I follow the MoskvaDown to Gorky ParkListening to the wind of change… Although I did not follow the Moskva like the Scorpions, I did end up in Gorky Park but only in the former capital of Kazakhstan, Almaty, a city name whose name essentially means “apple”, due to it being the area of origin for certain varieties of…
Category: Asia
Crossing the Kyrgyz-Kazakh border
After returning from Cholpon-Ata and staying in Bishkek for the night, I made my way across the Kyrgyz-Kazakh border and toward Almaty. I had a little scare crossing the border because I thought I lost my marshrutka group and my ride. This is how a border crossing works in a lot of Asia; your shared ride arrives…
Lake Issyk-Kul, Kyrgyzstan
Boarding a marshrutka from Bishkek, I took the 6 hour journey to check out Lake Issyk-Kul. While many people choose to make a clockwise or counter-clockwise journey around the massive lake, checking out different perspectives from different towns (with the aim of passing through Karakol, east of the lake, a favorite launching-off point for hikes in the beautiful…
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
Naz Gul called a taxi for me to take me back to Bazar-Korgon where I was supposed to find a connecting ride (in the form of a shared minivan ride, or as they’re known in Russian, “marshrutka”) to Bishkek, an 8+ hour journey. Due to a misunderstanding, I found out I had to pay for…
Arslanbob, Kyrgyzstan
After a series of marshrutka rides taking me from Osh to Jalal-Abad to Bazar-Korgon, I entered the Chatkal mountain range and into a region famous for its expansive surrounding walnut forest, one of the largest in the world. My destination was a small, rural village called Arslanbob. After getting dropped off in the village center, I went…
The conversation in the Lada
“Ya ne ponimayu.” No matter how many times I repeated that phrase (and with a smile), the guys in the Lada kept speaking Russian to me. “Guys, I don’t understand!” I guess they believed that with enough persistence, I would finally give in, admit I do speak fluent Russian, and have a conversation with them….
Osh – and where we all said goodbye
Back in 2010 when I first set off to travel the world, I met some guys in a hostel in Turkey who had cycled all the way from Germany. Back then when I first knew that people could ride that far, and even now, after meeting many others who’ve done long-distance bicycle journeys, I am…
Keer-geer-stan – The Journey to Osh
I pride myself on being a decent speller. After all, I was once a reserve on my 3rd grade spelling bee team, combing the Oxford dictionary to learn and memorize multi-syllabic words that I or most normal humans would never use in our daily lives from the day the spelling bee competition ended. (We didn’t…
The Highway of Dreams
One way to experience the legend of the purported Eighth Wonder of the World, the Karakoram Highway (or KKH for short), is to travel from Kashgar to the town of Tashkurgan. Although Tashkurgan itself isn’t much of a destination, it’s a great place to rest for the night after a six-hour journey. I’d been told that there…
The Kashgar Livestock Market
As I showed a taxi driver a picture of the Kashgar livestock market I found on the internet, I told him, “Wo yao chi zhe bian” (“I want to go here.”). The Uyghur-looking driver looked at me and replied back in Mandarin as we looked at each other, him in a questioning and I in…