Archive sections: ‘Life In Kyrgyzstan’
Today has been a busy day. About half way through, the phone rang, and Lisa transferred it to me saying, “It’s a Mr. ****”. Now, the name meant nothing to me. It was obviously an Anglophile name - so it wasn’t the police, (they had already called in connection with the bomb blast earlier this [...]
Today has been a busy day. Before it had really go underway, I got a phone call from the hotel asking if I had heard, or felt, the explosion. “Uhhh, No – what explosion?”
For several years now, some of the CBT, (Community Based Tourism), groups around the country have organized during the height of the Summer season, (July and August), small festivals in their own neighbourhoods. They have proved to be popular with tourists and locals alike, but are rarely crowded events so there is a good chance for people to get [...]
Today has been a busy day. It began with a minor crisis – no internet. It’s at times like this that I realize how reliant we have become on the internet for our everyday operations: especially for communications and news. Anyway, having arrived in the office, as usual, at six, I was able to spend [...]
The kids went off to the cinema on Monday to watch the latest Harry Potter film. I seem to have missed out almost entirely on the Harry Potter Craze, but it has taken off here just as much as in the West. The books are on sale, (in Russian, so I give them a miss), [...]
A few years ago, we had an enquiry from a tourist who wanted to come to Kyrgyzstan “to see the apples”. This caught me by surprise. Although I was aware that we grow a lot of apples here in Kyrgyzstan, I was intrigued as to why someone would want to travel all this way to [...]
The GAI (pronounced guy-EE) are the State Automobile Inspection – basically, Kyrgyzstan’s Traffic police. The GAI have a mixed reputation in the country, possibly because the main contact between members of the public and officers of the service is when they stop vehicles at one of their roadside checks to inspect documentation, or because of an [...]
This was written a few years ago and is based on an answer to an enquiry we received by email from someone who was planning to bring their own vehicle to Kyrgyzstan. As such it is written in the first person. It is not meant to be definitive advice or exhaustive. Make sure you have [...]
Have you ever noticed how something happens to people whenever they get behind the steering wheel of car? It’s as if the body of the car becomes a shell and the driver takes on a new persona. They become aggressive, selfish, thoughtless, inconsiderate to other road users – pedestrians as well as other drivers – [...]
For those of us involved in tourism, we used to understand the acronym as World Tourism Organization – a UN agency which brought together the members of the United Nations to consider issues relating to one of the World’s major industries … but a few years ago we had to get used to a new [...]
