Postcard from Bishkek

  After we had built our hotel in Bishkek, the Silk Road Lodge, I found I had two places of work, (the office where the Tour Department was based and the hotel itself), and I began a routine of walking between the two. On the short walk I would often meet a man on a […]

Towards the end of the twentieth century, the Federal Emergency Management Agency of the United States, (FEMA), apparently produced a report listing the three most likely catastrophic disasters that America faced: A  terrorist attack on New York; A major earthquake in San Francisco … and A hurricane striking New Orleans. Since then we’ve experienced the […]

Uranium is a silvery-grey metallic chemical element which is generally known due to the fact that it is mildly radioactive and for is used in the nuclear industries – including for nuclear weapons. Uranium is mined in various places throughout the world and some sites in Kyrgyzstan were mined during the soviet period, but uranium mining […]

The existence of mountains implies that there are valleys and passes. Many of the valleys are small (short and narrow), especially where they have been created by a mountain stream cutting through the rocks, as it rushes down steep slopes from its source (which could be a spring, a glacier or from a lake).  Woods […]

Kyrgyzstan is known as a mountainous country – with over 90% of the landscape lying above 1500m. Although this is true, it can be easy to overlook the fact because even at high altitudes there are meadows – and plains. We are sometimes asked for quite specific details about a tour itinerary.  For example, trekkers and cyclists planning […]

Kara Suu valley, Karavshin – Photo credit: k.belotserkovskiy / Foter /Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0) The Karavshin Mountains form a narrow east-west spine of granite, about 15 miles long, among the usual shale and limestone peaks of the Pamir Alai, on the border of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Sheer and massive rock formations cut by vertical cracks […]

Photo credit: simonov / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) Today, 8th August, is designated as the International Day of Mountaineering – Dehn Alpinism. Mountaineering – also called Alpinism – is a generic term used to describe various activities undertaken in mountain regions.  Its origins seem to stem from the term mountaineer which, some four hundred years […]

The first time I saw the Orto Tokoi Reservoir, we were driving from Balykchy at the Western end of Lake Issyk Kul towards Naryn.  It was a gentle climb through what appeared to be a barren semi desert landscape – sand and rocky outcrops with multi-coloured slopes on the distant hills and just the occasional […]

Sunday marked two Professional Holidays here in Kyrgyzstan: Fire Services Day and Water Resources Day. Water Resources Day is celebrated annually on the third Sunday in June – and has been since 1995.  It replaced a Soviet “holiday”, the Day of the Meliorator, which had first been established in 1981.  It’s an occasion when attention […]

Located in the Western Tien Shan mountain range, the River Chatkal flows for 189 kilometers in a remote valley in the extreme West of the country, flanked by the 120 km long mountain range of the same name and the Chandalash range lined with walnut groves, Semyenov’s Maple and, albeit less frequently, ash and tree-like […]