Issyk-Kul lake, truck driver's interpreter and KGB agents

The Issyk-Kul lake is so vast that you almost can't see the opposite shore. There is a lot of water in it. One could kind of expect a lot of water in a lake, but after a month in the dry steppe, I stare at it as if I saw a mountain of gold. We can bathe as much as we want in it, and we have hectoliters of drinking water. Our plan is to visit my (actually Janela's) family at the eastern end of the lake, which will take us a couple of days to reach. Then, we want to see some other Kyrgyz regions before our families fly in from Czechia to visit us.
It's a pleasant journey, and not even corrupt cops we meet almost every day can spoil it.

Valentina, Matteo and Horse at Issyk-Kul

 

Czech secret agents

Our next driver finds us suspicious. He agrees to take us on for free but he just doesn't get why we are traveling. Why to Kyrgyzstan? Why with little money? Why do we camp?

I explain him over and over again in my bad Russian that we would like to see countries we don't know and talk with people.

"So you collect information."
"Kind of."
"How much does your government pay you?"
"What? ...nothing. We are just traveling because we like it."
The driver smiles with an unbelieving, self-assured smile of a person who knows the way things are.
"So you work for the Czech KGB, right?"

He stands his ground and there is no way I can convince him. He is rather friendly for somebody who thinks he has members of secret police on board, though. He even decides to leave the road for us, and drives us to a small salt pond. He and Vojta go swimming in it. Even though the pond is just several hundred meters from the shore of the fresh Issyk-Kul lake, it is so salty that you can just lie in the water without moving, and you won't sink.

The salt pond

The driver then leaves us on the main road. We are still not sure if he really believed we were secret agents, of if he was trolling us.

We get a message from Valentina and Matteo, the bikers from the Caspian ferry: they are around and will be staying in a hotel at Issyk-Kul tonight.

We arrive to their village by afternoon and find out that our friends, like Alex yesterday, paid a huge fine to bandit cops for breaking a non-existing rule.

A moment for being poetic: "It was Issyk-Kul. There, the water met the sky, with nothing beyond them. The lake lay shining, deserted, and motionless, save for the faint stirring of white foam along the bank." (Chingiz Aitmatov, The White Ship)

Job description of a Kyrgyz interpreter

Hi horse.

The Italian bikers stay a small wooden hut in a holiday resort. Kyrgyz holiday seems not to have started yet, so there are not many tourists. And the resort is almost on the beach, so Vojta and I decide to set up our tent home just next to the resort. We swim in the lake (it's cold), make barbecue, make tea (with water from the lake), play Durak, drink Valentina's coffee and observe a horse chewing my backpack.

It takes us two days, and that pre-sets our traveling speed for the week to come.

The day we finally leave our friends and agree to meet again in Karakol, we only make 30 km. It's not because we get stuck, but because we meet Demir the interpreter and her boss the Turkish truck-driver. Demir seems to speak not only Kyrgyz and Turkish, but also Russian, Uzbek, Kazakh and any other language of the region. We speak with her and the driver in a mix of Russian and Turkish.

We immediately get adopted by them. (It seems that there is no other way if you meet a Turkish driver abroad.)

They are delivering goods to another nearby holiday resort, and they want us to stay with them until the next morning. To achieve that, they decide to pretend that we are all members of the same company. We understand the explanation of the master plan just partially, and we cannot imagine in which universe we could pass for their coworkers, so we just shut up and let Demir speak. It proves to be the right strategy.

Lenin lives.

The manager of the resort invites us to her living room and offers us tea and cookies. We shut up and observe the antlers, photos and other retro decorations on the walls while Demir has a conversation with the lady.

After that, Demir goes back to the truck to manage the unloading – it seems that this also is a part of her job. We meanwhile walk around the resort to see what is there to see. In the middle, there is a big concrete sculpture of Lenin's head and Young Pioneers, with an inscription saying „LENIN LIVED, LENIN LIVES, LENIN WILL LIVE“. It seems that in this place, Lenin and the spirit of the Soviet times will live for ever and ever, even through the end of the world, no matter how many times the regime changes.

At night, there is a barbecue party in honor of the newcomers. That seems to include us.

Slaughter party

When I say barbecue, I mean a journey to the nearby town to buy a sheep, journey with the sheep in the car trunk, beheading the sheep, processing the sheep, roasting it and then eating it. Demir is the one who calls the tune. Apparently, the work of an interpreter also includes butchering animals.

Our new home for tonight

Our cover doesn't burst – or maybe it does but nobody cares – and we get a wooden holiday hut with beds and clean sheets to sleep in. No tent this time.

The following morning, we say goodbye to everybody, and continue to Karakol. I have no idea how Demir and the driver explained this to our hosts, but nobody seems to look surprised and we don't even get any strange looks whatsoever.

Truck driver and Demir the interpreter

The next people who pick us up are tourists from Hungary. They travel around in a rented car. Except for meeting Kyrgyz cops who–of course–fined them, in Uzbekistan they met our Swiss friends, Kasha and Mira. The world shrinks a bit again.