"Short ride" Kyrgyzstan No.2 - Complete travel notes

Day1.

The plan for the Great Kyrgyz Ride is clear: take three horses, transport them to the southernmost possible point in Kyrgyzstan and start riding north across the Arpa Plateau and various mountains in a “wherever we go, we go” style. The southernmost place I choose is the village of At Basshi, which has a reasonable road and is also well south of the country. And since the area around At Basshi has reasonable terrain while being quite high up for good weather and nice grass, I’m promising myself a pretty fast average pace ride, with the possibility of trotting at least a quarter of the time each day.
Plan: At Basshi – Tash Rabat – Arpa – Kara-Kuldja – Sary Mogul.

But there you have it – plans are one thing and reality is another. Since Fidel and Chaie (our last year’s horses) are already on a hoof ride to France where a well-deserved retirement awaits them, and probably all the other sensible horses in the world have left with the tourists, we went with horses that are more fun and less sensible. Our herd this year is therefore as follows:

Café – comedian of the expedition, war horse and founder of world terror
Barney (aka RKK) – leader of the horse team, specialist in fending off foreign stallions
Kiks – teenager, champion of kicking and biting the target
Richard – man of the expedition and organizational element
Lucie – visionary and element of random enthusiasm

The positive thing is that each of our horses has a very strong personality. On a less positive note, these personalities don’t always get along with the other horses and the human participants in the expedition – we assess the first day of the expedition while our cargo horse, Café, is biting all the horses in front of him on the ass with gusto while they gallop desperately off into the distance, eyes bulging and big aggressive teeth marks on their backs. Meanwhile, Barney is setting up a Hate-Man Department based in At Bash, while Kiks is holding a workshop on “How to Dispose of a Human in the Saddle, Volume One”. Café was presumably invited to this workshop and picked up some of the tricks there on the first day, but the workshop was nonetheless brought to a violent end by the black horses’ favourite leisuretime activity on eight characters, aptly named “bullying”, where a still untethered Café, teeth bared, chases his two terrified equine companions around the meadow while the human participants in the expedition invent several new Bohemian swear words in a very inspiring environment. So we won’t be bored here.

This year’s preparation for the short ride took us a lot of time in the Czech Republic, but only two days on the spot in Kyrgyzstan. So after two days everything is ready. The horses have new shoes, the bags are packed and waiting to be taken away. Veterinary papers are sorted out. Outfit tested on the horses. Half-day test ride. Does everything fit as it should? When we find that the answer to everything is YES, I send the final green light to our horse transport.

Horse transport in Kyrgyzstan is a chapter in itself. The usual Czech horse transporters are not to be found here. The animals are transported on the back of ordinary trucks, without a boarding ramp and without a bulkhead. We arranged in advance through my friend in Bishkek a very reasonably priced horse transport from the north of Kyrgyzstan to the south, to start our journey this year in the town of At Basshi. Only – we are in Kyrgyzstan.

In general, finding a good, reliable driver in Central Asia who also wants to work is quite a challenge. Getting such a driver to transport horses is therefore an even bigger problem. The driver was due to arrive on Sunday. Then on Monday. And finally he wrote that he might come on Tuesday afternoon. That would mean waiting until Tuesday and then arriving at At Basshi around 2:00 in the morning. Somehow I don’t believe him – I don’t think he’s coming at all. It’s time for a change of plan. That happens a lot around here. So now it’s time to find a new driver.

So with the help of the vet, we call their vet transport company. It’s three times more expensive. It may warm our hearts that we’re paying the driver and his friend their vacation with relatives in Arpa. They will stay in the south when they go there. You’re welcome, boys, enjoy. I hope you at least get to drive those horses properly. It’s not a bad job being a driver in Kyrgyzstan. You’re paid like a god if you’re on a job. And if you don’t come, it’s no big deal, mañana buddy, you arrive on another one. The world ain’t gonna go to shit for a job, is it?

Finally, a Mercedes sprinter with a cargo area came to pick us up. Since it was raining all day, we arranged for a covered cargo area so that our horses would not get wet and cold on the first day. And on the floor of the box we put rubber and sawdust, so that the horses would not slip. Interlochadhotel on wheels level Kyrgyzstan. Well, not that the horses appreciated it, but anything for my better feeling and the safety of the horses.

However, in the first few minutes of the ride I make a cardinal mistake. “Would you like to come over for lunch?” The driver asks. Absolutely not with loaded horses, it’s not safe and it’s not good for the horses either. “No. Let’s go.” I declare resolutely. “At least I’ll jump on the oil change,” he says, and I automatically approve. Putting oil in the engine is important and it’s right away. I buy the oil, hrc prc, it’s in, let’s go. I mean, that’s how the blonde from the city imagines it. But there’s a difference between substitution and filling in. What’s my surprise when suddenly the driver pulls into the garage and a technician crawls under the car. Oh, shit! I couldn’t have done anything stupider with those horses in the back, really. On a scale of zero to ten, I’m currently at minus ten for intelligence.

However, the drivers drive nicely and we arrive at our destination late in the afternoon in good health with our horses. That is, after I manage to forbid them to unload the horses from the car directly into the waste hole of the future toilet.

Day 2 – 20 km

“Where is the director?” I yell as I run hysterically towards the marquee in the middle of the yurt camp. “I’m the director,” a young lady in her mid-twenties or early twenties comes out. And she couldn’t have said it better. While her husband is lingering somewhere, and two of her male helpers are lying on a blanket on the grass, talking and smoking, she manages to manage the whole yurt camp, cook, paint fences and walls of buildings, and take care of three children, one of them a year old. No wonder her name is Saltanate. Nomen omen.

Can we put a horse in here? Can we stay here? Can we eat here?

“All is possible,” replies Saltanat, and I see that we are in good hands. So maybe we’ll come back here.

On the first day we wake up at six o’clock, by eleven o’clock we are packed and we ride a nice 20 km. The horses are fresh and the terrain is great. We cross the main road to China (well, on the map it’s marked as the main road, in real life there is a truck on it sometimes and nothing else) and ride up into the mountains. When there is water, we will camp. But… there is no water. Anyway, the horses drank during the whole ride today and we have water for the people. But somehow it’s complicating our route. Without water, even the early bird can’t get anywhere. In the distance, you can see a huge riverbed down in the valley. But that would mean going almost all the way back to the other side of the valley. So we decide not to overdo the start, quietly pick good grass for the horses for the day and come back for water in the morning.

Day 3 – 18 km

“So there it is”, we look around in the morning from the green mountains to the quite arid valley. A river. Our destination today. Originally we had planned to ride today over the pass 35 km to the famous, most beautiful plateau in Kyrgyzstan, Arpa. But without water with three horses it would be sheer stupidity. And I don’t like stupidity.

After four hours of riding, we can clearly see the hot air glowing over the grey stones of the riverbed. As in the last campaign in the desert, we crawl with our horses to the lowest point of the valley to the water. Another hour or so and we’re there.

Well, we are. There. We’re there fucked.

In vain I walk back and forth along the arid riverbed, looking for the shimmering water. The air heats up to unbearable temperatures on the dry stones and the absence of any grazing in the area lets me know that the water hasn’t been here for a really long time. Is this how those ancient travelers die in the desert? My mother told me I could last two days at most without water. How long can a horse last? Is it possible to make drinkable water from human urine or also a horse urine by evaporation and condensation? Am I just an asshole or an even bigger asshole? Why is there no signal in half of Kyrgyzstan? Who drew the river flows on mapy.cz and why can’t you download offline satellite maps of Central Asia anywhere even for a fee? So many questions and no answers. Sheep bleating in the distance. A wise man said that if you cannot, then you should try harder, and if you don’t know, then you should ask. Let’s go get the sheep. Where there are sheep, sooner or later there will be man.

