Kyrgyzstan🇰🇬Spending the night in the gers of a family in the mountains

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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