Postcard from Bishkek

I think it was back in 2001 when I first came across a “Stateless Person” … We had been asked by one of our partners abroad to arrange a visit to Kyrgyzstan for one of their clients, and the passport details that they sent us in order to arrange the Visa and OVIR  registration said: […]

The theme for Travel Talk on Twitter, (#TTOT), this week was Responsible Tourism. I have mentioned TTOT before – it was organized by a number of people connected with tourism to enable people to hold “conversations” on Twitter.  Twice a day on Tuesdays, (at 3pm and 9pm GMT – twice so that they can reach […]

I was talking with someone the other day and the topic of conversation turned to the differences between trying to do business here and in the west. For example, the  tendency here for things to happen “at the drop of the hat” … and at very fast pace.  Even of something like an event or […]

There is a story of a journalist interviewing Kim Philby in Moscow.  Philby, of course, was the original Third Man, one of the Cambridge undergraduates recruited by the KGB to work for Soviet Intelligence, who went on to follow a brilliant Career in MI6, rising through the ranks to a senior position and was even […]

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 […]

Money … makes the world go around  Although the situation is changing, over the years the Kyrgyz economy has been, and basically still is, a “cash based” economy. As a result, visitors to Kyrgyzstan need to give plenty of thought to the questions …

One of the classics of British television humour was an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour called The Blood Donor. First broadcast in June 1961, it was one of the last episodes he made for the BBC and recorded shortly after a road accident.  As a result he ended up reading his lines and aficionados often […]

Regular readers of my postcards will recall that every now and again I make oblique references (and sometimes not so oblique) references to my cats.  One of my first postcards was about My cats – My “children”. At the moment I have three cats, or perhaps I should say that at the moment three cats […]

A few years ago, the CBT guidebook to Kyrgyzstan stated: “If Kyrgyzstan feels like the far side of the world, the end of the line, then At Bashy feels like the last stop“. According to official statistics, parts of the At Bashi region are the “remotest” in Kyrgyzstan.  This conclusion is drawn from an index which […]

There is an old saying the The camera never lies … but I am not so sure … In the “good old days”, photographs were taken on film, (which was a precious commodity), and time was required to develop the negatives and print the final product.  To get a succesful photograph one had to take […]