Kyrgyzstan
Spending the night in the gers of a family in the mountains
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Johan Kruseman
Updated on 8 August 2024
Updated on 8 August 2024
Next on the agenda was Lake Song-Kol. Don’t be alarmed by the word ‘agenda’; it’s more like a list of places you want to visit that need to be done in a certain order because they are too far apart to visit at the same time. Armed with offline Google Maps, I embarked on a three-day ger trek into the mountains. Even though I initially took the wrong valley and was later delayed for an hour by children who showed me in a playful way that a washing machine is so 2014 (just throw your clothes upstream in the river and wait for them to come back to you), I managed to reach a few gers before dark, where I was warmly welcomed with kymys. To their bewilderment, I had to explain that I preferred to skip this delicacy, but I managed to win back their appreciation by gulping down 10 cups of tea greedily.
Without a power outlet in the ger, I let my Waka Waka convert the last rays of sunlight into new juice for my iPhone while playing some music from my library. However, this required me to explain to the family’s children how I could turn sunlight into music. My book received even more admiration because I miraculously managed to turn the pages. At first, they didn’t know whether to attribute the talents to me or to the book until they realized that they could also perform this miraculous feat by simply pressing a finger on the screen of an e-reader.
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Traveled route: Bishkek, Ala Archa National Park, Kockkor, Song-Kul lake, Beltam Yurt Camp, Fairytale Canyon Skazka, Karakol, Altyn-Arashan, Cholpon-Ata, Jalal-Abad, Kazarman
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A sudden frisbee ban in the mountains
After a night and a kind of porridge with horse milk for breakfast, I headed to the next ger where we spent the evening playing frisbee brought by two Israelis. The children quickly caught on to the game, but at one point, their father came out to sh
Kyrgyzstan
Did this story inspire you to go to Kyrgyzstan? Read more on what Kyrgyzstan has to offer, what the best months are for visiting and check the handy links for backpacking there.
