13/10/2019 0 Comments Kyrgyz yurt lifeDuring my horse-riding trip, I had the pleasure of experiencing a bit of traditional yurt life, up in the high country 'jailoos' (summer pastures).
Kyrgyz shephards and their families spend around three months a year living in their yurts and taking care of theirs and others animals. Life is harsh up here, often many hours drive from the closest towns and over very rough mountain passes. One of the yurts I stayed in was at 3500m. Here, even in the summer, you can expect any kind of weather. Here are some things I learnt about life in yurts, and more generally about Kyrgyzstan: - Soviet era nostalgia runs through the veins of the Kyrgyz, e.g. 'In Soviet times this road was well-maintained, now only horses can pass'. - Kyrgyz don't seem to drink water, unless it's hot and in the form of tea. And this, they drink arguably more than the British. They also have wonderful fresh cream and jam, also strangely British. - You can turn up in any yurt even as a stranger and they will put out a spread of tea and food. - Men like to give unbelievably long monologues. Women's interventions are limited to short snippets. - The gender divide is a gaping canyon. The women of the yurt jump up constantly to serve the men. - Week old bread is given a new lease of life by submerging in tea. - There are no fridges so everything is fermented, from jam to milk to cheese. - Kyrgyz sounds surprisingly like Finnish. - Fear of wolves is very real. Instead of scarecrows to chase off birds, they hang old cd's and plastic bags to keep the wolves at bay.
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13/10/2019 0 Comments A week on a Kyrgyz horseWhile Jasper was finishing up some work, I went on ahead to Kyrgyzstan. Since many years a dream of mine, I traded in my bike and took to the Kyrgyz slopes on horseback. With my guide, we set off into the high Tian Shan mountains, overlooking the Issyk-Kol lake and only a mountain pass or two away from the Chinese border. This epic trip took us through snow, over two passes of 4000m, through valleys filled with roaming horses and to the hottest hot spring I have ever encountered. At night we camped or stayed with shephards in their yurts, with the pitter patter and munching of animals surrounding us.
My horse was great - a young stallion called Lizer being ridden for the first year ever. As my guide said, 'we only ride stallions, females are only good for babies and milking'. Patriarchy is alive and well in the Kyrgyz animal world. I discovered that Kyrgyz horses only have two speeds: walk or gallop. Lizer would've been happy to gallop the whole way. I also learnt that horses aren't as smart as I'd always thought. Lizer would've ambled off a cliff if I didn't intervene at times. While not guiding, my guide played the national Kyrgyz sport 'kokboru' which involves charging at each other on horseback and trying to launch a headless goat corpse into a goal. He showed me some moves, smashing his horse into mine, luckily with no goat corpse involved. Another funny tradition to observe was the Kyrgyz way of tying up horses. They rope their front legs together so they can't roam too far. As a result, the horses have a developed a hilarious if somewhat sad method of hopping to get to new patches of grass. Seeing yurt life (see next blog), living in the shadows of great mountain ranges and being surrounded by eagles, marmots and yaks along the way made this trip really unforgettable. 13/10/2019 0 Comments Tunnel of deathIn August we took a three week summer break away from our bikes. Acacia went hiking and horse riding in Kyrgystan, while Jasper travelled ahead on our itinerary to finish his articles on China's New Silk Road. After that we went back to our 'normal' lives of biking.
Our first ride took us from Samarkand to Dushanbe. Along the way we had to pass the "tunnel of death" as it is known to cyclists, because it is 5km long and there is no ventilation or lighting. So the chances are high that you get run over by one of the many trucks or you succumb to asphyxiation. We planned to do what most cyclists do and hitchhike through the tunnel, but we ended up tagging along with three French guys who told us that the old mountain pass was still open. We doubted, but nothing works better then a little peer pressure, so we set off on our first adventure in the mountains of Tajikistan. It took us a day and a half to reach the pass at 3300m - then our highest point. It was hard work climbing on a road made out of gravel and sometime just big rocks, but we were rewarded with stunning views, great camping spots, and a long fun descent straight into Dushanbe. And an other advantage: we felt more ready for the next challenge, the Pamir mountains. 10/9/2019 0 Comments Real men ride donkeysWe came to Central Asia with a picture in our heads of ferocious warriors on horses marauding across the open steppes. After all, this is where hordes of people moved across the steppes in waves of mass migration that deeply affected history all the way to Europe. These are the lands from where conquerors like Genghis Khan and Tamerlane built some of the biggest empires in history, a fact that local people are still very proud of today.
It took us only a couple of days to realise that we had to adjust our view, just slightly. You almost never see horses, while there are donkeys everywhere. They use them for everything from taking children to school to bringing crops to the market to carrying wooden beams for construction. At first sight it might look less cool, but in Central Asia today real men don't ride horses but donkeys. 10/9/2019 0 Comments Playing PopeWhen we are biking we always wave hello to other cyclists - locals and travellers alike. We also wave to all the people who say hi to us. We wave back to all the children, who often come running to the side of the road very enthusiastically. We wave at motorbikers on long overland trips like us. We wave at trucks honking their horns even if it's right in our ears (the noise regulations are pretty much non-existent here so the honking is pretty brutal). We wave at the police putting their sirens on just to welcome us. And most importantly, we wave at angry and disgruntled looking men, utterly confused by what we are doing, just for the fun of it. So basically half of the day on our bikes we spend waving at everybody. We realise that when we are back home we really are going to have to stop this ridiculous pope like behaviour.
