Travel Warning! Return to Ala Archa

This summer/fall we managed four hikes in the Tian Shan mountains.  This was the second one and by far the most strenuous.  We were thinking of making it back to the mountains before they become completely snowed in, but we may be too late, as the mountains are looking pretty snowy from here and there's been snow on the ground in the city for the last ten days.  In the summer, the mountains looked distant and were hard to see due to the leafy foliage of the city.  Now, the leaves of the city trees are gone and the mountains are coated in snow- they seem to be three or four times closer and hover over the city.

This second hike was also in Ala Archa National Park, but we took a different trail.  Together with a few friends, we hired a van and met in front of school.  The street in front of our school, called Abdymomunov, has hosted some pretty strange events during the year.  That Sunday, the day of this hike, was maybe the oddest...go-kart races!

Once we were all gathered and finished watching children race at high speed - one of the spectators told us that the karts go up to 170 km/hour - we piled in the van and bumped and bounced our way along the 30km/45 minute trip to the park.  The park is due south of the city and is an actual park - you pay an entrance fee at the gate and they, presumably, maintain the park.  The entrance fee for the car and nine of us was 900 soms or about $18.  After the gate, you continue another 5km or so in the car.  We passed by the trail we hiked before and came to end of the paved road by a weird hotel called the Alplager or something equally strange.  It's pictured later.  Then it was up and into the Celestial mountains.

It was a sunny warm day and we climbed up above the valley floor.  We were both a little further into the park when we started than we were during the last hike and on a different mountain altogether.  This valley was on our left during the Alpinist Graveyard Hike, on this hike, a.k.a. the hike of the Lost Waterfall, the valley was on our right.  Also, notice the effect of a single airplane;s con trail on the crystal clear sky.

The valley split and we took the left fork, climbing above a tumbling mountain stream.

We took a brief rest to admire the view.  Valery and Michelle found separate rocks to admire the world from.

Valery served as our guide on three of our hikes and is an amazing alpinist.  I think he draws strength from being in the mountains and, although he was the oldest among us, put us all to shame with his energy on these hikes.

We continued along our valley, heading towards the black stain on the far end of the valley - you can barely see it in this photo. It is a waterfall and was our ultimate target, although we were unsure if there was currently any water in it.  It's a glacial melt waterfall, and although the weather was still warm, it was not hot, so the glacial melt had slowed considerably.  It was one of those days where a you're warm in at-shirt in the sun, and cool in the shade with a light jacket on.  There was little shade on this hike though.

Always stopping to see the wildflowers along the way

And we climbed and hiked and climbed.  This was about an 8-10 hour hike...

About half way to our destination, we had to cross a rock slide

As the photographer, pictures of me are rare.  Here I am sneering at the little mountain stream that ran thru the rock slide.  "You call that burbling?"  I was heard to say.  And yes, the water was pure, freezing cold and drinkable.

Looking back, I swear the trail looked wider when we were on it...

Looking forward, that tiny ribbon of trail on the left didn't look too promising.  But we were in it to win it. Also, now do you see the black patch on the rocks in the distance?  Waterfall?

We found a nice shady spot to have lunch and feasted.  Nothing tastes quite like food in the mountains.  By this point, we had probably gone from Bishkek's 800m altitude to about 2,500m.  And actually, we always brought peanut butter and jelly.  It was pretty lackluster and everyone else brought nicer stuff, I think Valery had Kabuli raisins and Angie had something delicious and home made...good thing they shared with us!  Poor Karol, we made her a sandwich...

After lunch, I had a chance to go to the river we had been hiking above.  It wasn't very big, but it was super cold and super swift.  I complimented it on its cascad-iness.  And you can see from the rock debris level on these photos, just how high this gets in flood...

We mysteriously discovered some goat horns?  Maybe?  Marco Polo Sheep?

Mike, Michelle and I decided to go take a look for the waterfall, even though we were sure it was dry.

