We left the home-stay at about 9:30, under sunny skies, and after tanking up the Land Rover at the edge of town, headed toward the western edge of the Terskei-Alatau range. The landscape was mostly grassland, with a few irrigated fields lined with poplar trees. And the road, as all roads seem to be in Central Asia, was rutted, pot holed, and rolled up and down.
After about an hour, we turned south and began ascending a narrow gorge, following a rushing river up toward the Dolon pass. The road narrowed and twisted as we climbed higher. We drove through a small Kyrgyz village; the roadside littered with ugly cinder block houses, a few trailers, and in the backyards of some of the properties, a yurt or two.
Immediately after the village, the asphalt ended, and the grade of the gravel road increased to the point where Denis was forced into a low gear, and switched to four-wheel drive. I was happy to be riding in such a formidable vehicle. Even though the weather was good, it wouldn’t take much time up here in the mountains for things to deteriorate to the point where a regular vehicle would find the going impossible.
At length we crested the pass at 9850 ft. and I asked Denis to pull over so that I could snap a few pictures. Then we began our decent into the Naryn river valley, past tiny encampments of yurts and trailers, with small herds of stout Kyrgyz horses loitering along the way.
Just before the town of Naryn, we passed through a narrow canyon cut through a tall formation of bright red rock, called aptly enough, the Naryn gorge. Immediately on the other side was the Naryn river, and beyond it, Naryn itself. Victoria rattled off a few facts about the town, making a point to let me know that the entire Russian population of the town had left after independence. I asked her why this had happened, and she told me that the Russians were made to feel very unwelcome, and one by one they made their way down to Bishkek, or on to Russia.
It seems pretty clear to me by now that there are two distinct societies in these Central Asian republics, one native, and one Russian, and that the two almost never mix. My contacts here have been almost exclusively Russian, except for the very few natives engaged in the tourist trade. But there have been many subtle and not so subtle indications of the Russian contempt for the native peoples. Words like “lazy,” “dirty,” and “thieves” come easily out of their mouths, and not once have we stopped to lend aid to natives pulled over to the side of the road with car trouble. Even in the middle of the Karakul desert, when we passed a family with small children standing next to their disabled car, frantically trying to wave us down, we drove right past. When I asked Volodya if we shouldn’t stop and help them, he waved me off dismissively and told me that an Uzbek will be by soon enough, and he would help them.
None of the Russians I have met have bothered to learn the native language, even when they are forced to fill out government forms in Uzbek or Kyrgyz; they collar some native to interpret the form for them. I’ve asked a few of them would they, given the chance, learn the language. They only laugh and say no, as if it were a ridiculous question. I fear that eventually all this simmering contempt will boil over. But the Russians have been here a long time now, and these feelings have been hot for centuries. Who knows?
After Naryn we started climbing again. Now we were well into the At-Basi range of the Tien Shan, which means Celestial Mountains in Chinese. These peaks rise from the deserts to the north and south, and attain heights of over 24,000 feet. Their summits are permanently covered in snow and ice, and to see them from a distance looming above the parched desert like crystal towers, it’s easy to see why they earned the name Celestial.
We turned southwest and followed a broad valley under the mountain ridge, here and there crossing silted, icy glacier run-off. A few Kyrgyz settlements dotted the otherwise barren landscape, and their horses seemed to roam freely over the rangeland.
At an unmarked turnoff, we drove off the main road and onto a gravel track, which led us through a narrow crack in the mountains, and emptied out onto a wide meadow, sloping gently up to the snow-covered peaks. This was Tash-Rabat, the site of an ancient caravanserai, and the place I was to spend the night before crossing over into China. My home for the night was to be a yurt; a horsehair felt covered, round, tent-like structure, which the nomadic Kyrgyz people still use for portable shelter.
Tash-Rabat
My yurt was set up next to a cinder-block house where a Kyrgyz family lived, and where my guide and driver would be staying. I unloaded my gear and lifted the flap over the door of the yurt, and was assaulted by more horse smell than I had ever encountered. It was evidently going to be a pungent night.
Ah well, an experience I would be unlikely to forget, I said to myself, as I dropped my bags on the felt carpets. Denis came in with my sleeping bag and pad, and Victoria, entering after, told me that she had just found out that a seven-person climbing team from Latvia was expected to come down from Mustagh Ata, one of the highest peaks in the Kunlun Shan to the south, and would be sharing the yurt with me. OK, I can handle that, I said. Little did I know!
The late afternoon sun was casting beautiful shadows over the meadow, so I hiked up one side of the hills to take pictures and gaze at the nearby peaks. I lingered there until a small bus rolled up the valley, carrying what I assumed were my Latvian yurt-mates. And by the time I reached the bottom of the slope, and saw their sunburnt faces and sunken eyes, I knew that my assumption had been correct.
They were a rowdy bunch, six men and one woman, and were full of the spirit which infects a successful mountaineering expedition. We all gathered in the yurt, and vodka and cold food was brought in and consumed in great quantities. I stayed away from the vodka, even though those in the group who had mastered a few words of English attempted to get me to drink as much as they were. But I pleaded a bad stomach, which only made them more insistent. “Vodka gooood for stomach!” they cried. Still, I stuck to tea.
During the course of the evening I tried to converse with them, asking them about their climb, and they inquired about my plans. Their leader told me that landslides had closed the highway from China to Pakistan, and he had no idea when it might reopen. This was extremely disconcerting, not only because he had so few details, and my understanding of them was iffy. But also because that part of the journey was the seed for this whole crazy trip, and if I had to miss it, it would not just be a major disappointment, but probably involve a huge extra expense, and might cause unknown delays. I longed to get to Kashgar as soon as possible to get a clearer idea of the problem, and my options.
The eating and drinking went on until after dark, and then the singing began. Well liquored by now, they broke into loud Latvian drinking songs, of which there seemed to be more than I could count, and continued to pass the bottle and howl their songs until well after 11 o’clock. I then tried to not so subtly hint that I was tired by rolling out my sleeping bag and getting ready for sleep. But they didn’t take the hint right away. And later, when they too got their bags out, the bottles kept going around, and the Latvian caterwauling just increased in volume. Sleep was impossible. But I put in my earplugs and took a sleeping pill, hoping that I might overcome the combined effects of the vodka and Latvian exuberance.
But it was a hopeless idea. My only option seemed to wait for them to pass out. Finally, around twelve thirty, they began to drift off one-by-one. It was about then I began to feel the cold. The body heat from all that roiling Latvianness had kept the temperature inside the yurt fairly tolerable. But once the activity died down, the temperature dropped like a rock, and soon I had to exit my flimsy sleeping bag and pile on every stitch of warm clothing that I carried with me. To no avail. I was freezing.
I tried everything I could think of, and every curled-up position I could contort myself into, but still I was shivering. All through the rest of the morning I lay awake, teeth chattering, and muscles aching from the constant shuddering, until dawn came and I miserably got up to visit the scenic pit toilet down by the stream. Where my intestines gave notice that they weren’t quite finished playing firehose.