Over the last week, I truly have started to see more of what the great nation of Kyrgyzstan has to offer. Basically I have been travelling around as much as I can via marshrutka and/or shared taxi, aka public [intlink id=”1033″ type=”post”]transportation in Kyrgyzstan[/intlink]. And… this country is really gorgeous!! Who knew? So for this blog, lets start at the start with my trip to Jalal-Abad Kyrgyzstan!
Against all common knowledge, and opposite to what the CBT guy in Osh says, there is a marshrutka that leaves Osh city at 7:15am every day, bound for Toktogul. Toktogul is a small town, of about 20,000 people, in the northern part of the Jalal-Abad oblast. Now you can be in the Jalalabad oblast about an hour out of Osh, but of course, Toktogul is on the opposite side of the very large oblast. Classic.
Travel in Kyrgyzstan- Trip to Toktogul
To start my trip around Kyrgyzstan, Toktogul was my obvious first target. Even though it was 8 hours away, mainly through the Jalal-Abad oblast. Good thing I can stare out marshrutka windows! So after getting myself on the marshrutka to travel to Toktogul, I settled into a seat, which I chose because it was a single and next to a window that actually could open (thinking forward 5 hours for when that then chilly marshrutka was going to be a sauna of human sweat), and we were off, north bound. Well kind of Northeast, the road that runs North to South between Bishkek and Osh has to make a pretty wide curve to avoid barging though the Uzbek border.
The trip through Jalal-Abad to Toktogul was fairly uneventful. We stopped for a breakfast break in Jalalabad city, where I ate Kyrgyz noodles with a man whose own breakfast of champions was a chicken leg and a couple shots of vodka. An artist also tried to get me to buy a large, framed painting of horses galloping across the Kyrgyz landscape. As if that’s what I needed at that moment. I politely declined.
When the marshutka did heat up past the point of comfort, I slid my window open a bit, only to have the obnoxious kid behind me reach over my head to slide it shut. Apparently he didn’t know how cranky Canadian girls get when they can’t breathe. I opened it again and smacked his hand away the next time he tried.
There was also a really adorable child, about 15 months, on the marshutka. He went from wearing polar fleece, footie pyjama pants, to nothing at all. Which took up about 20 minutes of my mental thought process: “What happens if that kid pees, or worse, on the floor of this marshrutka?” He didn’t! Phew, bullet dodged.
Toktogul Town – A Village in Town Form
Once I arrived in Toktogul, the day was beautiful and sunny and I was looking around for the Toktogul Reservoir. Because we had all been told that Toktogul was ‘on the reservoir’. I didn’t see one. So apparently the town of Toktogul used to be near a lake, but then when the Soviets flooded the area to make a legitimate reservoir, they moved the town back. So it’s a solid hour walk to get to the reservoir from town. Mind=blown!!!! Seriously.
But my friend Marta who lives in Toktogul, and is who I stayed with, showed me the sights of the town, we chatted with various people, and we generally meandered around. Toktogul is a nice little town in Jalal-Abad, surrounded by landscape that I could compare to Eastern Washington/Oregon, with golden rolling hills. Marta lives with a lovely Kyrgyz family, of all women, who welcomed me to town with a meal of oromo and chai, you don’t get better than that! It’s really fun to see where and how other volunteers live, and it’s amazing the diversity of our sites. As they say, every volunteers experience is different, and it’s great being able to even just get a taste of how other people Kyrgyz lives have evolved in their 5 months here.
The Toktogul Reservoir
The second day in Toktogul, Marta and I walked out to the reservoir, which as I said is about an hour walk down a dusty road. In the sun. We passed a donkey at one point and thought that could have been a good investment. But the walk to the reservoir is beautiful, through fields and crops, with the lake slowly becoming closer. And by slowly, I mean there were times that it didn’t appear to be real because it felt so far away. There were thoughts, and legitimate conversation, that the reservoir was actually a humongous oil painting and our eyes were being tricked by a cruel mirage. Finally we arrived at the water and spent 2 hours sitting lakeside, eating cheese and kilbasa, enjoying the sun, with feet in the water, basking in the glory of our successful walk down a long road. We also enjoyed watching a bunch of jegeets drive down to the lakeside, and promptly get their car stuck. No we did not go over to offer assistance.
Staying in Toktogul was a great start to my trip north. It’s a calm town, very different from Osh, so it’s always great to see the variations of landscapes and ‘city’scapes that one country offers. Driving through Jalal-Abad oblast, you go through different zones and the Kyrgyzstan scenery never really gets boring. Even though Kyrgyzstan is a relatively small country, (someone said it’s the size of Nebraska… though I don’t really know how big Nebraska is!), the variations in land and people are incredible. And there is no better way to see those variations than from a marshutka window!
Travel in Jalal-Abad Kyrgyzstan
The reason the jegeet wanted me to close the window is that there is a very dominant thought among the Kyrgyz population, that wind makes you sick. Any kind of wind. So an open window can be seen as a death sentence. At one point in PST I had a cold, and my host ata said it was because I slept with my window open. Probably not. And also, if that window wasn’t open, I would have died of suffocation and heat exhaustion long ago. Other popular health paradigms here are that sitting directly on concrete will make a girl or woman infertile, and my now personal favourite, is that by not wearing socks you will not be able to have babies. Which doesn’t sound like an overly reliable method of birth control.
So far I haven’t thought I was going to die on a Kyrgyz marshrutka (except of course from heat). I’ve had pretty sane drivers and decent roads, especially the roads through Jalal-Abad oblast. And really I don’t think you can get worse than those [intlink id=”846″ type=”post”]roads in Nepal[/intlink], gives me anxiety just thinking back to them!
Marta lives near a small corner store. The woman knows which kind of ice cream Marta always gets, so when I went in with Marta, the woman jumped up, found two of that same ice cream and rung us up. This shows two things: A) All westerners like the same ice cream; B) Marta eats too much ice cream. It is a good ice cream bar though!
A lot of the Jalal-Abad landscape photos in this post were taken from the window of a marshutka. Go me!
My journey after Jalal-Abad took me further north, into the wilds of Talas, a little visited oblast that is absolutely gorgeous and happens to have a few things I adore, like mountains, a planned Ladies Night, and two of the Kenesh 4 (Anna and Tori, yay!!!!!) More from [intlink id=”1018″ type=”post”]Talas[/intlink], next time….
