Shamshy pass. Every time someone talked about this place, their eyes would get weirdly glazed over. And I’ve been looking forward to this mystical place all the way.
The road to Shamshy pass is a gradual two-day climb through a long river valley. It has a major drawback, and that is a suitable place for a tent. With three horses, you are somewhat limited in your choices, as a flat spot with a 60 metre radius of great green grass is virtually nowhere. So we camp (as is probably traditional) right on the road. After all, we haven’t met anyone at all in the past two weeks, so there’s no reason to go off the road.
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I’m on night duty today. That means I’m only half asleep, keeping an eye on what’s rustling outside the tent by the horses. If by chance a foreign stallion comes running in, it’s like he’s going to fight with our peaceful geldings, so I chase him back and forth in a merino shirt with half-mast pants in plus five degrees with loud foul music for half an hour in a mountain meadow, catch a cold on my back and finally chase him away with a swinging hammer. And the bastard comes running! A different one every time. Almost every night.
Around six in the morning I hear hoofbeats from the tent – I run out and to my great surprise a pair of completely strange horses, fully loaded with cargo bags, walk right next to the tent. The horses pass by without hesitation, as if it were the most obvious thing to do, to load the panniers on their backs in the morning and head off on their own down the road somewhere in the valley. Otherwise there’s nobody anywhere.
A few minutes later, a tiny old man appears on the horizon, urging a donkey, again fully loaded with stuff. “Probably some business trip, they have quite impractical shopping”, I think to myself, and waking up I start to brew my morning tea. The mystery is explained a few hours later, when I meet a group of roughly 100-year-old French tourists with a young Kyrgyz guide on a narrow ledge above the cliff. There are exactly six of them, as well as the bags on all the horses, and they are walking completely lightly. Just clothes and walking sticks. Confused, we stop right in front of each other. I wouldn’t have expected such a traffic jam here. Explaining in Russian, English or Kyrgyz that they have to walk past the standing horses on the narrow ledge, that it’s safer doesn’t make sense, they are French tourists, so if the French tourist doesn’t go next to the Kyrgyz horse, the Kyrgyz horse has to go next to the French tourist. Fortunately, my compulsive image of a crowd of French pensioners flying with a flourish one by one down into the abyss below the cliff like skittles after being struck by a gloating horse’s buttocks is not fulfilled by either horse.
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The narrow rock ledge widens into a rocky field and continues to a grey pass of fine gravel. We climb endlessly up a narrow path between huge, orange moss-covered boulders. The pass opens up to one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen, and perhaps ever will see. So here we are. Shamshy pass kos keldiiz. ❤️ I’ll have to come back here sometime.
