As I approach the yurt, I list off everything that could go wrong.
First, dogs. This family must have dogs to help with their herds, and those dogs might attack a disheveled stranger appearing out of the stormy night.
Second, horses. I was wearing a backpack on my front, covered by a massive Nepali raincoat, and another larger backpack on my back. In the darkness, I looked more like some Kyrgyz Sasquatch than a human being. If I spooked some horses, they could go wild.
Finally, the family might not be happy to be surprised by such a wild figure as myself. Nomads are famously hospitable, but also famously tough. There might be some rough questioning or worse.
I rehearse my speech out loud: “Hello! Privyet! Americanski! Ya ni govoru pa-russki” [I am American. I do not speak Russian]. I untangle my hands from the raincoat and hold them to my sides in a gesture of peace.
I reach the yurt and shout my speech with all the courage I have. A tense second passes. A dog growls menacingly.
Then, a tiny head pops out of the yurt. It laughs. A second appears, and a third, and a fourth. The sheepskin that serves as a hanging door sweeps open, and there is a mother with four kids, all of them cackling so much that I forget how cold and wet I am, and join in the laughter.
It seems I will have no problems with these nomads tonight. They point me down the valley to a set of yurts owned by a man named Nurbek, who accepts visitors. I shake the father’s massive hand, drag myself to Nurbek’s place, and slowly come back from the edge of exhaustion and hypothermia with the help of limitless tea and fermented horse milk. A perfect first evening in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan.
Hiking to Song Kol
Song Kol is a large lake at 3,100m/10,000ft in the mountains of central Kyrgyzstan. Rounded green hills and peaks surround it on all sides, providing wonderfully rich pasturelands after the snow melts off in April.
Hundreds of semi-nomadic families travel from lowland villages to the lake each May and set up yurts for the summer. Spread out across the countless valleys of this massive land, they create a spectacular tapestry of human and animal life, all centered on the pristine lake. Song Kol is also a tourist destination, attracting those who want to sleep in yurts and take in the scenery.
I wanted to visit this slice of the Kyrgyz semi-nomads’ summer life. The problem was that no public transport visits the lake, and hiring a taxi on the long rough road was too expensive for me alone.
The solution was simple: walk to the lake. The map showed a road between towns passing about 10km from Song Kol at a village called Kyzart. It also showed a thousand-plus-meter mountain wall between Kyzart and the lake, but the terrain looked gentle enough to walk up without obstacle. I could catch public transport to Kyzart, climb the hills to the lake, sleep in a yurt, and then find some tourists to pay for a spot in their car back to town.
The plan felt bulletproof as I packed in Bishkek the night before. By the time I was using google translate to find transport to Kyzart in the rainy bus park in Kochkor, with time slipping away, I felt less certain. Kyrgyz transport only leaves when full, but I caved and paid for an extra empty seat to get us moving.
At 3pm I was on the outskirts of Kyzart, set among fields full of flowers against textured green hills and snowcapped peaks. I had to cover about 10 trail miles with a gain of 1,250m/4,100ft before dark. I also had an annoyingly heavy load, with full backpacking gear for a future hike as well as my laptop and town things. Hence the need for two packs. Experimentation showed that simply stacking the smaller one on my neck, held in place by the larger, was ideal.
The late time and hike length were worrying, but good weather and a lack of objective danger from cliffs made me decide to try it. My two backpacks and I set off towards the mountains.
Up over the pass
There is no hiking trail directly from Kyzart to Song Kol, but horsemen drive animals across the pass. I was able to follow their tracks through fields and up ridges. Ungrazed areas had an incredibly dense bouquet of wildflowers reaching past knee height that painted the hills purple and gold. Ascending viewpoints revealed rippling land in all directions. A storm blew in from the north, dumped half an hour of rain, and then gave way to late-afternoon sun. The weight and altitude were tiring me out badly, but I knew I could make it over the top if the weather held.
