Trekking, Sliding, Bathing and Fording
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009One of the main reasons we picked Central Asia as a destination in the first place was to go trekking in the mountains to enjoy the region’s beautiful scenery and work off some of the extra kilos gained from many Chinese banquets (OK, and a few times at KFC when we couldn’t stomach any more Chinese food). With that in mind, last Wednesday we set out from Karakol on a six-day, five-night journey in the Tian Shan mountains – the first time we had ever done a trek of more than one night where we took our own tent and cooked our own food. It was bound to be an adventure, if nothing else…
Day 1
We set off in the afternoon from Jeti-Oguz, famous locally for its striking deep red cliffs that are reminiscent of outback Australia or the US Midwest, but seemed so out of place here among verdant green valleys and gorges. From Jeti-Oguz, it was a 5km hike through a picturesque gorge, with pine tree-laden cliffs on either side and a white water river running through it, to the Valley of Flowers. We were a couple of months too late for the flowers, but it was a pretty meadow in any case and a good spot to camp for the night. It took us about 15 minutes to figure out how to set up our newly purchased tent, but we worked it out soon enough, and our Central Asian trekking tour was on. From some Kyrgyz nomads in a nearby yurt, we bought a litre of freshly made yogurt (in a Fanta bottle) for about EUR0.33 – so fresh that when we first asked if they had any, they told us to come back in an hour. We did, and the cow having been milked, the yogurt was made and still warm. Once it cooled down, it was lovely.
Day 2
This was the easiest of the full days because we were too far away from the 3800m Teleti Pass to consider trying to cross it in one day, and instead hiked lazily about four hours along the river past beautiful Kyrgyz horses and more lovely alpine scenery to another meadow, even prettier than the first. Here we saw our first snow-capped peaks of the trek, set up camp in the early afternoon and busted out our rented stove for the first time (successfully managing to produce two-minute noodles, for which we congratulated ourselves heartily).
Day 3
After an oatmeal breakfast, we set out along the river for about an hour before the ascent to the pass began. At the bottom, we met two Belgians who had tried to cross the pass the day before, but had missed the path and wound up climbing around lost for three hours before heading back down, concluding that they couldn’t find the path. It was not a good omen (especially since we had the same map), but we found the path easily enough. Still, it was a tough climb – about a 1300m ascent, the most physically challenging thing we’d done since the Annapurna Circuit last October – and all told it took us about 4.5 hours to reach the top. Near the pass, we met some Dutch trekkers coming the other way who gave us two invaluable things – some packaged trekking food from Europe (tastier than any of the food we had bought in Bishkek), and an interesting piece of advice that we initially dismissed as foolery but later adopted gleefully: that instead of descending from the other side of the pass in the usual manner, we should sit on our butts and slide down the snow instead.
We scrambled over mid-summer snow to the pass to discover – as usual – that the view was better back the way we came than on the other side. But it was a pretty decent achievement to reach the top, so we celebrated with a Snickers bar and then contemplated the route down. It didn’t take long before we determined that sliding on the snow was in fact the quickest, easiest and (somehow) least dangerous method, so slide we did for a few hundred metres until the snowline ended – brilliant fun, and better still, my Ђ5 pants from Nepal survived intact.
Day 4
If it’s pretty silly to voluntarily climb from a height of 2500m to 3800m, then descend back to 2500m again all in the same day, then it’s even sillier to go back up to 3800m again the next day. But the route was what it was, and so by mid-morning we found ourselves ascending once again.
It was tough going until lunchtime, when a hodge-podge meal of instant mashed potatoes mixed with rice and fresh tomatoes gave us fresh life and we climbed steadily in the afternoon until almost reaching a pass. At this point, we may have taken a wrong turn (it’s still unclear), and found ourselves on a pretty narrow – not to mention scary – precipice with nothing else between us and the many rocks and a raging river 20 metres below. But we negotiated it well enough, and soon crossed the pass triumphantly and were rewarded with a breathtaking view down to Ala Kol, a barren but beautiful lake at 3530m. Surrounded by mountains on all sides that are reflected in its shimmering green waters, this stunning place was the highlight of the trek. Even better, we arrived at about 4:30pm, set up camp on the lakeshore, and didn’t see another soul until we were packing up our tent the next morning – we had this gorgeous place completely to ourselves.
Day 5
Hard as it was to leave Ala Kol behind, the views of the lake got better as we rose above it to the eponymous pass at 3860m. This was the highest point of the trek, and one of the most magical, as the snow-capped Tian Shan mountain range – mostly hidden from us for four days – now dramatically revealed itself above Ala Kol.
A wall of snow guarded the pass, and after surveying our options for descent we again decided that sliding was best. But this time the gradient was much steeper – at least 45 degrees by my reckoning – and we went insanely fast. One of us (OK, me) was out of control for a while, with legs and arms flailing everywhere, but in the end we made it out of the snow in record time, with freezing and numb backsides but also a rush unlike any we’ve had in a long time.
After lunch, we missed a river crossing and wound up on a lesser trail on the wrong side of the river, which wasn’t too bad until it abruptly ended, giving us only two options: to backtrack and lose time, or to try to cross the rapids. We picked the latter, and ended up fording the fast-flowing river waist deep. It wasn’t exactly the best finish to the day’s walking, but soon enough we were in a private hot spring in Altyn Arashan, soothing our aching bodies. When the rain started falling after we left the hot springs, we decided against setting up camp and took a spare room for EUR3.30 in one of the village’s six houses instead.
Day 6
Rejuvenated by our therapeutic hot spring experience and by sleeping in an actual bed for the first time in five days, we headed off in the morning for the final few hours to Ak-Suu, from where we took a minibus back to Karakol. We arrived at lunchtime, tired but content, and after nearly a week of trekking food, ready for some good old-fashioned beef stroganoff…
Nick