“Short ride” Kyrgyzstan No.2 – Trip summary part one

The process of choosing the necessary equipment for our journey through Kyrgyzstan on horseback was long. This is the final selection.

Photo include: Horseshoeing equipment, irons to tie the horses for the night + ropes, a first aid kit for the horses (colic medication, colic paste, eye ointment, syringes, antibiotics two kinds, disinfectants different kinds, alamycin, antibiotic and antifungal ointment, bandages), saddles, bags, solar panel, water filter, Micropur tablets, mattress and sleeping bag, tent, pre-shelter for saddles, paper topographic map, satellite navigator with SOS helicopter, human pharmacy (bandages, dressings, personal medications, antibiotics, intestinal antibiotics, anti-diarrhea medications: smecta+charcoal+endiaron, probiotics, vitamin, ibalgin+paralene, patches), adventure menu one for each day, porridge for breakfast, cooker, gas cartridges, musli as snack, 12 foldable water bottles, powerbank, charging cables, headlamp+batteries, toiletries (towel, toothbrush and toothpaste, sunscreen 50+, comb, mini shampoo, soap, toilet paper, tissues). Riding clothes (chaps, chaps, Australian, helmet), three t-shirts, sweatshirt, down jacket, raincoat, leather straps to tie the bags to the saddle, whip (for emergency situations only), horse cleaning kit and weight for the bags.

In addition to the equipment for the Kyrgyzstan trip, we also need to fine-tune the equipment for the horses. There will be a few days of testing saddles, girths, cruppers and breast plate. We anticipate that the horses may become slightly differently muscled and might lose weight during the trip. The equipment has to fit at the beginning and also end of the trip, so you need to have some reserves. The basics are Kyrgyz saddle, biothane endurance breast plate, leather crupper, mohair girths.
We tuned the final set in cooperation with Spurny Saddlery, who made some custom modifications for us.

First test ride before leaving on horseback in Kyrgyzstan. There is so much to fine-tune.

Will the horses be rideable?
Barney, a 13-year-old sorrel, will be renamed RKK (don’t ask the meaning of the abbreviation, it’s short for “rusty Kyrgyz … well, you can figure out the last word)
Brown Kiks is a young four or five year old horse, saddled just before a ride.
Café is an old greaser who has been ridden by Americans on their long ride. He just has this fun habit of doing rodeo for joy, basically at every first trot or canter, which is not exactly ideal for a riding horse in the mountains. So he’s our pack horse.

Will the horses get along well? Will they adjust to each other’s pace? Will we be able to lead the black horse Café from the saddle as a pack horse even at the trot and canter?

So many questions and so little time for test rides…

The test rides went well. So off we go on our Kyrgyz riding adventure!
The ordered local transporter arrives an hour and a half early. This is such a classic, either it arrives hours earlier or hours later or not at all. Now we were lucky, arriving early is the best option.
Don’t be alarmed, this is the most luxurious horse transport car we could find. You won’t find any ordinary western style horse transporters here. They’re just not here. With a little practice, you can find a nice spot where the entrance is lower than the horses and maximize the safety of the entrance. Likewise, you need to choose your exit point carefully.
Traditionally, the locals don’t address this at all, so what you don’t look after yourself, you don’t have.
We’ve loaded up safely and we’re off.

The journey to our adventure takes place in good spirits.
The guys in the front sing Kyrgyz songs and we sing Moravian folk songs in return. We have a good six or seven hours of travelling ahead of us, so we can catch a lot of songs.
The horses at the back are happily sleeping on the new asphalt. It is being built by the Chinese and employing Pakistanis to build them. This is a common reality in Central Asia: the Chinese have a company, it builds roads in Kyrgyzstan, and only Pakistanis do all the work.

This picturesque place near the town of At Basshi will become our home for one evening and also the starting point of our entire ride. There is no phone signal in this whole area of southern Kyrgyzstan, so arranging anything in advance is impossible. You just have to come and see on the spot.

The head of the yurt camp is open to anything.
“Can we sleep here with the horses? And can we put them on your grass? And can we put them next to the yurt?”
“Anything is possible”, she replies in Russian, and I immediately know we’re in the right place.
“Unload the horses!” I instruct, while Richard has just prevented our horses from being unloaded into the pit latrine hole in my absence.
What you don’t watch… you almost have in the latrine.

Good morning, Kyrgyzstan!
We’re on our way.

On the first day, it takes us three and a half hours to pack all our stuff, saddle and get our gear on. Around 11:00 a.m. we cheerfully set off on our journey on horseback. We have about fifteen warm-up kilometres on the first day. Basically, we’ll start from the yurt and ride to the nearest water.

