Nomadic Life: Naryn, Song-Köl, and Tash Rabat, Kyrgyzstan

After a few weeks on the road, we have settled into the backpacker experience: arriving disoriented, quickly adapting, then leaving comfort for the next unknown; packing and unpacking relentlessly, reorganizing; thinking about what to get rid of, not actually getting rid of anything; “this hostel has a nice shower, let’s stay an extra night;” “this hostel has laundry, we’re due.” Just like anything else, we adapt, the change becoming the constant. The next stop of this nomadic life took us to the Naryn oblast in central Kyrgyzstan, to see the herders moving from pasture to pasture, and the caravan routes of the Silk Road. We ourselves may be temporarily nomadic, but we were here to see the OG nomads.

After a week of hiking in the Karakol region, we bid our wonderful host Taalai farewell, and headed to the Karakol bus station to catch a marshrutka. A marshrutka is a shared minibus that is a formal part of the local transportation system, with fixed routes and costs, but no real stops—you kinda just flag it down and hop on and hop off when you’re ready, or when the driver decides to stop. It is a common mode of transportation in Central Asia that we’ve come to love; its reach is extensive, it comes frequently, and it is very cheap. Kevin, the plastic surgeon from Bordeaux whom we had met at our guesthouse (Hardcore European Backpacker #1 from the previous post), was also heading to central Kyrgyzstan, so he joined us, and our travel party became four after we met a German girl named Anna at the bus station. After brushing off many taxi drivers who all wanted to take us to Bishkek, we hopped into the van with a few other Kyrgyz passengers, and drove off.

The 300-kilometer ride to Naryn was typical of these types of cross-country buses that only cost $4: hot, crowded, and bumpy. We started out in comfort, but probably should have known it was too good to be true. We added passengers along the way, and each of their many pieces of luggage on top of that, filling the aisles with people and packages. This was not necessarily a problem, but there was this crazy woman (durak!) on the bus trying to save seats for her friends, who would not come on until at least an hour later. Each time someone got on the minibus, a heated discussion ensued amongst every Kyrgyz on the bus about where everyone was to sit—or so we interpreted through context and body language. This resulted in a lot of reshuffling by everyone else. With each additional old lady that came on board, we moved farther back; by the end of the ride, we were all squished together in the last row. It was quite the commotion, but the woman managed to preserve her empty row up front until her friends randomly showed up on the side of the road and got in.

But the added element of this drive was the Kyrgyz traffic jam—not cars, but furry friends. We have experienced animals walking out onto streets before in places like India or western China, but this was different. It wasn’t a cow here or a goat there; it was a full-on farm. Herds of sheep, cows, and horses kept crossing the road, or in some cases, would be herded by their shepherds down the highway itself. We kept having to stop short to avoid an unpredictable sheep or a stubborn mule, with our driver maneuvering the minibus around the pack of animals. It was a fun sight and we have a lot of bad photos taken through the dirty marshrutka windows to show for it, but it did make for a lot of jolts.

While this sounds like a tough ride, it only took six hours, and it was worth it because it took us through some extremely beautiful scenery. The first half of the journey traced the southern shore of Issyk-Köl, the second largest alpine lake in the world (Lake Baikal in Russia is the largest). Issyk-Köl is a popular tourist destination with its many “beach resorts” along its banks, but this would not be the lake we were going to visit. We decided to skip it because, as Lonely Planet humorously described, in the summer you can’t find a place to stay because everything is booked solid by Bishkekans and Russians, and during the rest of the year, you can’t find a place to stay because everything is closed. We were in the closed part of the season, but we're not sure we would have preferred the crowds either. Driving past to catch a glimpse was good enough. As the lake passed by, it was interesting to see how the landscape turned from forested mountains and lush pastures into semi-arid grassland with desert-like hills. This would be our new terrain to explore in central Kyrgyzstan.

Naryn Central Mosque set amidst the surrounding mountains

We dropped off Kevin and Anna in Kochkor, the jumping-off point to trek into Song-Köl, and continued on down the road to Naryn (we would see Kevin again later in Bishkek, and it turns out Kevin and Anna would travel together for the next six days; we half expect to be at their wedding in six years and then we can say we were there for the dusty, marshrutka-y beginning!). Naryn is a provincial town of about 50,000 that we used as a base to explore the area. We weren’t expecting much, but came to really like it. Set into a fairly narrow canyon, the setting is pretty dramatic, and the constricting landscape made for a compact town that could be easily traversed. It has a nice mosque, a local bazaar, and an inexplicable amount of school children in uniform walking freely around the city during the school day. (We later learned that the older kids go to school in the morning, while elementary kids go to school in the afternoon, which is maybe why at lunchtime, it feels like everyone is out and no one is actually in school!)

