to near Bashkaingdy: up and over that hill!

August 13, 2016

“At least we are cycling even if it’s on a bumpy road. Asphalt might have been too much for us to take right now” Patrick says as we are back to a main road, leaving the “shortcut” road behind us. A painful though rewarding ordeal that we endured.

No trucks for us today! Not that there was an opportunity for a ride, we had made up our minds to push across this mountain by ourselves. And walking we do, there are only a few short sections we can climb on our bikes and pedal, the rest we push.

There are two summits to this pass, the first one slightly higher than the second, and in-between a short downhill. There are some yurts and lots of sheep and guys on horses. Nice campsites too along with plenty of mountain streams.

We take some lunch on the second summit and start the downhill. There are some steep sections that we have to walk, but most of it is ride-able. Patrick notices a grinding noise at his front brakes and finds the pads worn to the metal backing. We picked up some Indian brake pads in Delhi and they will have to do from here to Bangkok where we have more bike parts waiting for us. We reach the “main” road which is not as “main” as we had imagined: it is also gravel, but a lot wider and smoother and it follows a river valley.

Our original plan was to go about 5km west to Kiezil Oy, a town which might, or might not have a guesthouse. We need a shower after bathing in rivers, lakes, mountain streams or irrigation ditches the past 12 days. But even more we need electricity to charge our tablet and netbook computer. The tablet is important for its GPS, the netbook is used to write our daily journal so we can copy and paste later into CGOAB. But we would have to come back these 5km tomorrow morning on our way east, and we hate to backtrack. Plus it is only 11:30 and Chaek is only 42 km away. Maps dot me shows a guesthouse and a homestay there…. So we head east, downstream along the river. We meet two Austrian motorcyclists, who camped and shared a bottle of vodka with Jo last night! Jo it seems is only a day ahead of us. Rumor is that the vodka made Jo jump into the river fully clothed….. We must get all the details later…….

We push on and get to Chaek, only to find a lot of liquor stores, a drunken lady that wants to kiss Patrick, and a guesthouse whose sign along the main road has collapsed and no sign at all at the actual house. A local boy tries to help and points to the house. No-one answers the doorbell so we move on. The homestay is not to be found. We don’t like the atmosphere in the town and decide to ride on and find a place to camp. As we ride on a storm is coming up behind us, we get a few sprinkles but mostly a strong tailwind that pushes us along.

We have no luck finding a secluded site with a river nearby, the main river is now way down amongst farm fields and there just aren’t that many side streams to cross. The road is a lot busier so we want to be hiding somewhat and there are a lot of houses. In the next town we fill our water bladder so we can now “dry-camp” i.e. we don’t need a river, just some trees or a hill to hide us. Finally we spot a dirt road headed off just before a cemetery at the next town. It leads across a field to a hedge row where we find a grassy flat spot. There is even a small stream!

It starts to rain now so we pitch the rainfly and seek shelter. In Patrick’s opinion it does not make sense that most tents require you to pitch the inner tent first and then throw the rainfly over it. When pitching or taking down your tent in the rain you always get your inner tent and therefore the rest of your stuff wet. One of the reasons we chose our Hilleberg Staika is that the poles go in sleeves in the rainfly and you can pitch it first. So we sit under the rainfly and eat again a basic meal of salami, cheese and bread, but tonight we have a 1½ liter bottle of beer to supplement it!

When we decided to get off the main road and take the “Toluk shortcut” we thought it would save us some time. What it did was get us off the busy main road between Osh and Bishkek. It did save us about 100km cycling as well, but we could have certainly done the main road a lot quicker than our “shortcut”. The reward though was in seeing the Kyrgyzstan high country with its rolling green hills, the snow capped mountains, the yurts and the guys on horseback with their traditional head gear. As Jo said of a favorite quote, “Travelling lets you see a thousand lives you might have lived”.

So yeah, it was worth it, yet very hard and we happy to be done with it.