Kyrgyzstan Trip 2024

Just spent 10 days around in Kyrgyzstan, so here’s a bunch of pictures!

Overall this was a “botanical trip”. There’s a local group of gardeners and related people, who do journeys through various famous and beautiful gardens, and so on. This year, they decided to not go through literal gardens, but rather visit foots and valleys of Tian Shan, where a lot of decorative plants originate from and/or just grow in the wilderness. Now, I know next to nothing about plants, flowers or gardening, but my wife does, and I just tagged along.

Did you know? Tulips originate from Tian Shan. Another factoid: Yersinia Pestis bacterium that caused Black Death also probably originates from Tian Shan.

So! Our itinerary was like, visit valleys near the mountains, as well as whatever “must see” items within Kyrgyzstan are. We did not go into the actual mountains for several reasons, 1) high up there’s no vegetation anymore! and 2) this was an easy trip for non-professionals.

The nature there is absolutely beautiful! I mean, look at it:

It never felt crowded or “too touristy”; majority of tourists we met were people taking cross-Central Asia trips on motorcycles. Lack of convenient infrastucture (many places only have gravel roads towards them) and lack of “I can converse in English” options probably keep many tourists away (language to get by is Russian).

In towns and cities, I did not expect to see so many Soviet-era relics. Here (in Lithuania) most of them got wiped away or relegated to museums, but in Kyrgyzstan there are sculptures of Lenin everywhere, Soviet-time coats of arms on government buildings, etc. “Interesting”!

What follows is a bag of photos roughly grouped by geographical area.

Ala-Archa Nature Park

Bishkek

Burana Tower

Konorchek Canyon

Now… we did not get to the actual canyon, since en route my wife dislocated her kneecap :( We did get to try out how ambulances and hospitals work (on Sunday! 40km away from the hospital!). Everyone was very nice and total cost was around €10 (ambulance & personell: free, xray: €3, materials for the cast: €7). For the rest of the trip the leg was in a plaster cast though.

Issyk-Kul

Skazka Canyon

Barskoon Waterfalls

Towards Song-Köl

Song-Köl

Moldo-Ashuu Pass

Tash Rabat Caravanserai

I collected all the dogs

Lots of German Shepherds around, that actually do shepherding (of lambs, cows, horses and yaks), an occasional Taigan, and a bunch of other random dogs.

Carpets! They are important

Misc

And that’s it!