Archive sections: ‘Kyrgyzstan’
If you travel along the road from Bishkek to Issyk Kul, as you leave behind the roadside yurt encampment of Holodniya Voda (Cold Water) and enter Boom Gorge there is a monument on the right hand side of the road – where a series of whitewashed stones display the date 1916, which commemorates Urkun – an important event in [...]
Today, I learned something new. That’s not unusual, as Tom Jones used to sing … In fact, a piece of “homespun advice” that one of my schoolteachers gave us when I was young, was that we shouldn’t think of education as a process that finished the day we left school. It is a lifelong, on-going [...]
Cholpon Ata is the largest town (village) on the Northern shore of the lake, about half way along, some 250 kilometres from Bishkek. Summer always saw large numbers of tourists descend with their vouchers for a stay in one of the nearby sanatoria or tour resorts (Cholpon Ata boasts one of the two Presidential residences [...]
Lake Issyk Kul lies at the bottom of a drainage hollow, or depression and has no outflow. Mountains ring the lake and there are several valleys worth visiting, Gregorievka and Simeonevka on the North, Barskoon on the South and numerous others around Karakol. To the North are the Kungei (“Sunny”) Ala-Too mountains and are criss-crossed [...]
There is a report from Russian UFO-logists who claim that a 600 meter long UFO may have crashed in the Tien Shan Mountains, near to the Chinese border.
At the end of last week there were reports of an Unidentified Flying Object, (UFO), sighted over central Bishkek. This raised quite a bit of interest … but in fact it is not the first such incident in recent years. Strange lights in the sky, flying torpedoes on Lake Issyk Kul … and, perhaps the [...]
The Second Tuesday after Easter is the Orthodox “Parent’s Day”. It’s not like Mother’s Day or Father’s Day in the the West in that it is a special day for remembering one’s deceased relatives. Apparently, the tradition goes back a long way and there are fourth century references linking it to a spring pagan festival. [...]
The 1968 British entry for the Eurovision Song Contest was “Congratulations” sung by Harry Roger Webb, or Cliff Richard as he is better known. A popular song, it surprised everyone by being beaten into second place by the Spanish entry.
The closing moments of the 1966 World Cup final, between England and West Germany, gave us one of the most famous and memorable sporting quotations of all time: “They think it’s all over … It is now!”.
The Suusamyr valley is a high steppe plateau – 2200 meters a.s.l. – that although only some 160 kilometres from Bishkek is also one of the more remote and rarely visited regions of Kyrgyzstan. Although it is on the other side of the massive Kyrgyz Range from Bishkek and the Chui valley, it is part [...]
