Secondary side trip - Karakol

Train #14, Buses #8 and #9, Distance travelled from Shanghai 10,300 km. A big lake, an awful drive (twice), music, dancing and a beautiful wooden church.

From Bishkek, which is already a side trip, I make a further side trip - so I guess that makes it a secondary side trip. I have two reasons for this. I want to see Lake Issyk-Kul: it is the 8th deepest lake in the world, 11th biggest, and sits at 1600 metres above sea level - the Central Asian answer to Lake Titicaca. It is also a salt water lake and, although it gets cold in these parts, it never freezes.

Second, Kyrgyzstan has an extremely limited passenger rail service - just the two lines - but in the summer it runs a special train to Balykchy, a town at the western end of Lake Issyk-Kul. Various travel sites say to only take the train if you’re desperate, because it is really slow, but Kyrgyzstan have made a virtue out of this slowness, by turning it into a tourism venture, with panoramic windows in several carriages. There’s a VIP class, where you get to sit in fancy couches, and the Lux class, where the seats are pretty standard, but with the big windows.

The train moves very sedately through the valley west of Bishkek, never getting much above 50 km/hr - the video gives a sense of the pace at which we are not travelling. I enjoy some breakfast on the train - just some tea and sort of sausage rolls, but the rolls are made from bread rather than pastry.

The valley narrows quite suddenly, becoming a gorge - the road stays by the river but the train tracks ascend so we get a good view - at one point the train is going at barely more than a walking speed, with most passengers on their feet, taking snaps.

We arrive at Balykchy Station a bit before noon: a swarm of taxi drivers crowd around me, so tiresome. I try to ignore them, and walk to the bus station - I don’t have a destination sorted yet. I have read that there are a couple of towns on the north coast which get a lot of visitors, and I know that Karakol is the town at the far end of the lake, 200 km away. Fate intervenes: there’s a marshrutka leaving for Karakol just as I arrive, I figure I can look at the towns on the way, and if one looks nice, come back to it. Spoiler: they don’t. Their one advantage is that the road is good to them, but after that, I don’t know what’s going on with the road. For about 150 km, it looks like they have ripped it up and are starting again - it’s very bumpy and we are constantly swerving to avoid potholes. At least the lake is pretty, although we don’t see all that much of it.

Thankfully, after that rather horrible drive, Karakol has a really nice vibe. It’s in the foothills of the mountains, and has skiers coming in winter and hikers in summer - I haven’t been anywhere on this trip that foreign tourists have been so visible. I don’t think any locals are staying in the hostel, I don’t think even the receptionist is local. Oddly, I am now closer to Shanghai than I was in Kashgar, which is somewhere south west of here.

All these visitors make for good places to eat in this quite remote place. I have some really light and crisp gyoza and a decent tom yum soup at this place, and a really good brownie with ice cream at another. There’s even a tiny blues bar, where I am surrounded by English speakers as I have a local beer and enjoy the music (not live, but that’s OK).

On Saturday, I go for a walk and am attracted by the sound of music in what I think is the city’s main square - sadly, I get there just as the music stops, but then there are dancing lessons as well as stalls and fairground activities.

Someone has put in a lot of effort with the gardens here

Across the road from my hostel is the Russian Orthodox Holy Trinity Cathedral - built in the 1890’s, it’s a wonderful building. Once again, no photos are allowed to be taken inside, so I get a couple of surreptitious shots from my lap.

Two buildings across the street catch my eye - the first is a pedagogical institute and the second is the local museum - I don’t feel inspired to go in.

The hostel reception and another traveler I spoke to both said there were proper buses going back to Bishkek, every hour from 7 in the morning. I rock up to the bus station just before 11, there are certainly some buses there, but they don’t leave until 11 at night! So it is off to the marshrutka I go, another Mercedes Sprinter - they are speedy enough, faster than a bus, but the seats are a bit smaller than ideal for me, and this one is old, so many years of carrying passengers have worn an indentation into the seat. I am destined to sit in it for the next seven hours, the first four without a stop.

I see so many police on the way back, out on the side of the road with cameras and, I expect, radar. Our driver seems to have a detector as he slows periodically and then, sure enough, another cop. With them being so prevalent, you’d think other drivers would get the message and drive within the speed limit but no, every cop had a motorist stopped.

Cheers!