And there is.

Richard carefully prepares his Russian conversation until he has it memorized literally. But I leave nothing to chance.

“Salam Aleykum. Su barby bu jerde, su? Qayda?” I yell at him from afar like a discount carrot price at the market. No time for small talk, we need water here and now. “Yeah yeah yeah,” says the shepherd. “There and there,” he points to both sides of the river. I see. Well, we didn’t learn much. “And how many kilometres?” I try. “Over there,” the shepherd points uncertainly. Well, I guess they don’t feed sheep here by kilometres. You might as well have figured that out, you blonde from the city. “How many hours away?” This has a better track record. “One hour there and four hours there.” Well done, thank you! Richard swallows his carefully prepared Russian conversation sadly and puts away his practiced phrases for a later occasion.

And since we can’t do the four-hour ride today (it’s important not to overdo the beginning, Lucie chuckles), we decide to ride back for an hour. This way we actually got a detour to the starting point three days later, but that’s life and that’s what riding in unknown terrain without a guide is all about. You just have to take into account that reality doesn’t always meet the plan.

An hour later, we arrive at a muddy patch by the side of the road, which is full of cow shit, stacked jerry cans, oil bottles and energy drink cans. “What a dump!” think five heads at once, “this is what we’re going to drink tonight, yeah?!”. Well, a desperate situation calls for desperate solutions. I spend the next hour filtering the water with a filter, throw Micropur in it at the campsite and boil it for four minutes before eating. Triple protection. Condom, pills, vasectomy. That’s what you have to do with a frog green piss instead of water.

At the obligatory visiting hour (by observation we have traced that the visiting hour of our tent is every day exactly at 19:00) a shepherd arrives on a spotted horse and rides with a whole flock of sheep in front of him. He is about ten years old. He stops in sight and watches us. Then he starts training his three dogs. And jumping on and off the horse. And then he’s dropping his hat on the ground and lifting it off the horse. He’s just showing off! Well, he’s got something. Lifting a cap off a moving horse, that’s not something that just anyone can do. I acknowledge his skill with an appreciative “woopaa!”, to which he waves and rides off. In a little while, he’s back with his dad.

“Salam Aleykum”

“Jakshmisiz?”

“Jaksh, jaksh.”

The obligatory social window.

“Why are you sleeping here in a tent? Come to us! We will cook you dinner, drink tea, and you can stay in the yurt.” Well, the idea that we’re going to spend three hours packing up this whole grocery store and an hour and a half unpacking it doesn’t fit with the number of hours today. “No, thank you! We’ve already had dinner and we still have tea. Would you like some?” We probably look like complete fools, but there’s no point in explaining to the shepherds here how much things we have with us and how long it would take us to pack. We’d rather invite them to something we have with us. “Well, where did you get the water for tea?” the shepherd asks sociably. “Here, from the little stream”, I answer honestly, pointing to the gutter beside the road. “From the creek beside the road?!” The tea turns over several times in the shepherd’s mouth. The tourists are pigs, drinking from the sewer. “We vót tabljetku put there, vada charóšaja budět”, I try to calm him down. Nothing, too late. He says a hasty goodbye and I feel ashamed that we have improved the tourists’ reputation.

Day 4

Approximately 31 Km

“So he said four hours”, we clarify today’s route at dawn over the map.

“Well, that was from the herd. And one to the other side. Five in all.” Richard points on his fingers the secrets of elementary school classes. I’ll never be a mathematician.

Will there be water? There won’t be? Who knows? It’s dry and parched here. There could be anything beyond the pass. A desert, a few aspen trees or a river like the Danube and knee-high grass. We’ll never find out without a signal, so we’ll just go and have a look. If there was no water, we’d go five hours back again, we’ll make it today.

After four hours of fair trotting on the steppe we reach a small house behind the pass. Two soldiers run out of it. Oh, a border post! It wasn’t supposed to be here, and there shouldn’t have been any paperwork to get to Arpa. But fortunately my OCD intervened again and just in case, I did the paperwork that shouldn’t have been needed. Just in case. What if plans changed or we needed to go another way. We have full clearance to all border areas. And now it’s gonna come in pretty damn handy.

“Where are you going?” The older of the border guards starts to say harshly. He speaks excellent Russian. “To Arpa.” I answer him from the saddle of my horse. I look at him a bit condescendingly, as he looks so small under the horse. They left their rifles in the shed… still, it’s great to ride up to the border soldiers on horseback. Is that how it worked in the old days? “If I can, I’m not going down this whole control”, I resolve to myself. “A sen Arpany kayda barasyң?” The other asks. He speaks only Kyrgyz, but again he is a local from Arpa. I explain the route to him in detail. “Do you have a permit?” asks the Russian. “Of course,” and as the master I pull out from my saddlebag with one hand all the necessary documentation. “Please,” I reach out to him from the saddle and hand him a copy of all the papers and our passports. The lady at the office was clear in telling me “don’t give the original out of your hand” and she has also made us an ample supply of copies for various random inspectors.

The Russian sends the young man inside with the paperwork. The social part of the tour begins. “What’s this?” My safety endurance stirrups garner more attention than I would have expected and desired. But the comfort in them! “The stirrups. Safety. To keep your foot from falling in.” I illustrate the benefits of a basket on a wide stirrup versus my dirty trekking shoe. “I see,” he seems satisfied. “Got any smokes?” “We do.” “All right.” And suddenly we’re friends. He discreetly stashes the cigarette in his breast pocket – I guess he’s not allowed to smoke on duty. And sets about carefully tying our knots. He grabs each horse by the head and checks our knots. “Poor tourists, he can’t even tie his horse properly! he’ll probably think. “It’s okay”, I try to contradict him as he reties the reins to my halter. “It’s not, you got it wrong.” And gradually he creates a better or worse, but in all cases completely UNconsensual Kyrgyz knot on all the horses. I’m going to have to retie this to my screwed up knot called “the dragon is climbing across the lake to the princess and now it’s not working out so we’ll make a belay here” somewhere inconspicuously around the corner to make it stick.

The young man returns triumphantly with the paper. “Next time show the original”, the Russian thunders importantly, and I take all the documents from the saddle again. “Sure!” I reply cheerfully, knowing sure clearly that I will sure not. “And do you know where the water is?” He points behind the shed. A beautiful, big river flows from the mountains right into the other valley. From the same mountains as before, from which nothing, but nothing at all, flows on the other side of the pass. We’re lucky today. And the horses with us. The sky is gathering for a thunderstorm, and we are experiencing Kyrgyz storm hell for the first time this year, with a few buckets pouring down on your head from above in a few minutes again. There’s no point in pitching a tent, the horses intuitively turn their asses into the wind and we ride out the storm.
Welcome to Arpa! A paradise for horses, with knee-high lush grass and endless streams of crystal clear water!

Day 5 – 0 km

5:30! The excitement and travel fever wakes me up just as the sun rises. We’re in Arpa! Finally! Let’s go!

