It seems that we were very close to Jalalabad and the road by-passed the city on its way via Karasu and Toktogul to Bishkek. We stopped for diesel at a small town and had an embarassing moment when the charming young man who filled the tank told us that they only take cash. So he got into the van and and directed me towards a bank in a quiet tree-lined street with rather modern-looking houses. It seems that small Central Asian towns are all pretty much the same, with a frenetic main street full of cafes, filling stations and all kinds of shops under a welter of advertising boards, and quiet residential streets away from the main street. The road climbed gently through a dramatic landscape of multi-coloured hills with a long lake of a bright ultramarine colour on the left. The lake was the reservoir of the Tashkumyr hydro station. After descending to Lake Toktogul the road passed many small restaurants advertising live trout caught in the lake. You choose your dinner from a shoal of fish swimming around in a big tank, and they catch the fish and cook it for you. We didn’t stop because we both feel squeamish about seeing a live creature swimming happily about and then passing a death sentence on it. You might think that we are a couple of soppy old buggers and you’d be right. At the eastern end of Lake Toktogul, the road leaves the bare brown hills and enters an idyllic oasis of forest and farmland before swinging round and running westwards along the northern shore to the small town of Toktogul. It then runs north up a long succession of gentle hairpins up to a mountain desert region almost completely devoid of vegetation. We passed the site of a serious accident where a huge lorry had burst a tyre and lurched across the road blocking it. There was a lot of white plastic on the road suggesting that a car had smashed into the lorry. Small vehicles could squeeze past the end of the lorry and back onto the road but other lorries couldn’t and there were long queues of lorries in both directions.
The scenery across central Kyrgyzstan is mesmorising with grassland stretching up the mountainsides to the very tops of the lower hills. The higher mountains have streaks of snow which occasionally come down to the road. There are many yurts giving shelter to the nomads with their huge herds of sheep, cattle and horses. They advertise small round balls of dried yogurt and other items of foodstuffs derived from their animals. The biggest surprise came after we had driven many miles descending from the plain when we suddenly came to some rather acute hairpins at the foot of a mountain which soared up into clouds. Having noticed small white specks crawling up the side of the mountain, we realised that the road went right over the top. Actually it went through a long, dark and very narrow tunnel with just about enough room for vehicles coming the other way to squeeze past. I was glad to get out of it. The temperature had dropped to 7 degrees from 38 earlier in the day. There was then a much shorter tunnel and we joined a long queue waiting to get through it. A container had become disconnected from its cab and was blocking one side of the tunnel. Having got through eventually we then followed perhaps 80-100 hairpins down to the bottom, by which time it was dark and the endless stream of headlights rushing towards us was getting me uber-stressed. Reaching the bottom of the mountain, we stopped and dived into a truckers caff where an utterly charming girl told us we could have soup or pastry. We chose the pastry which was layers of suet interspersed with potato, mince and carrots. It doesn’t sound delicious, but it was!. Genuine Uzbek truckers’ grub and we enjoyed every mouthful. The cafe was full of truckers, recognised by their inevitable huge paunch and they were very friendly. A large number of trucks were parked outside, waiting to climb the mountain in the morning. So we joined them and had a good night’s sleep.
Lake Toktogul
Bee hives
