our guesthouse so we can hear the Muslim call to prayer, which I love, a few times a day.
Since I don’t have much to report as far as normal travelling news, and owing to a comment a couple of posts down, I’ll try to give a bit more of an idea of the logistics of travelling around a country like Kyrgyzstan than I usually do.
Accommodation: Only in Osh and Bishkek have we stayed in guesthouses / budget hotels as we usually would in other countries, but even here they aren’t the same types of places you’d expect to find in, say, Southeast Asia. The Osh Guesthouse is an apartment in which the bedrooms have been converted into dorms, with another nearby apartment serving as a private room. The Sakura Guesthouse in Bishkek (for which we pay €10 for a new and clean, but spartan, double) is a new building that the owners have built in the backyard of their own property, and they continue to live, with their two young children, in the same house on the same block of land. In both cases the location is in a residential neighbourhood and in that way it feels a little bit strange compared with what we’re used to. In all other towns, we’ve stayed in homestays arranged by community tourism organisers such as CBT (Community Based Tourism), who have offices in the centre of the towns and can organise a homestay for you on the spot (usually about €12 for two per night). This has been a great way to meet some local people and see how they live.
Transport: Getting around in Kyrgyzstan is surprisingly easy, but can sometimes be expensive. There are basically no buses, so the choices are either to take a minibus (which are usually new and comfortable), or take a shared taxi as in the Middle East, which is sometimes the only option and can be expensive (we paid €25 each for the nine-hour ride from Arslanbob to Bishkek).
Food: The most common Central Asian meal is shashlik, fatty mutton kebabs. We’ve managed to avoid these for the most part; even in smaller towns you can usually find Russian restaurants serving meals for €1-2 such as beef stroganoff or plov (a rice-based dish that often contains the aforementioned fatty mutton). We often self-cater by buying freshly baked bread and making sandwiches with tomatoes, cheese (still a huge treat after spending so long in cheeseless East Asia) and salami. In Bishkek, there are loads more options like shwarma and pizza, and we’ve treated ourselves too many times to count now to the excellent burgers, spaghetti and chicken dishes at the classy, American-run B&G just down the road from Sakura (where meals are about €4 each).
With all our visa tasks now complete, we have a few days up our sleeve before Wendy’s flight next Wednesday. Tomorrow we’re embarking on an overnight trek in the Ala-Archa Canyon, and after that we still have a couple of tourist things to do in and around Bishkek that we haven’t gotten to yet. Oh, and we still need to go to the B&G a few more times while we can, starting tonight…
Nick