Kyrgyzstan – Daily Reports from the Silk Road

Day 20: Monday 25th September –  a tedious border crossing from China into Kyrgyzstan

So, nobody wants to be accused of whinging, but how tedious was this, our first border crossing since entering China??  We had been carefully briefed by Jude our Tour Leader on what to expect and how to behave.  No photographs, keep your voice down, no jokes or larking about……    We were very well behaved but considering all we wanted to do was to leave their country, the Chinese certainly managed to make an Epic out of it.  I think our Passports were checked seven times, our luggage searched and kept waiting seemingly endlessly to move from one stage to the next…. Still, hey ho, this is Adventure Travel, so chill out and get on with it, which is what we did for three and a half hours from when they first looked at our Passports to when we finally trudged through the no mans’ land into Kyrgyzstan!

What a relief to get to the Kyrgystan side where their checks were perfunctory presumably because they rely on the Chinese process!!

Absolutely stunning scenery all around and then a picnic on the Kryg side at 10,000 with amazing mountain views finally got us over it all…… 

Pics of Our drive across the mountains to Sary Tash: Soon come!!!

Generally i don’t like posting videos on the blog because they are so greedy with memory.  Given the stunning nature of the moutain vistas in this part of the world i have made an exception here and you can take a look at this video looking south from Sary Tash towaryd the Tajikistan border and the 23,406 feet high Lenin Peak.

Pics and vid of Kyrgyzstan Mountains and the Lenin Peak: Soon come!!!

Day 21: Tuesday 26th September –  our drive from Sary Tash to Osh via  the Fergana Valley

Once again we found ourselves driving through truly spectacular scenery for the first half of our journey from Sary Tash to Osh.  The pic is a VERY early morning shot of the Trans Alay Mountains. Maybe that contributed to making the second half drag a little but we had been on the road for many hours by the time we got to Osh. 

We had a great leg-stretch when we did get to Osh by climbing up the few hundred feet high Soloman’s Throne, which is described by UNESCO as ‘the most complete example of a sacred mountain anywhere in Central Asia, worshipped over several millenia’.

See Pics of Our drive from Sary Tash to Osh: Soon come!!!