We started up the hill above our lunch spot.  Mike and Michelle leaping like gazelles up the stony path and myself, lumbering up, an out of breath elephant.

Here the altitude was really bothering me.  Each step set my heart pounding and thudding in my chest.  I'm not a fast runner, but I've played a lot of sports, run 10Ks and exercised a lot in my life...my heart never beat that fast or that hard.  Each step convinced me that it would explode.  Months later, writing this I can still remember that feeling - I can still hear it in my ears thudding, pounding.  I had to stop every 10 steps or so.  Which is fine, since I got to snap pictures for me to show you.

And I saw some kind of eagle.  Or maybe it was the angel of death, waiting for my heart to explode.  It's right in the center of the shot.

There was no clear way to the waterfall and after a brief conference we gave up on the idea and decided to follow the path we were on.  And this path went up and up and Mike and Michelle went up and up and I sat down a lot.  I feel that these pictures don't do the altitude, steepness and sheer above-ness of this path justice.  Going up was nearly like climbing a staircase or ladder.  I reached a certain point and I was finished.  Overcome.  It reminded me of a scene in Dharma Bums by Jack Keroauc.  There's a moment in the book, when the narrator, Smith is climbing a mountain and he's just about to the top.  He's suddenly overwhelmed by the experience and can't move up or down.  It's such an honest scene that it must have actually happened.
Keroauc wrote

""This is too high!" I yelled to Japhy in a panic...I nudged myself closer into the ledge and closed my eyes and thought "Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space," and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, "When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing." The saying made my hair stand on end; it had been such cute poetry sitting on Alvah's straw mats. Now it was enough to make my heart pound and my heart bleed for being born at all."

Well, that's about what I felt.  There was more to it, something like a feeling that nothing could HOLD me down onto the mountain.  Not that I would fall, which was certainly possible, but that I would FLOAT right off the mountain into the vastness of blue sky.  Up, not down.  It was a moment that made me feel both absolutely tiny in relation to all but abnormally large and clumsy and foolish.  And it looked like this.

I stared into the face of God and flinched.  And then climbed down and said "Stop looking at me God!"  On the way down I passed a backpacker in flip flops with about 100 pounds on his back.  He didn't come back down the hill, so I'm assuming he floated away.

Mike and Michelle made it to the plateau and said it was nice.  I think they were trying to protect me and that there was a taco stand up there, because honestly, that's what heaven would look like to me.

And then it was the path home.  Slow, plodding.  Singing songs to my son strapped in an Ergo carrier to my back.  Plodding.  But you can't beat the vista.

I think I have over 700 photos from this hike alone.  It's hard not to post them all.  It's hard to write about it in a way that expresses the joy of the mountains here.  It feels almost blasphemous to try.

We got to back to where we started and said hey to the yurts.

And the weird hotel thing.

We walked a little bit more and saw some more prayer trees.

Spent some chillaxed times by an alpine glacial melt river.  Valery and my son jumped about like frogs.  It was hard to tell which had more energy.

And looked back to where we had been, what we had done.

And to top off a perfect day, Angie found some raspberries growing wild and shared them with us.

Goodbye Ala Archa.  We'll miss you.

School Lunch!

At AUCA these are three options for lunch - Cafe Zebra, where you buy chicken or duck salad sandwiches, the Cafeteria (does it have a name?) where the sheer volume or students there makes ordering food chaos and Cafe Bravo, which is where we tended to eat.

Cafe Bravo isn't a cafe at all, but a little kitchen near the main entrance where you can get whatever it is that they made that day, usually an assortment of meat pastries, three main courses, rice and pastry pastries.  We've stopped eating here because there is really no place to sit there.  It's right in the front entrance hall, and although there are a dozen or so tables scattered about, the hall is usually filled with students dancing, giving speeches or playing loud techno music.  In this picture I think they are doing all three.

In the nice weather we would sit in the courtyard, which is a nice, shady place to sit.