As we mentioned before when we were passing through the deserts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan it was hot. Really hot. As in so hot that we didn't really want to put ourselves through the displeasure and potential bodily harm of exposure to 40°+ heat all day. Nonetheless, we couldn't do this trip without at least trying it, so we did a few days here and there. This was how an average 'cycling through the desert in extreme heat' day went:
5h: wake-up with/ before the sun. Pack up our sleeping bags (we didn't bother with tents in this heat) and roll onto the bikes. Load up the water for the day - we often got through 8 litres each! 7h: breakfast time, picnicking along the side of the road. 11h: second breakfast time, usually in roadside cafe with a coffee, finally. 12h: find a shady, cool place to hide for the hottest part of the day. This ranged from restaurants with air-co, to under bridges and at our most desperate under small trees with constantly shifting shade. Finding a place to shelter was the most important logistical point of every day, and required a bit of forward planning not to get stuck in the desert somewhere. 16:30/17h: finally the heat would start to fade a little bit so we could venture out again. Second part of the day begins. 20h: start the search for somewhere to sleep for the night. Luckily we were always invited by people to roll out our sleeping bags in their gardens or on their porches. 22h: sleep. 10/9/2019 0 Comments Training for the PamirWe've met people who cycled all the way from Kuryk on the coast of the Caspian Sea to Samarkand, almost 2.000 km mostly through the desert. The stories they tell are horrible. The temperatures were up to 50°C. There were stretches of more than 150km where there's no shade, no water, no restaurants or cafes, no gas stations,... no nothing. People who did it told stories of how they got delirious and really feared that they would not make it.
We admire those guys, but we happily said no to that. Instead we did what most cyclists do and took the train for the two longest stretches from Aktau to Nukus and from Khiva to Bukhara. When we saw the landscape passing by we could only be happy with what we called our "training" for the Pamir mountains 10/9/2019 0 Comments Cotton fieldsWe were not very keen on visiting the cotton fields. After all they are the culprits of the dissemination of the Aral Sea. But it only took us a couple hours to change our minds.
First of all the vegetation on the irrigated lands is a welcome change from the dessert. It's often a very sharp contrast. There is nothing except sand and some scrubs, until an irrigation channel starts and almost instantly it brings an abundance of life. Uzbekistan is probably the best place to see what the presence of water can do to a landscape. Second, the cotton fields proved to be an amazing place full of people ever so friendly. They offered us a million chai's and more food than we could ever eat. At each stop a small crowd gathered around, curious to find out more about us. We were joined by local cyclists, invited by people to stay and constantly asked to stop for pictures. Something we will remember too is how the irrigation channels are full of children swimming and enthusiastically shouting "Ghello" when you pass by. When we left the cotton fields behind we felt like we experienced some of the best days of trip. 24/8/2019 0 Comments Meet OphilieWe met Ophelie while we were waiting for our boat to Kazakhstan. She had been there for two days already. Later we went on trips together to the underground Mosque of Beket Ata and to the Aral Sea, splitting the costs of the tours. In between we travelled separately, but we kept meeting up, later also in Khiva, Buchara and Tashkent. In total we must have spend almost two weeks together, most of that time was spend in the waiting room of a port, on a boat or in the back seat of a jeep. Whatever the situation, Ophelie proved herself to be a true honey badger, she simply doesn't care. She always keeps smiling and stays in a good mood. That's one of the reasons we like her so much.
Ophelie normally lives in the north of Quebec in an Inuit community, where her parents work in a hospital. She's now 7 months old and she has been travelling half her life. The next six months she will slowly work her way up to Mongolia and then back to Europe with the Trans-Siberian Express. Oh, and we also really liked her parents, Julie and Nicolas, des vrais Québequois. They were good fun and made travelling with a baby look really easy. (Note: Her parents don't post pictures of Ophelie online, something we really respect, so we won't do it either) 24/8/2019 0 Comments "C'est perdu"We drove for hours, bumping along sandy roads, through the once sea-bed of the Aral Sea. Miles and miles of desert stretch out as far as the eye can see, no water in sight. Finally at the end of the day, we came over the hilltop - once the shoreline - and made a deep descent. And there it was, the remnants of the Aral Sea.
We both grew up hearing about the shrinking lake, about how everyone thought they would find a solution to this man-made ecological disaster and then seeing how agreeing on actions between countries proved impossible. Since the 1960s, the lake has shrunken by 90 percent with the salinity shooting up to three times its natural. As a francophone guide told us, 'c'est perdu'. The reason? The Soviet's plan to turn more of the the arid semi-desert plains into cotton crops which meant huge irrigation projects effectively cutting off the source rivers of the lake. The result: lost livelihoods, rusty boats lying stock still 200 km from the water, desertification, toxic dust storms whipping up now exposed salt and left over toxins from a Soviet biological weapons testing site (both harming crops and health), and an odd 'disaster tourism' industry. We felt strange being there. It was stunningly beautiful, but it felt eerily quiet and empty and unnatural. Floating in the water was unforgettable, like lying on a lilo, but we knew that the salinity which allowed this had also killed off all the fish and even sharks. We don't know if it's really going to disappear by 2025, like the guide said, but nonetheless we both had the feeling that this is one of those things we would look back on and think how lucky we were to see it. |
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