The weather did not hold. 300 meters from the top, a true thunderstorm rolled in, bringing heavy rain and near-zero visibility. By great luck I stumbled on a clear horse trail that seemed to be leading up to the pass. Following the muddy track blindly, I stumbled forward until a strong wind began to blow at my back. The track disappeared, but the wind meant that the pass was close, and I just walked forward until the ground started curving downhill.
The hardest part was over, but it was 8:30pm, dark, and rainy. A welcoming yurt on the lake was my only chance. The view opened somewhat as I cruised down the valley, and I spotted what appeared to be small ponds in the grass. Further down, these resolved into yurts, and the process of worrying about dogs, horses, and humans began. All’s well that ends well, though.
After the first family pointed me to Nurbek’s place, the clouds momentarily parted and a perfect crescent moon popped out of a deep indigo sky. I walked straight through marshes under the watchful gaze of horses and cows towards yurts barely visible in the gloom. I reached the main yurt, poked my head in, and a shocked pair of Israelis and a Brit stared back at me. There was tea on the fire, alcoholic kumis in the cups, and enough warmth for me to get my shivering under control over the period of an hour.
The Household of Nurbek
The next morning was full of good talks with my fellow tourists, who were great folks in high spirits despite the rough weather. Along with a Kyrgyz guide, they were riding horses from Kochkor to Kyzart via Song Kol. They lent me a jacket and hand-warmers the night before, and information and contacts in the morning, and then rode up towards the pass.
Alone with the Kyrgyz family, I had some time to take stock of their setup. Amina, Nurbek’s wife, did the majority of the work, keeping the household alive in the high harsh conditions. Nurbek tended their many horses and cows, milking them every day. They have four sons. The oldest one studies in Bishkek, the middle two mostly move with the family’s semi-nomadic style, and the 17-month-old baby Alihan provides entertainment.
The family’s most fascinating product is kumis, an alcoholic drink made from fermented horse milk. The dining tent hosted a huge barrel of the stuff. Nurbke told me they milk the horses daily and one day of fermentation with occasional stirring is enough to turn the milk into kumis. The result is weak booze, maybe half as strong as beer or less, with a mildly acidic but nice taste. Kyrgyz are almost all Muslims, but see no conflict between the religion and drinking: even baby Alihan got some kumis with added sugar as a pick-me-up when he started crying.
They are certainly not a poor family. They count four yurts, a shipping container, more than a dozen horses, a dwelling in Kyzart, and substantial furniture among their assets. The semi-nomadic life at Song-Kol is undoubtedly full of hard work in a tough climate, but families own animals and cars and have access to enough lands to support themselves.
The funniest moment came when Alihan, who wandered around all day bawling, playing, spilling things, laughing, and causing havoc, had to have his pants changed. He sprawled on a sheepskin, bum in the air, and Nurbek joked that he looked like a Muslim praying Namaz. The joke was a smash hit and the family made sure to repeat it every time Alihan sprawled for the rest of the day.
In search of tourists
The day was purely rainy, but I had to go find a tourist car for a ride back to town. This ended up being much harder than I thought. I walked east across the north shore of the lake, in the direction of the more touristy yurt camps.
The scale of the lake was deceptively massive, though. An hour in I met a pair of French tourists at a camp run by a young guy named Timur, but they were riding out on horses. Another hour of hard walking passed with nothing to show for it except soaked shoes and a growing respect for the bleak, beautiful land. In the third hour, I hit a stroke of luck: a compound of five yurts with a minibus parked out front. Must be tourists.
The sound of merrymaking spilled out of the largest yurt. When no one responded to my shouted greetings, I shoved my way in to find ten middle-aged Kyrgyz friends deep into a platter of fatty mutton and some bottles of vodka. They did not bat an eye at a traveler who had just walked three hours through rain and spoke no Russian.
Twenty minutes later, I left full of mutton fat, potatoes, and vodka, with Kyrgyz pop blasting in my head and a promise for a ride out at 2pm tomorrow. The group’s most outgoing member, “Crazy Max,” took me under his wing and told me we would party harder on the bus tomorrow.