Because our route is primarily guided by the horses and their needs. Each day we need to camp in a place where the grass is as rich as possible so that the horses have something to eat and are comfortable. Because, as the old Czech saying goes: “a merry horse makes a merry rider“.

Okay, the saying doesn’t exist, I just made it up, but it might as well say it because it’s true.

So every day we make sure that the route leads to a place with great grass and ideally some nice clear water. It doesn’t always go together. Water is scarce in some parts of the trail, so the daily mileage depends on where the water is. If it’s close, we only go maybe 20 kilometres. And if it’s far away, we ride until we hit it. Forty, maybe. These are things you can’t plan ahead.

On our journey on horseback through Kyrgyzstan we experience endless peace.

You know that feeling, when you have no phone signal for a week, no one calls you, no one bothers you and you sit on the grass, your mind is calm and peaceful, you watch the horses grazing and you do not care about completely f**king anything at all?

If you don’t know it, you definitely need to experience it. 🐎

We spend whole days and nights with our horses while travelling around Kyrgyzstan. Gradually we get to know their different natures, find out what they like and what they hate.

For example, here Café. He likes to go on the road every day. He’s the perfect horse for a long ride. Every day he enjoys putting on his bags and going out for the day’s ride. He’s always eager to saddle up, even though we always saddle him last. He neighs excitedly every morning when he sees us get up. And… he likes to buck. He is just a bronc, he gives us a few huge bucks every day. And then we catch him galloping all over the countryside. That’s why he carries our load. I might have handle some of the bucks in the riding arena, but I guess it’s better not to be suicidal in the mountains. Or so Richard said. He’s the reasonable one.

Well, what doesn’t Café like? He hates other horses. He just hates them. Sometimes he’ll take a chance and scratch them two or three times. And then he bites a hole in their neck. He chases the mares round and round till they fall off. He kicks the geldings. And he beats the stallions, too. He actually hasn’t noticed he’s a gelding yet.

And then there’s the RKK pro.
It’s easy there, he likes the quiet and the grazing.

And he hates everything else. People, the road, the saddle, the horses, the mornings, Café, me, Richard, the bags… everything. But what a reliable riding horse he is! He works without reins, on a thought, he walks fast and he’s a gaited horse.

Together with Cafe, they make such a yin and yang friends. One is a complete a***ole, but he’s a happy, enthusiastic and positive horse and the other is a reliable, 100%, perpetually pissed off pro.

Brown Kiks is a young horse, very sensible and reliable, master of passive aggression.
“Oh, that was a fly. That shouldn’t have been your leg. I accidentally stepped on your foot with the horseshoe, sorry.” is one of his favorite tricks to try at least once a day.
“I would have gone, but I got tangled up. Really. And now, too. And now even more. I tell you, the more I try, the more I get tangled up. It’s awful. I can’t go now. I can’t do it at all. And now I can’t either.” is the second most popular trick.

And what doesn’t he like? Walking downhill. Walking downhill is the kind of thing where you’d rather leave it to the nearest Kyrgyz and take a donkey in exchange. Kiks can’t walk downhill. With or without a rider. We argued for a long time why he can’t do it anatomically, but we still couldn’t figure it out. However, his downhill pace of 2 kilometres per hour is hell to go through if you want a great horse for the straights and uphill trails.

Our little horse Café likes one more thing while travelling through Kyrgyzstan: he likes to lie down.
Every morning he lies down until we pull up the saddle.

The other horses learn this from him, and so we regularly have a lazarette of three purring horses, warming themselves in the sun, happily sprawled out in front of our tent every morning when the sun comes out.
“We need to rest, we’re going far again today”, RKK whispers to them at dawn. I am sure. I heard him.

The first part of our route through Kyrgyzstan on horseback leads to the Arpa plateau.
Arpa (Kyrgyz for “barley”) is hidden between two mountains that converge at its end. All in all, it forms a kind of mountain horseshoe, within which Arpa lies.
It is located at an altitude of around 3000 metres above sea level, so the ideal weather for a visit is in June and July. To enter, you need a border permit, which you can get in Bishkek.
It’s a magical place because, as the location suggests, the entrance to Arpa is only from one side. This gives the impression of an isolated peninsula, with beautiful and friendly Kyrgyz island herders. It should be noted that only rich herders and rich herding families live in Arpa. The climate here is rainy and there is the best summer grazing in the whole wide area. But such a rich Kyrgyz herding family does not have a villa or a house with a Jacuzzi. Like other families, they have a completely ordinary yurt, only bigger, nicer, and with perhaps a thousand-headed herd of animals. They need to be fed somewhere, and Arpa is a place where the summer grazing is almost endless.

On a mountain expedition on horseback you need to have all your food for the whole expedition with you. With horses, it’s hard to stop at the supermarket, get in a taxi to go shopping or hitchhike with locals going to markets. When travelling with horses you simply have to be with your horses 24/7.