We spent the first night there in a nameless “homestay” to meet locals; turns out the host lived in a separate apartment next door and rented out the adjacent one to tourists without having to interact with them (though she did make us breakfast). We’ll take it though, because it was really big! We had a whole apartment to ourselves, with three bedrooms and a big dining room, and even though it was inside an old Soviet concrete block of a building, it was quite nice. We also ate a delicious dinner at Café Bamboo (twice), a trendy restaurant and bar with bistro bulbs (of course) and lettuce (a delicacy we crave in these parts!); they even gave us free beverages in exchange for taking a photo for their social media site—the first, but not the last, time this would happen to us in Kyrgyzstan. Who knew we were Influencers? Naryn was an unexpected oasis, which we would need to get us ready to rough it out in the countryside with the herders the next few days.

Our driver Sampar picked us up the next morning toward our first destination, Song-Köl Lake. When you google Kyrgyzstan, pictures of Song-Köl are likely to come up. It is the quintessential image: a yurt with some horses next to a lake, against a snowy mountain backdrop. And it isn’t staged for the tourists; it’s legit. Shepherds take their herds up to the jailoos, their summer pastures along the lake, to graze on the fresh grass. They pitch yurts to camp out in for the summer, and host tourists in them for a few extra soms. We hadn’t originally planned to visit, since the main way to get there is on a horseback riding excursion, which we didn’t want to do (with memories of a four-day horse trek in Mongolia still hurting the behind). Kevin, Anna, and Hannes were all trekking in over two days, which didn’t completely appeal to us either because we had just camped in Karakol, didn’t have tents, and had heard it was cold (remember, non-hardcore-backpackers here). But when we learned that you can drive right to the lake on the south side, we decided to give it a shot, since we already needed to hire a driver to reach our second planned destination.

As we made our way up dirt roads to the lake, we saw many more herds on the move as we had the day before. Shepherds on horseback were guiding their herds across the grasslands and through the mountain valleys, leaving thousands of sheep, cows, and horses roaming the hillsides. We called it the Kyrgyzstan Great Migration. It was a beautiful sight, especially seeing majestic horses galloping across the plains.

But there was a downside to this, and it wasn’t the traffic. These herds, which spent the summer grazing along the banks of Song-Köl, were leaving, heading back to their villages for the winter. By the time we got to the lake, only a handful of yurt camps of the hundred or so that exist during the summer remained, and these last few were actually in the process of packing up (we watched a whole camp disappear in a few hours overnight!). We had just missed peak time.

It wasn’t a loss, though. For one, we had our entire yurt camp to ourselves. It was very peaceful and relaxing, even if we had to breathe in the cow-dung fueled hearth that warmed our yurt at night (another painful Mongolian memory). And the setting was as advertised: the cold blue waters of the lake, crisp yellow grass of the pastures, and white-tipped mountains that surrounded us were indeed idyllic. Most of all, the night sky was epic, with the glow of the Milky Way hanging over the silhouettes of the yurts, rivaling a clear Kauai night.

While the notion of nomad-ing around can be romantic, I’m not sure either one of us would want to be this type of nomad; life is rough out on the jailoos and it showed on the weathered hands and faces of our hosts (this family had a toddler with them, and we thought for sure that they were the grandparents, as they looked like they were in their 50s or older, but it turns out they were the parents and probably not too much older than us!). We appreciated their deep hospitality, and knew that we could never do what they do so easily.

The next day, we went on another beautiful drive, and of course, encountered endless more animals. This time we were headed to the caravanserai Tash Rabat. Tash Rabat means “rock hostel,” which is fitting, because it was a 15th century hotel made of rock. A caravanserai is a rest stop along the Silk Road, and this one is believed to have been significant because it was made of stone, thus making it one of the few to survive into modern times. It was the perfect setting to get a feel for what life might have been like for the UPS drivers of antiquity. The narrow canyon through the steep mountains was accessible by horseback, and there was a river for fresh water, making it the perfect rest stop for travel-worn merchants. We walked around the historic site and enjoyed twilight with some horses there (again, we were practically the only ones there), and put ourselves in the shoes of these 15th century travelers via a brief horseback ride through the canyon (two hours was plenty for Michael!). Interestingly, on the other side of the mountains lies Kashgar, where we last finished our Silk Road adventures six years ago. Tash Rabat may have very well been the next major stop if we had continued, so it felt like we were picking up right where we had left off—on the move along the Silk Road.

Karen and Michael

Central Kyrgyzstan, September 22-26, 2019