The walk back felt full of accomplishment, although it might have just been the vodka. Timur hospitably brought me inside at his camp for a snack of tea, tomatoes, and cucumbers. For the second night in a row, I stumbled into Nurbek’s yurt with soaked feet in the gathering gloom.
The fate of drunken promises
The morning was mercifully sunny, revealing the real beauty of Song Kol. In the rain, it is interesting, but muddy and cold and raw. In the sun, it feels like a real-world paradise: endless green fields, ridges full of flowers, animals grazing their way across the land, the stillness of the huge lake, and smoke rising slowly from isolated yurts.
The walk felt much shorter in good weather. I had almost made it to Crazy Max and his crew when a Kyrgyz picnic crew waved me over to the shore of the lake. They were some of the most outgoingly hospitable people I have ever met, literally thrusting bread, tomatoes, watermelon, kumis, and vodka into my hands as soon as I sat down.
We exchanged names several times and they settled on calling me something like “Marx.” The leader, a woman decked out in cool sunglasses, repeatedly grabbed me by the shoulder and shoved watermelon chunks impaled on a knife into my hands. In a garble of Russian and English, we talked about life and work. The overall level of happiness was incredible. I escaped, full and happy, when a horseman rode up with his young daughter and dismounted to join in the snack.
The emotional roller coaster took a downward plunge when I reached the yurt camp where Crazy Max had been. I was 40 minutes early for our 2pm meetup, but they had just left, apparently headed not for town but for somewhere else on the lake. The folks running the yurt camp, called Song Kol Travels, told me they had simply been drunk the day before and eager to please.
Bad luck quickly turned good, though: A Kazakh tour group had just pulled at Song Kol Travels and would give me a ride to the main road early the next morning. I judged them truly sober and extremely nice, and took them up on the offer happily.
To the mountain’s edge
Since I would be spending a night more than expected at the lake, I resolved to hike the five miles to the edge of the mountains for cell signal. I could let people know not to worry about me. This turned out to be an amazing decision. The weather was again amazing, and the walk up a series of ridges in the huge rippling land gave wildly expansive views.
The vantage point at the edge of the mountains circling Song Kol is something else. On one side, the lake hangs under the sky like a sheet of burnished metal. On the other, the land drops thousands of feet to a maze of rolling, rippling valleys. Flocks of sheep and horse clans move across the land like ants. Clouds blow in form the Kazakh steppe and elongate, painting wisps into the sky.
On the walk back, I had an unexpectedly deep conversation with a shepherd watching his flock of 535 sheep. He introduced himself as Bek, speaking impressive English, and showed me that he had been reading a Chinese textbook on a Kindle.
Bek was studying in China as a graphic designer until COVID sent him home. He told me about the wild transition from being a college student in bustling Beijing to watching his family’s sheep on these open hillsides. While Bek is an obviously brilliant guy who wants more opportunity than a shepherd’s life can provide, his time in China also revealed the value of Kyrgyzstan’s abundant land and relatively low population and competition.
Sunset brought me back to the yurt camp and the lake, producing a final golden across the mountainsides, and then the stars took over, above the great silent water.
Back to the rest of the world
The Kazakh tour group could not have been kinder people or better luck. The guides were a couple of very young and welcoming Kyrgyz. The bus driver blasted American rap. A ridiculously muscular Kazakh guy provided an air of fame and mystery when locals kept asking to take pictures with him. I talked to a group member named Dash about Almaty, Kazakhstan, which sounds rather amazing and goes high up on the list.
We stopped at a stunning pass and a thunderous waterfall, soaking in stunning Kyrgyz beauty the whole way. I hopped off the bus at a district capital called Naryn, whose orange cliffs reminded me of Moab, Utah. Women were selling fresh kumis from buckets in the transport park.
Song Kol had brought intense adventure and unique beauty. What stood out, though, were the generosity and hospitality shown to me at every turn by people who had no need to go out of their way for me. If this is the central takeaway of travel in Kyrgyzstan, I can think of no better way for people to put their country on the map.
