Holiday in Central Asia (10): back to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan
After two days on the south side of Lake Issyk-Kok, today (Day 9), we were returning to the capital Bishkek. The day did not go according to the programme but it was interesting nevertheless.
The programme had us breaking the journey half way round the northern side of the lake to visit a complex called Rukh Ordo near Cholpon-Ata which depicts Kyrgyz legends, but the site was being visited today by foreign delegations and so was closed to the public.
Instead Olga suggested a visit to a location just outside Karakol: the museum, monument and grave of the Russian explorer Pristina Przhevalsk (1839-1888) whose name was used by the Soviets to rename Karakol for the communist period. The museum has a giant map filling a whole wall which depicts the routes of his four expeditions to various parts of Central Asia when it was largely unknown outside the region.
We still travelled along the northern side of Lake Issyk-Kol and we still stopped in Cholpon-Ata for lunch. But afterwards Olga proposed a short addition to the programme: a quick look at what she called “the museum of the open sky”. This is an extensive field of glacial boulders, many featuring petroglyphs, especially from the period of the Scythian era (7th C to 3rd C BC).
We had left Karakol at 8.45 am and were back at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Bishkek at 7.10 pm – a journey of 420 km (260 miles) which took us ten and half hours (but with four stops). At the hotel, we reconnected with group members Charles & Nova whom we had left four days ago and were pleased to find that Charles was now recovered from his bout of covid.
However, over dinner at the hotel, the oldest members of the group almost passed out and then repeatedly vomited. An ambulance was called and he was put on a drip.
I always knew that this was going to be a challenging trip …