Deep Mountain Breaths

22 hours over 500 kilometers of road pitted with pot holes the size of Volkswagons brought us from the far western oasis town of Kashgar at the farthest edge of China to the bussiest bazzar town and largest outdoor market on the Silk Road, Osh in Southern Kyrgyzstan. Osh is said to be older than Rome. Osh rests in the Fergana Valley, a pinwheel swirl of rather dizzying but important borders designed to parcel out slices of this incredibly fertile land to the nations of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Osh was a step out of the East and into Central Asia. Our first hint of this was delivered over our first Kyrgyz breakfast of mutton and potato soup at 8am on a Tuesday. Our neighbors two tables over demonstrated that the proper way to cut the grease of the mutton fat was to wash down your soup with not one but two glasses (not shots but glasses!) of Stolichnaya! I guess the Union has fallen but the Soviet legacy of liquor lives on...



From Osh, the second largest city in Kyrgystan, we moved on to the third largest city, Jalalabad. We arrived after a dusty bus ride and set our bags down in a Russian hotel near the center of town. Thirsty, we headed to an empty cafe down the road and seated ourselves on a tea bed, a raised platform covered with cushions, and ordered bowls of Kumis (fermented mare's milk), the Kyrgyz national beverage. I ducked into the bathroom for a minute and when I came back the cafe was a sea of blue police uniforms. I pushed my way through the crowd to our table where I found a strange almost dream-like scene; a laughing Lukin drinking horse milk, holding court with 25 Kyrgyz cops!

Just a day in Jalalabad and then we wrangled a bus ride up to the transit town of Baazar Korgan and crammed four Uzbek men, a Kyrgyz woman, Lukin our backpacks and me into a shared taxi for the last hour or so up the foothills into the village of Arslanbob. Arslanbob is every positive superlative you can think of. The village is a fairytale. We were met in the town center by Hoyat, the local representative of the national organization CBT (Community Based Tourism). CBT's aim is to foster a kind of tourism that protectes the local environment, promotes the local culture, and puts tourist dollars into the hands of local people, not in the pockets of out-of-town real estate developers and hoteliers. One of the ways it hopes to build this kind of infrastructure is by providing housing for tourists in the homes of local people. Beds are a certain price, a tent in the garden another, meals another. The money goes directly into the hands of those who house, CBT coordinators get their paycheck from the fundraising of the national office. It is an incredible system and the family in whose garden we camped was warm and lovely. We wpent the hottest hours laying on their tea bed in thh shade of rose bushes reading books and spent the cooler hours hiking up to waterfalls, following horse trails through the ancient and enormous walnut forest for which the region is famous, or exploring the alleys of the village. It felt like we flaoted through the last three days! Tomorrow we cram into another taxi and wind our way over the mountain pass into Central Kyrgyzstan. Now, I'm headed back to meet Lukin for a Baltica Seven Beer. We ran into some of his cop friends on the street, maybe they'll join us for dinner!