Bishkek Musings

Given that we have some leisure time, I thought I'd put down some more of the things that I have been thinking about on the section since the last lot of musings.  They are all random thoughts so this time I will put them under headings and if possible add a photo or two to illustrate the point!  Sometimes there are no photos though. 

Mountain Passes
We have been over a number of passes recently as the countries we have been travelling through have huge ranges of the most spectacular mountains, some with snow on their tops, some coloured fantastically and all of them beautiful.  We have had to cross some of these ranges through passes going up to around 3380 metres.  You can get altitude sickness when you are over 2500 metres.  Fortunately none of us got ill, but I have to admit to vertigo when we crossed  a pass in Tajikistan.  There are no photos of this one as I  had my eyes closed for most of the time.  It was a very bad road, not tarmaced and with huge lorries travelling both ways.  It seemed to me that the edge was very close and in the back of the truck there is a lot of swinging and swaying. At certain points you could see thousands of metres down into the river valley below, including several lorries which hadn't made it.  Nick had very crushed hands at the end of that trip.  I decided then that I would ask Will if I could sit in the cab with him whenever we crossed high passes after that which he agreed to. You are closer to the ground in the cab and don't sway so much.  I did that for the next couple of passes but found that the new roads and tarmac of Kyrgyzstan's passes  meant that it wasn't nearly as scary so  managed some pictures!

Taxis
We have found that when we get into taxis we often know more about the directions than the drivers do. Taking advice, we always negotiate before we actually get into the cab, and agree a price, but several times know we have found that the driver is just kidding when he says that he knows the way to '.....' and that once you start going he gets on the phone to his friends to find out where you want to go.  We first noticed this in Baku in Azerbaijan when we were trying to get to the Turkmenistan Embassy and then to the truck.  Here we started drawing pictures of local landmarks hoping that would send them in the right direction, but even that didn't work!  In Samarkand, Nick and I had the experience of the driver inviting some other people to get in the cab too to give him directions, which was when we got out.  The next taxi we got into still didn't know where the hotel was, despite Nick having a map and the man borrowing my reading glasses.  It wasn't until the police came by in a van and looked in to see if we were ok, that the driver and I both jumped out to see where on earth we were going.  Fortunately the police knew and explained to the driver,  much to the amusement of the two criminals in the back of their police van.  The driver's excuse was that he knew where all the big hotels were but not the smae ones.  Lesson from this is stay somewhere expensive as the drivers like these hotels and know where they are! This was confirmed on arrival here in Bishkek, when we got into a taxi hoping he would take us to some cheaper hotels,  but he didn't know the way.  He even had a Bishkek A-Z in his cab. Eventually we just said, 'Take us to the Hyatt in the centre', and Hey Presto we arrived!  Most hotels give you a card with their details on which is supposed to help.  Some even have maps on the reverse.  But we haven't found them to useful so far. Most drivers can't read them, even in their own language/script and they don't understand maps.  It certainly makes you appreciate London cab drivers 'knowledge'.  Could be a chance to get a job training drivers across the whole of Central Asia.

Animals in theRoad
Sticking with the driving theme, it has been interesting the kinds of animals that just wander into the road in the different places we have gone through.  In Turkey the main culprit was dogs.  They are quite quick so I haven't managed to get any photos of them but once we got into Georgia, it was cows on the road.  I think we commented in an earlier post that Georgia was a bit Indian in feel and this was part of what created that feeling.  These Georgian cows were certainly not going to move for any amount of traffic, whatever speed it was going at:

And at some points along the old military road from the capital Tbilisi, they looked as if they had set up their home and the road belonged more to them than it did to the cars:

In all the places we have been to the drivers partake of mad over and under taking activities.  It could be on a blind bend, on one of the aforementioned mountain passes, where the white line is solid in the middle of the road, and, when a shepherd, cowherd, horse herder or whatever is trying to move their animals:

Then we got to the deserts of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and so the dangers on the road changed:

Now, in Kyrgyzstan, it is the horses you have to look out for:

And even the occasional yak:

But you never see dead things.  They all seem to avoid being run over or hit, unlike the foolish bunnies along the Weardale road.

Beemen
In every country we have gone through since Hungary, there have been beemen.  They all look the same and it seems that they could well be a group who can travel regardless of borders, doing their job of turning up on land and fertilising the crops and fruit trees.  Possibly they are like gypsies.  They seem to live in their transport which is often just a simple caravan, but sometimes a lorry and the bees are in boxes, usually blue, being carried from place to place.  As a side line, they all sell honey at the edge of the road, and we have stopped to buy some a couple of times.

Language
Finally, it has been fascinating to see that it wasn't just precious silks and objects and people that travelled along the Silk Route, but that language and words did too.  In Khiva there were lots of buildings that had great clay outdoor ovens in front of them.  We found out that these were called Tandurs, which seems very similar to the Hindu/Indian tandoor from where we get tandoori...the oven in which things are cooked.  Honey, in Kyrgyzstan, is called Me'D' (I can't find this letter - but it's supposed to be the Cyrillic letter for 'D', which looks like a capital A), so med/mead, close to mel and miel and the drink mead.