After visiting numerous Beeline offices in Georgia on the way out where a succession of young ladies struggled to make the mifi work, we finally discovered from yet another young lady at the Beeline office in Cholpon-Ata that Beeline sim cards don’t work in Huawei mifis!!!. She sent us next door to the O! office where a very pretty young girl got me onto the internet in about two seconds flat. We then went across the road to the supermarket and met her again, to be told that I had left the mifi in her office. I get dafter by the day.
We then drove to see the petroglyphs a couple of miles north of Cholpon Ata. The pictures of deer, dogs, hunters and a camel caravan were scratched onto huge glacial boulders between 8th and 5th centuries BC. The best example is of long-horned ibexes being hunted by tame snow leopards. They were cut by the Saka people before the arrival of Kyrgyz nomads although some are dated to the 5th-10th centuries AD. We then drove to the Russian orthodox church which was closed according to the little old lady who looks after it. My laptop then fell off the van seat where it was charging and the charger bust. The girl at O! said there would be a Dell shop in Karakol at the east end of the lake so we drove there. It was called Przhevalsk during 1939-1991 after the Russian explorer Przhevalski who lived there after the town was founded in 1869 after Tsarist Russia absorbed Central Asia. There was a beautiful orthodox cathedral made entirely of wood and built in 1895 after an earthquake in 1890 destroyed its predecessor built in 1878.
Looking for somewhere to sleep we turned into what looked like an abandoned filling station, but an unprepossessing youth came out and told us we couldn’t stay. So we carried on and turned up a side road where we spent the night beside an abandoned factory.
