Postcard from Bishkek

About 200 kilometers from Bishkek, up over the Tuu Ashu pass and down to the Suusamyr plain, taking the turning to the right which passes through the village and enters the picturesque Kekemeren valley, a narrow gorge, where the road winds along the river bank, passing through a number of villages, after about 40 kilometers one […]

To the South of Bishkek lies the Kyrgyz Ala Too, the Kyrgyz Range of mountains.  You can see them from the city center, rising majestically and towering over the city, and because the city was laid out in a grid pattern, (with streets running North-South and East-West), by the Russian military engineers who were charged […]

There are a number of tour itineraries that can be considered to be pretty “standard”.  In some cases the terrain and time scales dictate an itinerary … In terms of geography, for example, following the Silk Road involves using one of only two border crossing points: Torugart or Irkeshtam. The time scale will help dictate […]

The Chui oblast lies in the northern part of the country and borders Kazakhstan, and the Issyk Kul, Naryn and Talas oblasts. Statistics: Area – 18684 square kilometers Population – 763400 – it is the most densely populated area in the republic; it also contains most of the industry and has a good range of […]

One hundred and twenty five kilometers from Bishkek, the Konorchok Canyons, (sometimes called Konorchek or Konorchak), branch off to the West from Boom Gorge.  The canyons form an entire system of deep canyons with vertical walls, (some large and some small), which stretches for some 200 kilometers into the Kyrgyz Range. The system is often likened […]

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 […]

To the West of Bishkek there are a series of settlements that form a continuous ribbon development along the main road towards Kara Balta (and the turn off for the Too Ashu Pass and the main Bishkek-Osh road), the Kazakh border and on to Tashkent.  One of those settlements is the town of Shopokov. It’s […]

Today is Mezhdunarodniy dehn karavanshika – The International Day of the Caravan.  This is not one of those international commemorative days established by the United Nations or one of their agencies … but a “professional holidays” for truck drivers, “teamsters”, crews of merchant vessels and escort ships, established in 1995 by the International Association for the rationalization […]

I am not a journalist but I appear to be a number of mailing list because I keep receiving a number of Press Releases.  I got one yesterday from the Swiss Embassy here in Bishkek which began:  Kant, an industrial city of officially 22’000 inhabitants, is situated at 25 km east of the capital Bishkek. […]

Many major cities around the world have firms which specialise in offering visitors day trips, offering a variety of possible variations.  Tourists can peruse the offerings, make their choice, buy tickets from their hotels or Information Centers and then be at the pick-up spot on the day and … off they go. Unfortunately that doesn’t […]