But it’s raining. I’m guessing it hasn’t stopped since yesterday. That’s why there’s so much water and beautiful grass… We can only wait. 5:45 It’s raining. 6:00 It’s raining, it’s just pouring. 6:30 It’s pissing. 7:00 It’s raining. 9:00 It’s raining. 10:00 It’s raining. Mm-hmm. It’s going to be a hungry day, we can’t cook in the rain (I don’t cook in my tent for safety reasons) and we’re running out of water.

I got a Garmin sat nav, which is the best on the market (in terms of satellite maps and weather forecasting). Unfortunately, just because it’s the best there is doesn’t mean it doesn’t completely suck in the end. Garmin’s forecast shows it will rain all day with a short break at 2pm and a brutal thunderstorm right after. Richard saddles his wet horse and makes a lightning dash to the river for water, a so-called “kyrgyz style ride”, which means to mount, gallop, jet somewhere and then gallop back. But there is no break in the rain at two o’clock, nor at four, and at five the rain stops and does not start until evening. Thank you, Garmin, for ruining our day, I bid you farewell and ritually throw you to the bottom of my bag. Bye bye, I’ll meet you at the end of the ride. From now on, I’m going to follow the weather like the locals, so I’m going to wink up and say “rain” or “no rain” with no difference. “Is it going to rain?” “I know this exactly, it’s fifty-fifty. It’s either going to rain…or it’s not.”

Day 6 – 17 km

We have already covered a total of 67 km! That’s a lot, isn’t it?

But the travel fever hasn’t left me, and on the contrary, it’s getting worse by the hour. We are here SO SHORT! It’s only been a month. That’s thirty days and we only have twenty-four fucking days left. We’re running out of time! Every hour we could RIDE and RIDE and RIDE and experience things and meet people and we’re sitting here waiting for the weather. Oh, my God! Life is slipping through my fingers and every second of waiting is taking us off track. How many more times will I be here, riding all summer? Twenty times at the most? And if the political situation goes to shit? Maybe this is the last time I’ll be here? Is this what they call a midlife crisis? I’m going, God I’m going, in the rain, I’m not waiting ANOTHER SECOND!

And so we set off, a little hysterical, Garmin with its forecast buried deep in the bottom of the bag (“Don’t you have another forecast in there? This one says it’s gonna rain all day. I want a better one.”)… and miraculously the rain stops.

We drive through the most beautiful part of the Arpa steppe. On the left side of the beautiful high mountains Kulunatiynski. On the right, the beautiful high mountains of Jamantau. Below us a beautiful flat steppe, a plateau at three thousand meters, ideal for trotting and galloping. The most beautiful place in the world. Arpa steppe. From the moment I saw Ashley in Arpa I knew I had to come here one day. And that moment is now. We are trotting merrily along the slowly narrowing steppe that empties into a narrow river gorge. The whole of this tens of kilometres wide steppe gradually narrows and narrows until it becomes a canyon that leads to the high, almost five-thousand-foot peaks of Kichi and Chong Koman. Ahead, the mountains are like a wall. Arpa is like a beautiful island, isolated from the outside world. With one entrance, surrounded by mountains. And here, at the end of Arpa… ends our plan to go straight through Arpa, from the eastern part to the western part and continue on to Sary Mogul. This year’s weather is very unusual. Every day it rains for several hours and it is quite cold. In vain I spent hours and hours trying to figure out which four-thousand-foot pass would be the best to take with three horses out of Arpa. In normal years they are all passable from the end of May. But today… All the passes above three thousand are under snow. And I won’t risk the unknown route with horses in the snow.

So my travel fever is getting Scottish spritzers. No going straight for the nose. The one-way weekly detour to Arpa has become a bit of a dead end and a new plan needs to be devised. After much debate in the sleeping bag while the storm rages outside again, the final route is At Basshi – Tash Rabat – Arpa – Ak Beit – Terek – Ak Tal – Song Kul. Richard wants to go back to Song Kul and finding a way for the horses from Arpa off the only road there will be an adventure. While the storm rages outside, travel fever rages on the Soviet maps, which, thanks to my obsession with Plan B, C and D, I have taken enough of for about half of Kyrgyzstan. Tomorrow we’ll have to go back the same way.

Day 7 – 20 km

It’s raining. It’s raining. The devil owes us this Arpa. There’s water, there’s grass, but there’s nowhere to go. It’s like a prison. Here’s water, here’s grass for the horses, but you can’t go anywhere, it’s pouring. It’s pouring. It’s still pouring. I’ll never complain again that I can’t find water! A few days without water is not bad either!

At 4:00 p.m., it finally stops. And so we set off on a desperate mission: ride as far as you can before the piss starts again. We’re stopped in our trotting pace only by the sun slowly sinking behind the horizon. That’s as far as we’re going anyway, it’s just dark, *uck it and have a good night.

Day 8 28km

Yeah, but what a good night! I’m on horse duty at night. We take turns with Richard and each of us watches our horses one night so that they don’t get tangled, no strange stallion attacks them, and we watch Café so that the locals don’t eat him. He’s a beautiful horse, tall, fat… and the first word the locals say when they see him is: “sausages”. But they don’t know I understand. So I always explain to them afterwards, completely unobtrusively, that this is the horse of a very well-known horse owner who guides tourists here, and a lot of people work for her, and she knows them, and they usually remember that they know her too, and with a tear in their eye they stop drooling at the sight of half a bucket of fatty qazy sausages and have another bowl of kumys.

Well, I’m on duty today. Sometime after midnight it’s brutal noise outside, so that means running out of the sleeping bag in a flash, running out into the rain and counting horses. After last year, I’ve learned my lesson, and when I’m on duty, I don’t sleep naked as a matter of principle. Running around for fifteen minutes in just my breeches on the prairie in about five degrees of rain, chasing a strange aggressive stallion will neither amuse nor offend any newly awakened gopher…but that cold back is hard to treat on a trek like that. Before we left, we tied one reflective tape on each horse’s mane and tail, so counting the horses is easy: one, two, three, four, five, six reflective tapes in the flashlight light, all horses in place, okay, good night. I just can’t count today. One two three four…. and NOTHING. Somewhere in the distance a few pairs of alien eyes glisten. I’m sorry?

With my adrenaline on high, I run (yes, in a sweatshirt!) out of the tent and switch on my headlamp to “gang of neg(censored) with a blowtorch” mode, ready to instantly burn out the eyes of anyone within two hundred meters. And…there he is. Our teenage Kiks is grazing at the bottom of the hill, tucked away behind the RKK, while a herd of local stallions triumphantly enthrones in his place at the top of the hill. Well, no, bobcats, this is our camping spot! And with a mixture of grunts, hisses and other unidentifiable noises, I run as fast as I can up the hill to chase the strange stallions away. At three thousand. Four hundred. Thee thousand four hundred metres. Above sea level. Ow, what a stupid idea! I crawl furiously towards the fucking assholes and they, in the adolescent state of colts from two to four years old at the most, always run a bit, then show me the turds, do a lap and come back to the original spot with the nice grass. We picked it out carefully for Kiks too!

After many, many unsuccessful attempts, I manage to drive these assholes over the hill. And then comes the task: catching the crazy Kiksík, all this in a torrential rain, with the stallions looking down from the ridge: “Look, Franta! she’s still there! Do you think she’s going to chase us off again? This is fun! I’ve never seen that before! Crazy mare!”.

Sometime in the morning, I’ll hike back to my tent. “I haven’t slept all night”, I mumble in my sleep around 5am in response to the uncompromising alarm that someone very impatient (i.e. me) has set for the earliest possible hour in the dawn.

