Postcard from Bishkek

Kyrgyzstan is over ninety percent mountainous territory.  The mountains criss-cross the country.  As a result, almost any journey, anywhere in the country involves crossing over a mountain pass.  Some of them are quite dramatic – others more prosaic.

  At the highest altitudes, snow falls and does not melt. As more snow falls, it compresses that which is already lying on the ground, and forms sheets of ice – known as Glaciers. Kyrgyzstan’s glaciers – and there are quite a lot of them,  - have been in the news quite a bit recently […]

The Naryn River is also known as the Alabugatuz - although that is actually one of the major tributaries.  In fact, the river has  several names that are applied locally along different stretches of its course) The river rises in the Tian Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan, flows West and then South into the Fergana Valley and Uzbekistan, […]

Coronet Peak is a mountain at the head of the Ala Archa Gorge, which lies about 40 kilometers, (just under an hour’s drive), to the South of downtown Bishkek. The gorge is famous for its beautiful alpine scenery, (some consider it to be the most picturesque of the mountain valleys in the Kyrgyz Ala Too […]

  There are almost 2000 lakes in the Kyrgyz Republic, with a combined area of 6836 sq km. Most of them are small mountain lakes, located at altitudes between 2500 and 4000 meters above sea level and were formed as a result of glaciations.  The largest lake, of course is Lake Issyk Kul, followed by […]

There were news reports last weekend about the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, (INC5), in order to prepare a global legally binding instrument on mercury – The Minamata Convention on Mercury, (named after a city in Japan where serious health damage occurred as a result of mercury pollution in the middle of the […]

Despite our name, The Celestial Mountains Tour company doesn’t undertake mountaineering expeditions.  Even so, being in Kyrgyzstan, which is over 90% mountainous, it is difficult to ignore the various peaks. Today is the International Day of the Mountains, so I thought I would take a look at another of Kyrgyzstan’s lesser known mountains. There aren’t […]

Kyrgyzstan is rich in caves and grottos, (=”Unkur” in Kyrgyz), which are scattered throughout the Republic and they attract a number of “speliologists” – “pot-holers”, or cavers.  Although many of them are easily accessible, they have not been developed as tourist attractions as in other parts of the world. Many of the caves provide evidence […]

Lenin Peak in the Osh oblast lies on the border with Tajikistan – it rises to a height of 7134m and was the third highest mountain in the former Soviet Union, shaped something like a “high armchair”. The outline, however, is not always obvious because the summit is almost always covered in cloud – and […]

Reservoirs form an important part of the Kyrgyz landscape. The most notable of Kyrgyzstan’s thirty odd reservoirs is the vast Toktogul reservoir. The dam at the head of this man-made lake was constructed in 1974 in the Ketmen Tube valley, as one of a series across the Naryn River, (the Naryn-Syr Darya cascade – The […]