Do you see those stairs and that trailer?  Everyone at AUCA needed to get a chest x-ray to prove they didn't have TB.  Right?  Let's expose you to dangerous radiation to make sure you're well.  We managed to get out of it, as it seemed that foreign faculty were exempt, although I'm still waiting to be told that I need an x-ray.

This lunch was laghman (sometimes spelled lagman), which is a thick noodley noodle (think lo mein) that tends to be fried.  This laghman has chunks of veggies and lamb in it.  It's not bad, but in life there is definitely a laghman quota that we have now filled and greatly exceeded.  There is also a little strawberry tart and a couple of blini.  It is always a fun game at AUCA to figure out if the blini on offer were sweet or savory.  I think the ones pictured had meat and rice in them.

This delightful meal is also representative of what we ate for lunch everyday from roughly late August to mid October.  This meal and each of the above trays cost about 200 soms or $4.  Each dish being roughly 90-120 som or $2.  The dish on YOUR left is rice with chicken.  It's a pretty straight forward white rice with chicken chunks in what's likely a mayo-lemon sauce.  It works, but it's not the kind of thing I want to eat every day.  My son loved it.  The round pastry things are sort of like creme filled donuts, except they have sweet cheese in them, like a ricotta or cottage cheese with tons of added sugar.  The soup on the right is a yogurt, dill, cucumber soup that is served cold.  It was quite tasty.  I'm sure there's a name for it in Russian, but I don't know it.

Honestly, for the price the food is not bad at school, but it's not good either.  Since the cold set in, we've shifted to a nearby stolovaya...столовя...which translates as "dining room" but has no real equivalent name in English that I know of.  I suppose I'd call it a buffet.  You grab a tray, get in line and then point to what you want (I always get BORSCHT!)  and they give it to you.  You pay, sit down, eat and then leave.  Not bad and you can get a hearty lunch for two for about 240 soms, or about $5.  There are also a lot of "business" lunch deals around town, where you get a three course lunch for about $6 or 300 soms.

Stay tuned for Adventures in Kumis, or How we Learned to Fear Fermented Mare's Milk!

Lost in Translation

One of the dangers one runs is exposed to when eating in a restaurant here is believing the translations in the English language menus.  I am reminded of a restaurant in Varanasi, India that had misspelled Snacks as Snakes.  Of at least we hope it was a misspelling as we weren't brave enough  to order some snakes...

Old Edgar's a.k.a Starry Edgars a.k.a. старые Эдгарс, is a nice little pub type place in Oak Park that we like to go to.  They have an item on their menu called "Chocolate Slab."  We all, and yes, there were four adults at this meal, debated what this could possibly mean.  We decided that it probably meant a slab of chocolate and we needed to find out.

Yup, that's a slab of chocolate.

At another meal at Mimino, a lovely Georgian restaurant, our friend Michelle decided to challenge the menu again, this time with a dessert labelled Honey.  Unfortunately I don't have a picture, but yes...it was a bowl of honey.  Just a bowl of honey.  Honestly, it was just a bowl full of honey.

Lesson: Don't challenge Kyrgyz menus and thank god we didn't order those snakes.

A Walk Through a (Post) Soviet Amusement Park

Well, the month of October has made fools of us again, vanishing in a haze of sunny days and cold nights, pomegranates and failed attempts to locate misplaced gloves and hats.  But as my colleagues/compatriots/friends/saviors and better bloggers Mike and Michelle have pointed out, November has snuck up upon us, and, like Prufrockian fog, pounced on us.  See here for their (well, Michelle's) take on November in Bishkek.

But, let's not dwell in the Octobers of the soul, let's take a walk in a crumbling amusement park!!!  Panfilova Park!
Special thanks to all of you who reminded me that I was slacking in my duties here, and special thanks to Anna Reed and her co-worker.

