Postcard from Bishkek

On the pavement, not far from my office, outside a shop selling rather fashionable women’s clothes, some markings have appeared. Unlike the graffiti (street art) that has been making an appearance throughout the city – and even celebrated in street festivals, these markings do not make a picture, depicting a scene or characters. It’s a […]

The Zoological Museum is currently part of the Biological-Soil Institute of the Academy of Sciences. The collection was begun in the 1920′s – and was part of the Central Museum for the Study of Local Lore. Specimens were donated by scientists from various parts of the Soviet Union and were housed in a small single-storey building. In 1943 the […]

When we set up the tour company, back in 1997, we featured one itinerary as our Premier Tour … a tour along the Karakoram Highway. That was a play on words … not only was it a “highlight tour”, it was, actually, our first tour. We left Bishkek and drove up to Naryn, then – […]

In my first visit to Bishkek I actually had to fly in to Almaty in Kazakhstan … which lies two hundred and fifty kilometers from Bishkek and it used to serve as the main gateway to Kyrgyzstan as there were more international flights connecting with its newly refurbished airport than used Manas airport. However, with the […]

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 […]

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 […]

There is a little known monument in one of Bishkek’s less well known parks that was inaugurated on 26th July, 2008: The Good Angel complex in Fuchik Park. During the inauguration ceremony, the then Prime Minister, Igor Chudinov described it as the first monument to philanthropy in Kyrgyzstan. “This is not a monument, this is […]

Kadji Sai is a village on the southern shore of Lake Issyk Kul, about 20 kilometers East of Bokonbaeva, , surrounded by low, cabyons carved by the action of wind and water. The village itself actually lies a few kilometers from the shore. There is a bus stop on the main road between Balykchy and […]

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 […]

The second half of the 1990s saw a number of of monuments which portrayed important people in the history of Kyrgyzstan  - although it also saw the unveiling of a monument dedicated to the two hundredth anniversary of Pushkin. There were, for example, monuments erected to the writer Tokombaev (1996), the Avenue of Statesmen (1996), the Ballerina Bibisara […]