Wednesday 19 August 2009

Day 33: home from home



Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan.
The Kyrgyzstani for pasty is 'somsat'. We discover this at lunch, when we pull over in a mountain town and pick up six of these dudes for about £2.50, with a pot of tea thrown in too. Way better than paying about £15 for a fashion pasty at Paddington station.




They cook these somsat in a mental oven, sticking them to the clay walls and scraping them off once they've baked. Aside from the attentions of the local drunk, who's intent on communicating with us via bookmakers' hand signs, it's the perfect lunch.

We walk off the pasty mong with a stroll through the local bazaar. The word bazaar always conjurs exotic images of silk road trading - east meets west in big trousers, to the tune of the snake charmer's flute. But at this bazaar the brilliant fabrics are almost outweighed by fake Chelsea shirts, Barbie bags and David Beckham notebooks. For anyone reading this in Cornwall, it's essentially like topping off your pasty with an amble round Par Market. Albeit with fewer lunatics or people selling hub caps.

We've been very taken with the hats in Kyrgyzstan...

So we seal our lunch break by buying a few of them. The next wedding I attend, I'll be rocking this bad boy...

It's a mileage day today. We've got to power on through Kyrgyzstan as quickly as possible. If we can get in and out in a couple of days, we'll have five days to get across Kazakhstan before our visas run out. That should give us a day's grace for admin issues or car trouble.

It's a shame to effectively bypass an entire country, but Kyrgyzstan is all about the scenery anyway, so driving through it is exactly what we need to be doing. We drive up into the mountains, which are fairly low-lying and pleasant, if a little samey. Hmm, I'd actually expected something more striking than this. Then we drive up into the mountains. Aha. That's better. This is absolutely stunning.





The only downer is the potential death element. All along the twisting mountain road we see the carcasses of old cars that have stacked it on these bends. Many are displayed as part of a 'keep your speed down' campaign.



Others are just left where they landed, completely destroyed then stripped for parts. We see another fresh crash - a truck is completely on its side in a ditch, its windscreen smashed in, cargo being loaded into another truck. Every couple of miles or so there's a wheel-change happening, a truck with a burst tyre, or women wandering around while a bloke tinkers under the motor. Still Mr Wazzboobleyoid rolls along.

We're well off the tourist trail now. It soon gets stormy, and lightning flashes over the mountains ahead, lighting up a spectacular sky. Those mountains are where we were planning on camping. Rain starts smashing down at the windscreen. This is odd. We haven't been anything but sweating our tits off for the past month. Now we're moaning about the rain and cold. Only earlier we were scoffing pasties. Where are we again?

We reach a town recommended in the morning by a huge man at the hotel, a place named Mouse, because the rocks look like cheese. There's nothing here, aside from the odd roadside cafe under the mountains. We pull into one and attempt to order food. We have no idea what's going on, so we just point to three random dishes, much to the amusement of the waitress in the Great Britain tracksuit top. So that'll be sheep's eyes, goat brain and yak nuts then. Actually we've done all right - four bits of chicken, a mutton broth and what looks like deep-fried spam. Ideal.



The place is full of families, and once it empties a little one group starts talking to us. They speak a little English, enough to tell us the town centre is up the road and that there's a hotel there. Then, outside, we go through the whole 'photos on the car' routine again. It takes about half an hour to leave. Lovely.

Then it's up the road a few km, where we spot a motel next to a fast-flowing river, right under the mountains. Those lightning flashes keep happening. The stars are amazing. We take the staff up on the offer of a beer, say hello to a group of Spaniards on a massive cycling trip, and then bed down for the night in a room with a proper power shower, and spiders with unfeasibly long legs.

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