Kyrgyzstan is both enigmatic and quirky.  It is difficult to characterize Central Asia as it is at the crossroad of Chinese, Russian, and Middle Eastern cultures.  It is still struggling to break from its past Soviet rule and embrace its nascent national identity, but in so doing an utterly unique country has emerged.  After leaving Kyrgyzstan most explorers agree that the natural beauty and opportunities for experiencing traditional culture are exceptional here: from heli-skiing to hunting, very few places can offer the experiences that Kyrgyzstan does. No adventure in Kyrgyzstan would be complete without a visit to the legendary Lake Issyk-Kul, the second-largest alpine lake in the world.  I spent several days there with my two travel companions, Wis and Kelly. We felt we left the lake infinitely more enriched as human beings.  Before leaving we were told the legend of how the Kyrgyz came to the lake.  For thousands of years the numerous tribes of Kyrgyzstan were engaged in constant warfare.  After one particularly bloody battle, an entire tribe, except for a little boy and little girl, was killed.  In desperate need of food, the children wandered upon their enemy camp.  When they were spotted, the elder woman of the enemy tribe was ordered, against her will, to kill them.   As she reluctantly led them to a cliff to throw them off they were approached by a cow.  Yes, a cow.  The cow offered to take the children away and raise them as her own, feeding them from her own udders.  The old woman agreed and the children were taken to Lake Issyk-Kul and raised by the cow until they were old enough to marry.  Their children were the ancestors of the indigenous inhabitants of the area.  Although I personally wasn't offered maternal care by a talking cow, I had some adventures that would certainly rival that.  We booked our trip through Community-Based Tourism -  rural Kyrgyz people register their tourist services through a central non-profit making organization.  We had planned  to stay in a traditional yurt - a nomadic Kyrgyz tent covered in animal hides.  One Saturday morning, after much bartering, we embarked on the four hour taxi ride to Issyk-Kul.  We spent the first half of the ride getting pulled over by local police who demanded bribes to let us continue on our journey.  The driver eventually thought to take down the "taxi" sign, (read:  "foreigners inside"),and the rest of the journey went smoothly.  Our driver spent much of the trip asking Kelly, who speaks Russian, intimate questions about our finances.  How much money did we earn?  What was an average salary in the U.S.?  Did we own or rent our homes?  How much was our rent?  It is not at all taboo to ask such questions here. The topography of Kyrgyzstan is peculiar, almost science-fiction in nature.  When we looked far out to the east, we saw the shockingly intense blue waters of the lake.  In the far distance to the right were snow-capped peaks that reminded me of Colorado, but dwarfed the Rockies in size.

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My anxiety was replaced with amusement when we arrived at our humble camp and met our host, Bakeet.  Yes, we were at a yurt camp in the middle of the desert, but it was only a quarter of a mile from the highway and the beautiful beach.  Bakeet and his wife built five yurts on their leased land, and had a small working farm which grew the produce we ate while we were there. This was definitely not a major tourist destination and we were the only guests, save for a French couple.  The latrine was a gutted-out port-a-potty resting on planks above a hole in the ground.  Our yurt was typical on the outside -  gray in color, and swathed in wool and animal hides.  On the inside, the floor was covered in colorful felt rugs.  On the walls hung busy tapestries, bedazzled in sequins, depicting local animals.  The top of the ceiling had an open hole and we could see the clear blue sky above.  I was surprised to find that we had electricity in our tent.  We were clearly staying at the Hilton of yurts. 

Our first order of business was lunch, which was eaten sitting on the ground at a low table.  It consisted of deenyah melon, borsch soup, fresh apricots and apples, plov rice with mutton, bread, and homemade blackberry jam (but with very little sugar so it packed a punch).  We gained a loyal companion for the weekend when we fed the camp dog our scraps.  He followed us everywhere and slept outside our yurt.  Our adopted dog led us through the desert down what we dubbed "condom alley," the name inspired by the treasures that littered the path to the lake.  We spent several hours on the shores of the sparkling lake, swimming and running in and out of the cold water.  The snow-capped mountains were an unforgettable backdrop. 

As we were walking towards a grove of trees on the beach, I looked behind me and saw a flock of sheep coming to the water to drink.  In hindsight this does not seem like a spectacular sight, but at the time I recall being fascinated by the oddity of livestock drinking on a tropical beach that could have been in the Caribbean.  I immediately recognized the pastoral scene as the most authentically "Kyrgyz" one I had witnessed thus far and became very excited.  My unbridled enthusiasm caused me to go sprinting down the beach toward the sheep, camera blazing, screaming for the other two to follow.  My arms were flailing about to stop myself from dropping my numerous bags and I didn't even dare slow down to properly button my pants.  Judging by my frantic sprint one would have thought I was hunting a pack of lightning-fast pumas, and not a huge flock of virtually immobile sheep and goats peacefully drinking at the water's edge. 