Our friend the bear lives here, in Panfilova Park right around the main entrance area.  He is available, with his fellow taxidermied friends, for photo ops.

Yes, that is a little boy riding the bear and yes, that does say Bishkek in Cyrillic.
An additional yes, this is all taking place literally in the shadow of this statue of Ivan Panfilov, a Soviet WWII hero who is credited with playing a major role in the successful defense of Moscow.

Well, let's enter into the amusement park that celebrates this hero, and see what there is to see...I realized, reading this over to check for errors, that I've shown what Bishkek looks like, but not what it sounds or smells like.  Panfilova Park is particularly polluted with noise and smell.  So, imagine in your ears thumping  techno dance music and, in your innocent nose conjure the wafting scent of roasted mutton fat.  And if you don't know what that might smell like, imagine what deep fried lamb might smell like.

Behold!  Terrifying Swings with little or nothing holding these daredevils in

See!  Machines that measure how hard you can punch.  This guy's was particularly, uh, distinct.  In the background is the "White House" where the Kyrgyz Parliament meets.

Observe!  Maybe they should let these punchy Kangaroos have a chance?

Marvel!  Another ride with people holding on for dear life...

Conspiracy?  The park is laid out as a pentagram, or the five pointed star of the Soviets surrounded with a circle.  Whatevs. At the center is a fountain.  It's a nice fountain and the mist from the fountain was a great place to cool off at during the summer heat.  The summer days would reach about 105 or so, but the nights would dip into the 60's.  November has mostly been low 40's in the day, low 20's at night.

This, in actuality, might be the most terrifying atrraction in all of Bishkek.  I have seen kids on those upper rungs and no there is no safety equipment that keeps them from falling.  If they fell and bounced clear out, they would be landing on solid concrete.  Also, not sure what that guy is doing with that chair.  He is probably the fellow in charge of collecting money for the attraction.  All of the rides in the park cost 40 or 45 som (about $1) and you pay this to the operator of the ride. They will run the ride even if there is just 1 person on it.  And stop it when you child screams to get off.  I know these both from experience.

Here's a nice little train for the young ones

We live about a 30 second walk from the park, so if you were worried that we were bored out of our gourds in Bishkek, this park has been a major chunk of our entertainment.  It's more or less closed now, although you can still walk through and usually parts are open or at least still blasting techno music.  You can listen to your techno, eat your deep fried lamb pastry and take an animal ride

These pictures were taken in October, when things were starting to wind down at the park.  Hence this empty carousel

And behold these other wonders...
A caterpillar roller coaster

Pink Camo Tanks!

And of course the ubiquitous Bounce Houses, known locally as batoot.  These are all over the city, but the biggest ones are here in Panfilova.  Again, please see a better post about batoot from Mike and Michelle here.  Here's of a few shots of one of the Panfilova batoot.

My son spent a lot of time on these bounce houses this summer, bouncing and playing with the local kids.  As a rule, Russian and Kyrgyz kids play on the same batoot, so that is good to see a lack of ethnic tension in that sense.  Also, my son only sprained his ankle once and got pink eye just once, so I can say he won the batoot season.

And here's a bonus pic of a classy bride and groom taking a bounce in  batoot...

It took them a while and few hundred som to convince the operator to look the other way on the no adults policy.

And now we leave our fair park through the main gate.  Goodbye sweet sweet Panfilova Park.

An additional note - I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but Bishkek looks, in an arboreal sense, like the Northeast of the USA.  It is the same latitude as say Newburyport, Massachusetts (Anna!) so it makes sense in that way.  Also, my theory as to why Birch, Maple, Oak, Cottonwood and Horse Chestnut dominate here as they do there, is that all of these trees come from Northern Europe.  Bishkek, like Newburyport was colonized by Northern Europeans and they brought their trees with them to keep their trees from feeling abandoned.  Trees can be so sensitive.

I'm not entirely convinced that this the reason, but it sounds reasonable...well parts of it.