Through the border station we return back to the already tested place without water but with nice grass. Tomorrow, tomorrow the adventure begins!

Day 9 20 km

“You’re going the wrong way! Tash Rabat is on the right!” shouts the man in the white Lada with the hull as he looks off into the distance, standing on the hull. I usually don’t tell anyone where we’re going, and I always have an answer ready for any questions: straight ahead. “Where are you going?” “This way, straight.” That always confuses everybody so much they don’t have any more questions. But Tash Rabat is such a tourist destination, we just can’t hide it. Again, we don’t even have to look at the map. “Salam!” “Salam Aleykum!” “Take the shortcut straight here!” A skinny Kyrgyz man with a strange Argentine beret on his head tells us over an even skinnier sorrel horse. “Thank you,” I don’t resist. “And where are you going?” “To Tash Rabat,” he replies firmly. Oh, so they go there too, the locals. Soon a gentleman with a white Lada reaches us. He stops, gets on the back, looks for a moment, and gets back on. What kind of local tradition is that?

Meanwhile, the gentleman on the rickshaw carefully examines several horses by the roadside. They’re not going to buy horses and load them on this little buckboard, are they? Meanwhile, about the fourth decorated car passes us on the dirt road. Have they all gone mad? It’s Wednesday!

The rider is joined by another rider along the way and then a third. They have several horses in front of them and gradually more and more join in. We trot up the hill to Tash Rabat and suddenly a nearly stampeding herd of foals and mares are stomping furiously behind us. So, a summer herdshift to higher pastures! All the influencers are sharing those herd roundups on those Instagrams and we’re living it.

We arrive in Tash Rabat together with a monstrous convoy of decorated cars. Oh my God, a wedding! Then we’re fucked. A vision of hundreds of drunken wedding guests in front of the yurt and one fat Cafe, ready for the sausage for the locals, flashes before my eyes. “Well, tough luck, today’s ride isn’t over yet”, I think in a funereal tone, we have to go somewhere far away into the mountains. But not every wedding is the same. The wedding guests arrive, have their ceremony at the caravanserai, get back in their decorated cars and drive off to the city. What would they do at night up here in the mountains, it’s cold. “They’re local tourists”, comments the camp manager scornfully.

There is only one visitor with us in the whole yurt camp, a strange guy in a ragged sweatshirt. He’s right behind us. “Hai hai”, he greets us with a terrible accent. Who is this homeless guy? “Ay nou yay”, he assures me. He turns out to be Florian, the Frenchman I lavished my wisdom on a few weeks back in Sintob, Uzbekistan, when I was bored in the morning. I sat down at his breakfast table and mermally advised him on where to look in Kyrgyzstan because he looked cute, incompetent and confused (like every other Frenchman on the road). Now, after a month in the region, he looks like any hitchhiker (i.e., like a hobo). We have a great chat, as if we had known each other for years. “It’s great in Kyrgyzstan, it’s like having your grandmother in every yurt.” he comments on his best experience. “You say ‘I want two dumplings’ and they say ‘You’re skinny as a pound, eat properly, here’s four’.” Grandmothers are the same everywhere.

Day 9&10 – 25 km (900 m ascent up 900 down)

Since we plan to go back and forth tomorrow, we decide to leave all our stuff down at camp. That leaves us with an extra horse. So I decide tonight that I’ll mount Cafe in the morning, and give RKK a well-deserved day’s rest. I’m gonna rearrange all my gear on this giant and… but Café senses this plan. It’s the horses. Soon, two strange stallions (who have run back and forth here a thousand times…) come running up, and Café decides to show that he definitely doesn’t belong in the old irons yet, nor under saddle.

On a beautifully massive two gallop jumps, he professionally plucks his qazyq from the ground and with a giant hump, tail cocked up like an Arabian stallion on show, begins to show off on a circle around the resignedly standing RKK and Kiks. “What an asshole” thinks RKK as he boredly watches Cafe’s show. “Café to be a strong stallion, Café to dare, Café to like to run and hump, Café to know how to hula-hoop”, Café puts on his not very sophisticated but all the more physically impressive performance. It takes us a good hour before the big and not very intellectually gifted horse stops jumping back and forth in circles, neighing, galloping, lunging, showing off at the trot, raking high with his front hooves and physically attacking all the horses around him. If Lucifer was reincarnated into a horse, I would imagine it would go something like this. Anyway, Boban, you’re not going under saddle tomorrow, I still have (really? I wonder) some survival instinct. But you deserve a job. RKK will remain a riding horse, and you’ll be working your ass off. So instead of a pack horse, we have a rest horse tomorrow. “Café agree. Café like to rest.” Café nods in silence, still chubby yet panting, and I swallow my sentence about salami and go fix the torn ropes and bent qazyqs instead. You have to love him.

The plan is to take a leisurely ride from Tash Rabat over the pass to the picturesque border lake Chatyr Kul and back. According to the map, about thirty kilometres of the journey. “We’ll do it,” says Richard. “Well, more like no”, I look at the elevation of the route 1400 metres up, 1400 metres down.

We set off honestly at dawn, leaving a head start for Florian the Frenchman – so as not to embarrass the poor man on foot. After a week and a half, we are acclimatised to three thousand above sea level and so are our horses. But… our horses are not up to four thousand in the pass. RKK is snorting like he’s going to die and the moment his heart rate crosses a reasonable threshold, I jump off. “Dear RKK, I don’t walk as a matter of principle, but today you have an exception”, I pat him on the head and give him a big break. Meanwhile, Richard and Kiks get smaller and smaller on the mountainside until they disappear around the bend. “Hooray, I’m good, let’s go,” RKK declares in my left hand, while Cafe joins in from the other side. “Café be ready, hooray, Café take off!” To reinforce the truth of that statement, out of sheer joy, he lightning-fast bites RKK’s shoulder.

Being dragged by horses may have been one of the more common medieval punishments for witches, but A) I’m not a witch, and B) I didn’t believe it was something that could still be tried anywhere these days. However, Café with RKK can grant wishes you didn’t even know you had. I’m desperately flapping my leashes on the gravel up a gravel road with over a ton of double live weight, and I think I’m tearing up the time record for the fastest foot ascent of a 4,000-foot saddle.

That is, until we meet Frenchman Florian. He’s sitting happily on the pass, looking out over the lake. “Gee, what are you doing here?”, I snap at him.

“I’m resting. I’ve been here for a few hours. I climbed to the top of the mountain over there, there are nice views. And now I’m going to go down slowly.”

“So we don’t embarrass the poor guy on foot”, I mutter to myself in shame, remembering the annual futile resolutions.

Night 10 & Day 11
Which tourist has it bigger?

After a difficult ascent and descent we return back “home” to the yurt camp. Such a nice home for two days. We cheerfully tie up our horses for grazing in sight and haul a bunch of dirty horse bags into the yurt. However, a surprise awaits us. For today is Friday. And on Friday, everywhere is crowded.

The engines roar behind the yurt and two men on a motorbike rush into the middle of the camp. Jeez, that’s what we’ve been missing. “Hello, we’ve come to your living room, can we have a motorbike here?”. After a few weeks away from civilisation, civilisation comes to you. And then another one in the car. Perfumed, scented, middle-aged men. I’ve almost forgotten what a perfume looks like, let alone smells like.