After much counting of carbohydrates, proteins, kilojoules, vitamins and gas cartridges, we calculated that a normal diet from the store would weigh somewhere around sixty kilograms for two people. Our pack horse can’t carry that in a saddle bag (the “dead weight” should be 40 kg max, while an agile, experienced rider might be twice that), so we need to choose alternatives with the same amount of nutrients but significantly less weight. With freeze-dried food we get to about twenty kilos of complete diet. And minus four cartridges of gas. We’re clear – our packhorse will appreciate the pounds saved every day.

In a long blind taste test, Adventure Menu CZ/SK won without hesitation, especially with their chicken korma and tikka masala. So we packed a full menu of freeze-dried dishes from them to go.

The Arpa Plateau is also an ideal place to visit because it has great terrain for riding.
The gently sloping plain offers the opportunity to ride at a trot or canter for virtually unlimited lengths of time, depending on the strength and ability of the horses. The arpa is some forty kilometres in length. So we enjoy it for four days – two days there and two days back.
In addition, there are no major marmot holes in Arpa (you would be surprised, but marmot holes can slow you down extremely – they are very dangerous and so you have to walk over them in walk).

Arpa is located in the border zone next to the border with China. Along the way we encounter a huge number of ruined bunkers, trenches and military bases. None of this is on the map, of course. For example, this former base is marked as a cemetery.

Arpa offers endless views of the empty mountains and wild nature.

Richard, Kiks and Café in the beautiful countryside of the Arpa Plateau.

Pink Lake in the Arpa Plateau.

Café relaxes and enjoys succulent grazing with a view of four thousand metres high mountains in the clouds.
We tie the horses to Kyrgyz metal pegs (basically a roxor with a little modification) called Qazyq.
There are several methods of tying the horse, which vary by region and also by the preferences of the particular Kyrgyz horseman.

Circular ties for qazyq and rope

Halter tie. You hammer the qazyq into the ground, tie it to the swivel and from the swivel to the halter. Done. A modification is a the same but with the collar.

Tie with the front leg. You hammer the qazyq in the ground, tie it to the swivel, and from the swivel tie a special knot on the front leg just above the pastern/sesamoid bones. There are quite a lot of things to take care of here: the rope must not be too tight so that it doesn’t press on the tendons but at the same time it must not be too loose so that it doesn’t fall on the pastern bone itself. The legs should be rotated regularly every day. The horse must not be tied in such a way that the rope ends in a slope (if it rolls at the end of the rope, it must be on a flat surface so that it can lift himself without any problem). For the same reason, horses are never tied by the hind leg – there is a risk of injury when rolling, rearing, kicking, etc.

We use the second method because our horses are used to it. They stood tied this way even in the pasture before our ride. Most horses already know to the inch the exact length of their rope and are very careful to stop in time if there is any running around qazyq.

The horses need, depending on the richness of the grazing, a circle with a radius of about 15 metres per night. Less so when the pasture is rich. When the grazing is poor, you just have to wake up in the middle of the night and tie your horses to new circles.

Tie leg to leg or head to head.

This is a favourite method of the Kyrgyz who don’t want to or can’t carry several kilos of metal qazyqs, a hammer and fifteen metres of rope for each horse. One or two pieces of short rope per horse is sufficient. However, I really don’t like this method because here, unlike the methods above, there is some pressure on the horse’s tendons with every step. And we want to eliminate as much as possible the possibility of the horse pulling or bruising a tendon. Probably the worst way for the tendons is one hind leg short to both front legs – yet it is used quite commonly in Kyrgyzstan. And it’s also quite common for horses to go lame from it. So I always explain it to all Kyrgyz people (but who am I to explain bullshit to them with their thousand year old tradition), usually to no avail, but I still have to…

Another base, with beautiful mountains in the background.

During the journey through Kyrgyzstan on horseback, we take regular breaks to get water. On average we take about twelve litres for two people for two days. We try to always carry a reserve of at least six litres in case we don’t encounter any water along the way for one full day. And that has paid off several times – we’ve either encountered no water or water so dirty that it was undrinkable.
We always filter the water through a filter and throw in Micropur. It seems like unnecessary paranoia, but when you get diarrhea while riding, you really don’t get anywhere that day. Hop on, hop off, go to the bathroom, hop on, hop off, go to the bathroom, you’re going to have horses marching around and, heaven forbid, running off when your pants are at your ankles. And you still need to get to good grazing, you can’t just slap your tent up where you’re about to get a tummy ache.
So we try to prevent problems as much as possible. Even at the cost of having our water filtered, pill-popped, and if it’s extra nasty, we boil it at the end.

You want to go on an expedition? Next year will be Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan 🙂
To be continued in the second part 🙂