Archive: November, 2010
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 [...]
At the moment I am trying to read ‘News from Tatary‘ by Peter Fleming, originally published in 1936 and telling the story of his 3500 mile journey from Peking through the, then, mysterious province of Sinkiang to India with the Swiss journalist Ella Maillart. Apparently she also wrote an account of the journey, ‘Forbidden Journey’ [...]
There is one task that I really dislike and tend to put off if I possibly can … going to the bank. Today I didn’t really have much choice.
Prospect Chui is the one of the main thoroughfares of the city. It stretches along the entire length of the city from East to West. Entering the city from the West it carries the main road from Tashkent (Uzbekistan), Taraz (formerly Djambul in Kazakhstan) and Kara Balta (Kyrgyzstan – and hence the main road from Osh). After [...]
Bishkek does not have regular organised city tours – although as a capital city it does have it’s fair share of interesting, important government building, museums, theatres, shops, monuments etc. The city centre is quite small and can easily be walked. A walk around the city centre along the following itinerary covers most of the [...]
I came across an interesting article recently which proclaimed that “the best way to explore a city is on foot.” I thought to myself, “how true”, although I was a bit surprised by some of the editor’s selections for ten of the best cities for walking in, (Florence, Dubrovnik, Paris, New York, Vancouver, Munich, Edinburgh, [...]
I don’t often get to look at the Sydney Morning Herald – after all, Sydney is an awful long way from Bishkek, but a tweet on Twitter sent me to an interesting article: “Why would anyone want to go there?” by Ben Groundwater – aka The Backpacker. It was not only interesting. I found Groundwater’s approach, [...]
Kuman Ait is also known as Eid al-Adha (or the “Feast of Sacrifice”) and is the most important feast of the Muslim calendar. (Eid is an Arabic word derived from the Arabic word, “aada” that means a recurring event – one that returns. In Islam it it is used to denote a festival.)