We meet for dinner and the classic noisy discussion of middle-aged, shrewd white gentlemen develops. One biker is from the Netherlands. “Oh, what would I do, I’m the top manager of the company”, he tells the urchin who came by car. Classic di*k measuring. His son wanted to be a dentist, but in the Netherlands there is a terrible overload of students at the school, so they looked for a school to take him, until they took him in Košice. Yeah, nobody wants to go to Košice, I understand, being a dentist in Košice is a bit different than being a dentist in Amster. The other biker nods silently, I can’t tell if he’s amused or ashamed (he’s German). Meanwhile, the Sultanate refills our tea and brings a sumptuous feast to the table (“Just like Grandma’s, Florian would say modestly. Oh, how we miss them, we’ll swap three of these dic*s for one stinking hitchhiker).
Then a sleek man who has arrived by car takes the floor. He begins his life story. Nobody asked him about it, but he’s clearly not bothered. He is an Orthodox Christian from Bulgaria and his wife is Kazakh. Their family lived in Russia and as they persecuted Orthodox Christians during the Soviet Union, they drove their entire family out of Russia and into Kazakhstan. “It’s still the same Russia,” he launches into a discussion of politics. “The Russians are degenerate, they have propaganda. Even my grandmother in Almaty, Kazakhstan, watches TV and thinks NATO and America started the war. But he’s just a poisonous dictator. Just get rid of him and it’s peace. We need to kill Putin!” he says hysterically, eyes blazing, over a Kyrgyz dinner in a yurt. Oh, my goodness, we’ve come this far in politics. One goes to southern Kyrgyzstan to hide from the media massage, and even here one is not safe. I’m gonna puke. “Yes, yes, it’s needed,” both bikers nod in unison.
So I’m glad, boys, that here in a yurt in southern Kyrgyzstan, three middle-aged white men have managed to sort out the whole political situation in Russia and Ukraine. I’m as embarrassed as I havent been in a long time. But the debate continues, willy-nilly.
“What about the wife? How does she take it? Is she here or in Kazakhstan?” asks the Dutchman.
“My wife is not here with me. She’s a bitch, lying by Issik kul with the kids by the water. I left them there, what am I going to wallow with them for a week”, declares the Bulgarian, and the landlady Saltanatta’s tea rises in her hand as her eyes pop out of their sockets. For no one knows that she speaks fairly good English.
“Well, what do you do for a living?” the Dutchman asks. “I take photographs for a living. I’m a world-famous photographer. I’ve taken pictures for a lot of magazines. I’ve been taking pictures for over forty years. I’ve had many international exhibitions, for example the last one in Bulgaria…” “Ah, well, that’s interesting”, the gelled German finally gets into the discussion, “I’m an amateur photographer, can you please show us some photos?”
I still don’t understand if he’s serious or if he’s a troll.
“No…” the Bulgarian pauses, rather puzzled. “There’s no signal here. I don’t have any.”

Di*k measuring is over, Mr. World Famous Photographer. In the company of strangers, anyone can be who they want to be. Someone is a National Geographic artist (I hereby salute an unnamed friend who packed about as many chicks on a National Geographic hat he bought at a souvenir stand, and on a proper story about his world-famous profession, during our trip through Kazakhstan, as there are stars in the Kazakh night sky – it should be noted that the Kazakhs subsequently asked for money for this service, so it’s actually a fifty-fifty in the “friend vs. Kazakhs” match), someone a manager and someone a world-famous photographer. Well, it didn’t work out, try another time, you dumb Bulgarian.
I’ll put a plug in my left ear and compliment the Sultanate on her fresh bread. She smiles. At least someone’s normal.

Edit – answer to the title question: German.

Day 12 – 25 km (11 km forwards and 14 backwards)

Some days are like painted. Some days are just s*ite. So today, today is the es day.
I wake up at 5:00 in the morning. It’s raining. Six o’clock. It’s raining. Seven o’clock – it’s not raining! In a desperate rush, we try to eat, get in and pack up the camp, all at once. But before we can, it starts raining again. The saddles are wet. The tent is wet. Gear wet. Me wet. Everything wet. Café rolls right out with all the bags before we leave and runs up his ass. “Café be free, Café be fast!” Luckily, he just goes around the circle and comes back. Who would he bully if he ran away from the other horses?
The s*ite atmosphere carries over to the whole team. That’s the bad energy on the road. Once you let it in, it settles in and expands and expands until it’s all-consuming. It consumes all the smells, all the sights, all the wonders… You’re left with a little cloud over your head. And today that little cloud is with us steadily.
“It rains and it rains”, pissing steadily through the ropes of water for the third hour. My mobile phone and sat-nav are soaked through, so I try to take it out as little as possible. Behind a beautiful triple river we meet a stuck truck on a narrow muddy road. When things go s*ite, they go s*ite. We have a saying in Czech: “when you shit yourself, even a toilet will fall on you”. We spend the next half hour going around the Kamaz down a steep cliff and then back up again. “Where are you going?” they shout at us from the Kamaz. “Straight ahead”, I use my usual evasive reply. “It’s the other way to Songkul!” they shout. “Hahaha, funny”, I reply with a huff. That’s how they make fun of us.
In another hour we arrive in a beautiful valley. We make a photo stop while it rains steadily. So now straight or left? Only my GPS is broken. “Richard, will you check the GPS, please? Mine says we’re in the middle of nowhere.” Oh, shit. Oh, shit. They’re not both GPSes that are broken. It’s my routing for today’s route that’s broken. We’re totally fucked. I’m so pissed. Those Kamaz guys were right. It’s the other way around on Songkul. If we keep going straight, it’s 37 km further round. And if we go back, it’s 7 km further. The SEVEN kilometres I’ve been riding merrily for the last hour and a half to somewhere, not looking at the map because it’s raining. So it’s decided. And in the piss of the day, we’re going back again. A beautiful ride, 15 km in a torrential downpour, I can’t say. We’re camping eleven kilometres further than yesterday, at a turn off the road. Dear today, thank you, fu*k off, I’m sending a key fob.

Day 13 – 21 km

Adventure! Today we’re going up the road to the pass. And then we’re getting into an area where they have absolutely no maps anymore. I can tell by the contours that if we turn right after the pass in time for the Red Mountains today, and then turn left in time for such a wide valley tomorrow, we’ll just have to connect to the main bridge over the Naryn River in a few days. We just have to. Those contours looked nice there. Plus, the local printed maps showed a promo photo of a lake somewhere nearby (although no lake is marked on them) and that means that if there is a lake, there will be water! It saves us 84 kilometers on the asphalt, which I simply refuse to walk because the road is so boring and the locals drive like pigs.

But it’s not working today. After yesterday’s debacle, we started today with enthusiasm, but the average pace of three and a half kilometres per hour shows us that the mileage will not be any better today. Café is dragging himself like it’s going to die. At the pace of an average tortoise, our three horses are dragging themselves up the pass and then back down again.

After noon, the storm starts. A monstrous, dignified storm that gathers over the entire pass. We’re trying to ride it out. But you can’t escape fate and you can’t escape the storm. In the biggest piss we meet the only water flow from this morning – a frog stream running in the ditch. Since we have no certainty that we will meet any water today, we water the horses and start scooping green water into bottles. All of a sudden a truck appears and a twelve year old boy from the steering wheel says to us, “Is everything okay? Do you need help?” “We’re getting water,” I try to explain before the futility of my actions dawns on me. “The water is dirty, have a kumys!” He starts to persuade us and after some time of furious refusal we wave them off, a whole bottle of kumys in our hands. (“What are we going to do with it? I can’t drink it, I’d s*it myself instantly. And I don’t recommend it for you either.” “Then just pour it in the ditch.” “We can’t pour it out if we’ve got it out of the goodness of their hearts.” “If we don’t pour it now, we’ll pour it tomorrow.” “Tomorrow. That sounds like a compromise.”)

