Postcard from Bishkek

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 […]

Today is World Water Monitoring Day, and water has been very much in the news quite a lot recently. World Water Monitoring Day was established by America’s Clean Water Foundation in 2003 as part of a program to encourage public awareness and involvement in protecting water resources around the world, encouraging and empowering citizens to […]

I was born and brought up in the spa town of Malvern in Worcestershire and one of our claims to fame was the Mineral Water that has been bottled since 1622, (it is now bottled by Schweppes out of their factory on the Western side of the hills).  There are a number of natural springs […]

  Khan Tengri: lies in the Issyk Kul oblast near the border with Kazakhstan. (The name is translated variously as “Prince of Spirits” or “Ruler of the Sky”) Until recently the summit was said to be 6995m a.s.l. but a recent survey announced that it is, in fact, 7010m – however some people treat this […]

I have mentioned in a previous postcards the phenomenon of #TTOT - Travel Talk on Twitter. The organisers decide on a subject for the week and then on Tuesday, (at 9:30 GMT – am and pm, in order to cover all the world’s time zones), they pose a series of questions on that theme, inviting others to submit answers, and thus […]

Waterfalls – where water flows over a vertical drop in the course of a stream or river. It could be the sight, of the sound that the cascading water makes, but there is something dramatic and appealing about them. They normally form in the upper reaches of a river system, where rivers are relatively young, […]

  Today is Dehn Pobeda – Victory Day … the day in 1945 when Nazi Germany capitulated at the end of the Second World War, (or the Great Patriotic War, as it is known here).  The war had a major impact on the peoples of the Soviet Union and in 1946, one of the tallest mountains […]