Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian country often mispronounced if not confused entirely with its neighbor Kazakhstan, might seem more like a plot device for the “West Wing” than a hot travel destination.
Roughly the size of South Dakota, Kyrgyzstan welcomed more than 1.2 million tourists in 2016. And while 84 percent of them came from nearby Kazakhstan and Russia, promises of ecotourism and yurt camping are slowly attracting visitors from Western Europe and the United States.
Issyk-Kul, one of the world’s largest alpine lakes, is the heart of Kyrgyzstan’s tourism industry. Soviet-era resorts line the lake’s north shore. Discos blast until the early hours of the morning and old women walk up and down the sandy beaches selling corn and cotton candy throughout the afternoon. At the far eastern corner of the lake, Karakol welcomes tourists year-round for paragliding, skiing, hiking, and traversing mountain roads in renovated Bukhanka trucks.
Along the south shore, a path winds through Skazka Canyon, also called Fairy Tale Canyon. There hikers relax in natural hot springs near a waterfall in Barskoon, and picnic near the Jeti Oguz rock formation. Recent pushes in regional tourism development have led a stream of visitors to Osh—a 3,000 year-old city with a holy mountain, historical marvels, and access to one of the largest bazaars in Eurasia—and Naryn, where visitors ride horses on three-day treks through the mountains.
While it’s (usually) possible to make reservations for guesthouses and tours, print out airline tickets, and estimate a time of arrival when visiting more popular destinations,. the majority of the country is not so easy to navigate —and most tourists miss the truest gems of Kyrgyzstan, which are harder to reach and worth the extra effort.
In July 2016, I decided to spend the weekend at Sary-Chelek, another alpine lake in Kyrgyzstan’s southern Jalal-Abad region. Many Kyrgyzstanis call Issyk-Kul the “pearl of Kyrgyzstan,” but for all its beauty, it remains particularly difficult to reach. Without a direct bus route connecting the north half of the country and the south, my travel companion and I would have to break up the trip into smaller intervals, with a mix of scheduled buses and hitchhiking..
We met in the capital, Bishkek, at the city’s largest bus station. There, we waited two hours for a taxi heading to Toktogul to fill with passengers—actually a pleasant surprise, seeing as we had been told the wait could be as long as four. Toktogul—a tourist destination in its own right, known for its massive reservoir and the production of honey—is a five-hour drive from Bishkek, easily the most reliable leg of the journey. Arriving at dusk and too late to catch a ride any further, my friend and I spent the night with a plan to be on the earliest bus departing the next morning.
The Toktogul bus station is unique, insofar as its three daily minibuses operate according to a schedule (in other parts of Kyrgyzstan, minibuses only leave when they’re full, which can take a few minutes or several hours , depending on destination and time of day). Our journey was delayed a mere 45-minutes by a detour to deliver a crate of produce for the driver’s relatives.
Hours later, the minibus deposited us at a fork in the road, and we watched the van shrink into the distance as it continued southward to Osh. We walked across a bridge to Tash Komur, a mining town bisected by the brilliantly green Naryn River. My friend wandered off in search of water and sugary treats, but returned 20 minutes later, waving and shouting that she’d found us a new ride in the form of an 18-wheeler. We settled into the semi truck’s cab and instantly got to know the driver, Alman, and the landscape, which transformed from Martian rock formations to rolling, grassy hills.
Alman wouldn’t be able to take us the whole way (aside from the physical challenge of getting a semi-truck up a mountain, buyers were waiting for his shipment of lumber further north), but he insisted on calling an English-speaking friend for us. The man, Temirbek, usually organized trips to Issyk-Kul for tourists, but had grown up in a village near Sary-Chelek and was determined to help us see the lake.
We were grateful for the connection, though not entirely sure whether it would lead to any logistical developments for our trip. As Alman pulled the truck to the side of the road, a minibus appeared in the rearview window; we waved it down. Lucky for us, the bus, chartered by 20 women from another village in Jalal-Abad, was going in the direction of Sary-Chelek. We were welcomed aboard, where Russian pop thumped through the speakers. The women cooed over us, planning which sons of theirs we could marry.
The van stopped for a mid-afternoon meal of watermelon and kymyz, fermented mare’s milk. After our third cup of the smoky-sweet drink, my friend and I began to worry that we would never make it up to Sary-Chelek. Our temporary hosts started to offer us food and space to sleep, but with perfect timing, Temirbek called back to let us know that Urmat, a former classmate, was willing to drive us up the mountain.
Urmat arrived a while later in a Soviet-era Lada. My friend and I climbed in among the heavy wool blankets and empty five-liter water jugs that also occupied the back seat. We sputtered up the mountain, stopping periodically to gather cool water from natural springs to douse the overheated engine. Urmat dropped us at a tiny house overlooking an alpine lake—just not the alpine lake we’d traveled so long to reach—and from there we pushed on, still in search.
We followed horse trails along a steep bluff until we finally reached the shores of our destination, where we gingerly dipped our toes in the freezing water and embraced the quiet. Sary-Chelek, which translates as “Yellow Bucket” in Kyrgyz, fits snugly into a small valley, much like water fills a pail. The deep green vegetation of the mountainsides mirrors perfectly in the still water.
A woman named Nurbu welcomed us to her hotel, a two-room cabin with no running water, electricity, or cell service. We stayed for two days, adjusting our sleep schedule to the natural rhythm of the sun and relishing in the bizarre series of events on our journey. . The heat, the uncertainty about where we were going and how we would get there, and traveling at the mercy of strangers—it was not always pleasant, but it was ultimately rewarding.
The magic of traveling off the beaten path in a place that’s already well off the path is that the experience is impossible to replicate—but why attempt to repeat something once-in-a-lifetime anyway?