After a few more hours of following the contours, a miracle happens. A tiny, but crystal clear lake emerges in the depression below us. We’ve found it! We are saved for today. We have the daunting task of spilling all the green water and filtering new water directly from the spring. And look after the horses. Especially that one. We’re camping in a place with bushes today, so it’s a test of intelligence.
“Right, Cafe?”
“Café be big, Café be master, Café be strong.”
Well, in the intelligence queue, the horse was missing. Soon there’s a desperate snort.
“Huguhuhu! Café be tangled!”
Eight times around a bush…
“Café be hungry!!!”
“Cafe, just do eight laps around to the other side of that bush and you’ll be free”, I try to advise him remotely from the warmth of the sleeping bag. But to no avail.
“Huguhuhu!!! Hello! Café be here! Café to starve! Go quickly to the Café! Café to be tangled, Café to need untangled!! Hugh! Cafe be hungry!”
And so we do eight laps patiently around to the other side, in the naive hope that if I walk it a few times he’ll eventually learn. RKK passes the intelligence test with flying colors. What he tangles in his rope, he’ll untangle. Kiks got the patronage job without the bushes. And Café…… after getting out of my tent a few times, I’m just gonna give up. I’m gonna take a hammer, a rope, and Cafe’s horsepower. Together we’re gonna beat the s*it out of that bush.
Café grazes contentedly in the glow of the setting sun, rolling in fresh dirt. Maybe he’s not a stupid horse at all. Maybe he’s just extremely clever.

Day 14 – 31 km

The RKK is going like crazy. Right at the beginning of the day RKK jumps to the side and gallops a few times, and Café follows him, so instead of one crazy horse we have two crazy horses.

We ride through the valley to the village of Ak Tal. From there we cross the only existing bridge in the area over the Naryn River. I found the valley by following the contours – there is no road on the map…So it will be an adventure! Just to be sure, I check it out on the way by waving furiously at a guy on a motorbike who passes by. “Is there a road to Ak Tal?” I shout, praying to all the gods in existence. “There’s a turnoff after this big hill and a road from there,” he hollers back, taking a picture of us on his cell phone for a souvenir. And it’s a beautiful road here, so we’re trotting most of the time. Best choice. We’ll cover the whole valley in one day and save ourselves more than eighty kilometres on the road. We camp just outside the town of Ak Tal in the river valley. Only orange water flows here – the horses don’t drink it much, fortunately, but there is no other water.

In the morning Richard filters the water and I hold the three horses. From the saddle of the RKK. I’m gonna pick the prettiest grass for them. Now, eat here, you’ve got at least half an hour to eat before you go.

Only, it’s a society of mentally challenged horses. At the fifth minute of the meal, Café gets bored and bites RKK in the ass. RKK kicks him. And Kiks says, “Hooray! Anarchy! Punk and total chaos! That’s enough, grandpas, I’m leaving. I won’t be around with this bunch of over-aged morons.” And he’s off on his own around the lake. In vain I scold him, in vain I drag the two culprits after him, he continues to glide forward with the grace of a ballerina. “That’s enough of that, I’m off, there are plenty of better horses around. I’m young, I can do it myself, by myself!” But after a few minutes of chasing, disaster strikes. “Chrrrrrooo chrrr!” Kiks sees an old burnt out fireplace and a pile of rubbish in it. He grunts furiously. He turns around. “RKK?! RKK????” he yells, terrified. “What’s that? Will you save me? I didn’t mean it like that. You’re the best herd leader. Really!”

The RKK will finish him off with the calmness of an English lord. “It’s a bonfire, you little thing. What a herd I have. Come on, let’s go back.” And so we ignominiously drag the two robbers back to the beautiful grass. When we get there, the water’s not filtered yet.

Anyway, collective guilt, collective punishment – so you’ll just starve. And for the next few dozen minutes, the three of them stand in shame, heads together, nodding. I’ll give you food! There’ll be order.

Day 15 – 25 km

For the first time since the start of the ride we meet a shop. A lady of about 50 years runs out of the shop. “Gee, horses!”, gushes the disheveled Kyrgyz woman, “they are beautiful, can I pet the gelding?” Horse people are the same everywhere, in the Czech Republic or in Kyrgyzstan. No matter how many horses they have seen today, it’s always that childlike “yay” excitement again.

“You can, sure, just watch out for the black guy…” well, I almost don’t finish. Cafe will know we’re talking about him. “Café big, Café strong, Café show!” and with his ears laid menacingly halfway down his neck, he takes a big leap and bites into Kiks’ slender young mane. Kiks whistles and turns on his haunches, kicking at Cafe. “Assholes!” I groan, trying to keep the two thugs from the cowardly retreating RKK. The lady jumps in confusion, a few seconds late, and stares in disbelief at the horse’s black and brown mutter of teeth and hooves. Asshole is an international word, and it’s obvious that it’s probably not the first time it’s been used. Into this comes an old Kamaz on one side and on the other a battered Lada Niva that perhaps even remembers Comrade Lenin. The severity of the traffic jam pacifies both offenders and we move ignominiously from the middle of the intersection into the shadows towards the garbage container. Richard triumphantly brings five bottles of water, two loaves of bread, one salami, one cheese and one cucumber from the shop. A normal purchase after fifteen days in the mountains.

Ak Tal is a beautiful village. No tourists. No monuments. Just real beautiful Kyrgyz village life. Three drunks outside the shop drinking beer. A young boy driving a sheep down the road. Three little girls riding rusty old bikes back and forth on the main road. A cow carcass is rotting in a ditch somewhere. A lady hangs freshly washed laundry in her garden. Her daughter is hosing down a big red carpet. A passing žigul stops and its driver shouts unintelligible things at us. “Don’t let that horse drink from the puddle, he’ll die!” ends his long Kyrgyz monologue, which even an illiterate could understand. “Yeah,” I reassure him laconically while lifting the heads of all three horses out of the puddle. Fresh clean water is better, it’s just that since yesterday it’s all orange water or brown water…now choose, orange, brown or none? I haven’t conjured fresh water from my sleeve yet, unfortunately that won’t be until this afternoon across the Naryn River.

We’ll find the best place to camp in the world. At about 2300 meters above sea level, beautiful grass, right next to the river, and therefore of course lots of mosquitoes. But wonderful weather – for the first time in a while it’s really nice. The sun is shining and the breeze is blowing, it’s neither hot nor cold… We’re rolling around in front of the tent and the comfort, it’s endless. The horses have a nice pasture and the river is within reach. It reminds me of Siberia, nice nature, forests, flies, sun, breeze, mountain streams and no people.