I can't imagine what that poor herdsman was thinking when he saw an obviously insane blonde woman sprinting towards him, snapping pictures.. My efforts paid off however when I experienced the Central Asian hospitality I had heard so much about.  The Kyrgyz herdsman stopped on his mama donkey, pulling her baby alongside, and smiled at me as I stood in the middle of his herd of animals.  He offered to let us take pictures with him and we did.  I was hugging the baby donkey and I slowly tried to see if he would let me try to ride it, but as I brought my leg up I could see on his face that he wasn't thrilled with the idea, so I thought better of it.  Bless his heart, he graciously waited as we fawned over his donkeys and posed for photos with them.  Herding animals is his daily activity and I'm sure he couldn't understand our interest in such a mundane task.  I think what we did might be akin to Asian tourists screaming and running into an American chain restaurant to take pictures and pose among the entrees, gleefully asking for photos with servers holding their trays. 

So, after convincing the local population of my evident mental instability, Kelly and I took a sunset hike through the nearby Muslim cemetery.  At home such a cemetery tour wouldn't garner much enthusiasm on my part, but the Muslim cemeteries here contain small mausoleums to honor the dead, and from far away actually look like villages.  Most graves had etched pictures of the deceased on the walls of the tombs.  The bodies, rather than being buried underground, are covered with huge mounds of dirt because it is so ossified. There was a mosque on a nearby desert hill and as the sun was set behind it we could hear the echoing call to prayer. 

After dinner, we collected brush and built ourselves a bonfire in the hole our adopted dog had dug earlier.  We sat back and tried our best to take in what we saw above us..  The outer ring of the Milky Way was so pronounced that it was almost a totally solid white band spreading across the entire sky.  The stars were so numerous and so bright that it almost hurt my eyes to look at them.  We clearly identified several planets and each got to see our own shooting star.  Between the three of us we named most of the major constellations.  I sincerely didn't know the night sky could look like that.  It was a truly awe-inspiring and humbling evening. 

The next morning after our restful sleep on the floor of the yurt and a most delicious breakfast of sour milk balls and room-temperature yogurt drink, we set off to ride horses.  Our host, Bakeet, drove us an hour deep into the alpine mountains in search of families from whom we could rent.  We finally saw the Kyrgyzstan that we read was the Switzerland of Central Asia.  I don't know how they manage, but families build their yurts high up in the grassy green mountains, surviving off gathered plants and animals they hunt in the summer.  Our old car overheated at the top of one of the mountains, which was fortunate for us since we had an opportunity to meet an old woman who lives alone in her mountain yurt.  Apparently the family we were searching for had left the day before in search of new grazing grounds for their animals, but after another two hours of searching, Bakeet finally found some horses. 

Having ridden extensively when I was younger, I felt very comfortable on my horse.  However, Kelly and Wis didn't have such good fortune.  From the beginning, Wis's horse was clearly the descendent of Lucifer himself and was not meant for riding.  A very scary incident arose when his horse came alongside Kelly's horse to drink from the same stream.  Both horses made eye contact and immediately began bucking wildly - Kelly panicked and tried to jump off.  Her food got stuck in the stirrup and her hand tangled in the bridle so that she was hanging completely upside down and off to one side, with her head directly between the horses legs.  She was hanging on to the horse’s side, which caused her to hold the reigns in such a way that the horse was forced to buck her in circles, over and over again.  I genuinely believed she was going to be seriously injured or killed, but miraculously, once Wis had released her foot from the stirrup, she walked away muddy, and a bit bloody, but more shaken up than injured.  She definitely has a guardian angel. 

After this, Wis and Kelly understandably decided to do the rest of the hike on foot.. There were moments during the trek that my poor horse was climbing up such steeps slopes that I had to hug his neck to help him keep balance.  On the last leg of the journey to the top of the mountain, I felt so bad for him that I got off and walked the mountain beside him.  I did the best I could to let him to choose the paths we took, since he knew those slopes far better than I.  At the top we rested to eat lunch.  We did what all rural people do in Kyrgyzstan with their idle horses; we tied the reigns to their front leg, limiting how far they can wonder off.  I was slightly upset by this prospect at first, but Bakeet assured me they needed to rest anyway and shouldn't be moving much.  After eating, we made it down in far less time than it took to go up and returned the horses to their various owners in the village.  Our taxi was waiting for us back at the yurt camp to drive us to Bishkek.  We slept the whole way back.

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