In the evening, we’re going to wash in the river. It is so cold that I can literally just jump in and jump out again. “A bath doesn’t count as a wash”, Richard declares resolutely, but I’m a cakewalk, so I’ll just get all scrubbed and dirty…

We have a surprise in the morning. Café got allergic to mosquitoes – so you could say, in Czech, that he has a fly allergy. But there are no fly allergic horses in Kyrgyzstan, all such have been thrown into the sausage, so he must not be a fly allergic horse. Poor little horse. He’s spotted like a spotted quail. But what can you do, he can’t stay here another night with mosquitoes, so for his sake he has to move on to higher altitudes where there are no mosquitoes. Richard performs a magical saddling so that all the bites are out of the stress points. Will he make it through the day’s journey in good health? Nothing to do but pray.

Day 16 – 28,5 km

Café’s tired and he’s not going. It’s understandable, with all those splits. Poor little horse is dragging in the back and doesn’t look like he’ll get far. But a few more vertical metres and….
Song Kul!
We’ve arrived at our destination, Song Kul.
It’s blowing here, it’s a pancake and there’s nothing in sight. We’re sleeping in the yurt of Mirlan camp. It’s the closest and has the fewest horses around. Remember that name, especially never go there unless you want to end up like us the next morning.

Richard gets a medal for mounted of the year because Café is not scratched anywhere, not even on his withers where he had mosquito bites. It’s all flattened out, especially under the saddle. Anyway, we arrive and Café lies down and sleeps for about an hour. For the first time on the whole trip, he’s clearly fed up. Richard too, he wants a rest day here tomorrow. But as fate would have it otherwise…

Day 17 – 9 km there and 7 km back

We’re going to get the Internet. I need to get the horses back home, but we haven’t gotten a signal since we started riding. We’re leaving Mirlan camp to Ulush camp, which is supposed to be 3 km the other way. Kyrgyz numbers, it’s actually 9 km. They have Elon Musk’s starlink internet and sell it for 500 soms a day, when you can happily connect to the internet in the middle of nature. Actually, it’s great. Every herder has access to maximum information, every kid in the yurt has access to the whole infinite world of the internet. Practice your English in duolingo, study professional books, improve your skills…or read about how the earth is flat.

In the middle of nature on Song Kul, things change quickly. All the yurt camps around here are full. Busloads of Chinese tourists have already arrived here this year. It’s hell, it’s time to start exploring other destinations, this will be Bibione in a few years. One campsite is pretty empty. I’ll find the dirty camp manager.

“5,300 soms per person per night.” “Five thousand and three hundred?!” I blurt out in disbelief. “Yes,” the man chuckles shyly. “Hm, that’s over $50, that’s a bit much.” “For a person, not the whole yurt”, the man counters, laughing. I don’t look like I can live in a gold-plated yurt. Certainly not now, after all these days of sweat and rain. “And can we have horses here?” “No.” In horse country, I can’t have a horse in front of a Chinese yurt. Hm, nothing.

Ahead of us is a mini-camp with grey yurts. “So what’s here?” Three girls run out, about 15 years old each. “Sure. For 1,700 soma.” The obligatory question follows. “And can we have a yurt overlooking our horses?” “Sure, but the horses have to be across the road.” “So the horses can be here?” “And I’ll swing gracefully behind the white stone fence.” “Sure.” Okay. We have a home today. It’ll come in handy.

We embark on a well-acted theatre of unsaddling horses, unpacking bags and tying horses. Working together, we’ve whittled this evening’s work down to just twenty minutes plus pitching the tent and cooking dinner. Everyone briskly unsaddles their horse. We throw a blanket back on his back because he’s sweaty under the saddle and it’s windy outside. We throw the saddle and saddlebags in a pile. Next, we untie the saddlebags from the harness, take the saddlebags off the horse and unsaddle the saddlebags. “Yordam mumkinmi?” Can you help me? I ask the gentleman standing around, who watches idly as I try to remove the heavy cargo harness with my little hands like chopsticks. “Bu qyin.” It’s heavy. “Oh, yeah, yeah,” he says, and goes to help me, throwing the cargo satchel into a pile with one hand. Well, okay, it probably wasn’t that heavy, it’s just that I’m a blonde from the city.

Richard pulls out ropes, large iron qazyq pins and a huge orange hammer from his cargo bag. He throws the ropes in front of the horses and with the qazyqs and hammer carefully measures out twenty paces (my thirteen paces, his twenty paces, don’t look for logic in that) in the radius of a circle of the best grass for each horse. Needless to say, there are other rules to this – the circle must not end in a hill (in case the horse rolls so he doesn’t end up at the end of the rope in a slope), the horses must not reach each other so that they get tangled up, but must reach each other so that they can socialize (so we’re tying it “on the snout”, they can reach each other with their heads, but not with their feet), and ideally the lead horse of the herd should be placed on the side where there is danger, and even better in the middle between the two subordinate horses to give them peace and security throughout the grazing. In one minute thirty-five the qazyqs are in place in the grass and each is carefully marked with a ribbon, qazyq wrapper or orange hammer (there is nothing worse than searching randomly in the grass for a piece of iron eye eight inches in diameter with a knowing, that if you don’t find it, my dear, you’re in deep shit, because you have nowhere to tie your horse from now on, I know, because I once spent a whole afternoon in the rain looking for this iron).

In the meantime, I tie one rope to each horse’s front leg with a special knot (which I then secure with one extra knot) and make sure that the legs are changed regularly every day. All of this has to be done really quickly – so quickly that the horses don’t wander off, because frantically chasing horses around the steppe adds unnecessary work, time and stress. With the ropes tied, I lead one horse at a time to its qazyq, where I tie it with the dragon knot.

The guy watches the interplay in puzzlement. “You know, women don’t do that in Kyrgyzstan,” he says. “They don’t do what?” I ask him, confused. “Don’t they ride horses?” “They do ride, they just don’t tie their feet. Men always do that.” Oh, so we didn’t think about Kyrgyz gender stereotypes in our division of labor. However, this is the most efficient way overall. I only hit anything with a hammer about once every three blows, I was sort of lacking in the accuracy queue.

Day 18 – 0 km

The food poisoning from yesterday’s breakfast came from the first yurt of the camp. I have to say, I haven’t seen food poisoning like this in a long time. After the initial fever comes the delirium, and a few hours of talking completely out of reality thankfully subsides after a strong quadruple combination of Endiaron-Smecta-Black Coal-Paralen. I search for a thermometer, but to no avail (ours broke in the horse’s saddlebag and spilled into it, among Enteromulgat colic paste and a few other spills that just couldn’t handle the pressure of the other cargo in the gallop). We get Omniprazole from the yurt lady, which is supposedly a local antibiotic. The yellow and white powder cut off with scissors with no expiration date is very poofy, but we get so sick at night that we end up taking it. We’ll have bed rest tonight.

I’m going to water the horses at least. On foot? Five minutes on foot? Never!

In the land of horses, no one will walk. So I’ll get on the RKK and take Cafe and Kiks behind me. I’m taking inspiration from the Uzbeks (they can manage up to six horses like this). Cafe tries to bite or kick one of his “friends”. And since I have two horses behind me instead of one, I can’t afford any trouble this time. “Cafe!” I shout at him sternly. He looks at me reproachfully. “Me? Café be good. Café to always listen.” Oh, yeah.

The RKK is Mr. Leader – of course, like the lord, like the flock.

He proudly leads his panopticon straight to the water. “Come with me, homeboys, I know the way and I’m not changing direction”, he confidently marches. Through the broken tufts of marsh grass around us, we reach the beautiful pebble beach of Song Kul Lake. Café and Kiks immediately dip their noses in the water and start drinking. But alas, the lake has – who knew! – waves. RKK gets scared. “Save yourselves whoever you can, guys, everybody out, there’s a huge and terrible… two whole centimeters high water wave coming at us!”

Café and Kiks immediately jump out of the water. “Oh my God! A wave!” No matter they’ve been drinking happily through the past three waves. The boss said “watch out for the waves”, so we need to listen. But the thirst is stronger. And so I jump off the hysterical RKK, trying to get as far away from the water as possible, holding Cafe and Kiks in one hand, peacefully drinking water with waves (that’s like a beer with foam or a latte with a picture) and a flailing sorrel in the other. What can I say, he’s a red horse.

The next stop is a cove a few dozen minutes away, where the water has created a large muddy pool. Panopticon stands obediently while RKK greedily gulps down sips of the delicious, fishy and muddy brown water. Different horse, different tastes.

“All right, that’s enough, boys,” RKK declares, jerking his front leg out of the mud at the edge of the cove. “Let’s eat.” And our train obediently returns to the yurt of the camp at the command of the director, so that it can start its afternoon gluttony after the morning’s yawn.

On the way back, the RKK hacks every step. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh. Yeah, RKK, you got it tough. It takes a lot of effort to lead this squad. “What effort,” RKK replies, “I’ve got to pull this weight here in the saddle, and these two a***oles are taking it easy.” Well, thanks, horsey, for the compliment, I think to myself, now go eat. “Well, I’d better go. And to the new grass.” He announces directively, pulling his cronies a few yards away. “You can’t eat that, this old of my is shit.” I assume he means the grass. Which he’s shit on. With the local concentration of intestinal germs, I just hope that wasn’t a visionary prognosis for his rider.

Day 19

We go to the nearest yurt camp, which is at the turn to Kyzart. We ride over one that doesn’t have toilets nearby and look for another one. Toilets are quite essential for a person who currently uses them several times an hour. However, further on there are only ordinary private yurts that don’t even have a wc. And at the end – world wonder! A monstrous yurt camp with about sixty Chinese tourists who have arrived in several dozen off-road vehicles and are currently watching a demonstration of the practice of the national game of kokboru.

“Ey! Ey!” The rider on brown horse is calling to us. “Come to the yurt of Camp Aziz!” Come on, we’re gonna miss this one with three horses. The thought of getting up several times a night and shooing these cock-eyed stallions away from our horses doesn’t sound much like a relaxing night at yurt camp to me. Oh well, can’t be helped, the toilets will have to be far away. And completely against the principle when looking for a restaurant “where the most people go, go there” we look for a yurt camp where there are the least people, ideally no one. And this campsite fulfills that perfectly – we are the only guests here and we are asked a nice 1500 som per person with dinner and breakfast. “Jaksh, bolady”, I say to the lady, I don’t even want to haggle, even though I know that they shoot the price from the waist up by the face and we look like 1500 som max, rather less, after a month’s trip, so haggling would be possible.

“The horses must stay next to the yurt” is a more important subject of negotiation. The herdsman who belongs to the yurt camp has a different opinion. He sputters and gesticulates furiously. To give his Kyrgyz the weight it deserves. “Horses – impossible here – up better grass – must go up – I’ll take – return in the morning”. Since I understand every other word, exact agreement is impossible, so I have no choice but to remain 100% strict. I explain in Uzbek that the landlady told us that the horses would be next to the yurt, that there was good grass there, so we agreed and we want to see them. My Uzbek probably pisses him off even more than the content of the message. I don’t know why, but Uzbeks are really not favoured near to Song kul. He leaves twice and comes back with the same request. I end up saying “no” so many times that even a teenage kid would be ashamed of it… he mutters something about dic*s and goes off to herd sheep.

After an hour of rest, a local currant with two young tourists arrives on horseback and starts shouting at the landlady (it’s not a land, but a yurt, so a yurtlady) if they can sleep here. Oh no! Three extra horses? The idea of a quiet night ends right up there. I’ll run up on him. “What are the horses doing here? Where will you keep them overnight? We have our horses here. Won’t they fight?” The guy calmly explains to me that he’s going to tie up their horses’ feet, let them roam free in the pasture, and they definitely won’t fight (and thinks something about hysterical tourists).

You can see the difference here. Two guys, almost the same age, mid-20s. One speaks English, Russian, French and Kyrgyz, gets hosted in yurts and picks up hot teenage German tourists (with one hihi haha goes for a galloping ride around the area in the afternoon. The horses come back wet only under saddle, but how lady returned.. only he knows the magnitude. The other German girl is p*ssed off waiting alone in camp, where the average age of her fathers and grandfathers is, nothing comes of it). The second one can only speak Kyrgyz, swears and herds cows here at the yurt. As my grandmother, a teacher, would say. Children, learn.

The white stallion came to make friends. He took a look at our herd of three and had a clear idea – I’m not going to tempt the big black one in the back. You rusty one, you’re an asshole by the looks of it (RKK returned the thought by trotting right up to him with his ears back and his head down as far as the rope would let him). “Then I’m going after this brown currant first,” he decided. Only Kiks is a completely unconflicted horse, a master of passive aggression. Don’t mess with that. While he’s happily grazing next to the white stallion, the stallion shits next to him to mark the spot. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Kiks immediately started a reloading battle. It simply comes down to whose shit is up, wins. Stallion, Kiks, stallion, Kiks, game… stallion’s out of ammo. The master of passive aggression writes one zero in his journal with his hoof and the white stallion humbly pulls away.

But right in range of the RKK! And he won’t leave it to chance. He runs up to the white guy and after a few squeals, turns his back on him. And that’s what RKK is the master of again. He doesn’t like you, kicks your ass, and walks away. The big black Cafe won’t even get to the stallion. “Huhuhhhuuuu, bullyaa, stallion go to Café, funaa!” regrets Café’s missed opportunity.

Day 20 – 18 km

Last day. Damn, it’s been a short time!

After two days of hunger, Richard starts eating again. “Do you have any diet food?” I try to ask for at least dry rice. “No rice, but we throw some pancakes”, suggests the landlady.

“So that the throwing of pancakes don’t turn into throwing up” I commented on the choice of not very dietary food after a prolonged poisoning.

Café will perform its usual morning entertainment at the saddle.
“Huguhuhuhu! Café want to see friends!” And as usual, he gets away with his desperate yelling. Poor guy! How sad he is. Social deprivation. Horses have to live together in a herd. Romantically, I watch Caffé approaching the RKK, the sound of the water, like Jack approaching Rose to Celine Dion’s pu**y-ripping vocals. Will they touch? Love, butterflies? Will there be a kiss?
“Hey di*khead bite kick” a sharp cut interrupts the film music in which their heart will go on and on.
“Huhuhu. Cafe be sad, Cafe have no friends.”
Yeah. So to be forced into solitary again today.

The last eighteen kilometres, which we already know like the back of our hand, I am riding this part of the route for the third time. We ride from the coast of Song Kulu to the yurt in Kyzart and here we wait for the arranged transport of the horses back to the stable.

Café already knows where we’re going. “I’m reporting the loss of a pack horse!” It’s echoed continuously throughout the day, Café galloping around freely and throwing humps in a gleeful effort to spur the entire herd to a group gallop to today’s destination. Tell me how the horse will know. He just knows he’s done for the day. That horse is smarter than all of us put together.

bye, Kyrgyzstan! I’ll see you later. I look forward to next year.

“Short ride” Kyrgyzstan No.2 – Complete travel notes