Kyrgyzstan

The flight to Bishkek, the capital of the Kyrgyz Republic, took in some splendid mountain scenery, the sort which would follow me around for three weeks. The country is 95% mountainous, and has been called the Switzerland of Central Asia. (Indeed, a disproportionately high number of Swiss tourists visit Kyrgyzstan each year, drawn by the alpine scenery. I find this puzzling, given they could just head out into their back gardens for the same experience. It's a bit like Eskimos going on holiday to Antarctica for the snow.) There's another comparison to be made with the Swiss – late-arriving trains are practically unheard of in Kyrgyzstan. That's because there aren't any. So my options for exploring the country would revolve entirely around the capabilities of minibuses and shared taxis. I was in no rush to repeat the Khiva experience, so I decided to stay in Bishkek for a slow, relaxing week.

I knew which bus to take from the airport, and hauled my bag across arrivals to the nearby station. I was approached by a young local waving a mobile phone who informed me that he had booked a taxi for me. "That's very nice of you, but I'm taking the bus," I told him. "Yes, taxi, OK, we go." "No, I don't want a taxi." "Yes, no problem, we take taxi." "No, I'm afraid I'm taking the bus." "Yes, OK, taxi." He followed me all the way to the doors of the bus before giving up.

Hostel back alley

The bus dropped me off somewhere in the centre of Bishkek. It was now dark, and I was eager to find my hostel as soon as possible. The city was built from scratch in the 19th century and is laid out in a rigid grid system. Each road goes from north to south or east to west, making it a breeze to navigate. Most locals get around the city using marshrutkas, or minibuses, which ply straightforward routes along the grid for a tiny fare. I took a ride to the main intersection of the two busiest streets, Chuy and Sovietski, and decided to walk the remaining kilometre or so to the hostel. I was immediately struck by how dreadfully underlit the streets were – it was the first time I had actually felt unsafe in my whole trip.

Incredibly I was stopped twice by the police, clad in their familiar green uniforms, the permanent smirk of officialdom on their round faces. On both occasions I was approached by 2-3 officers and taken to a shadowy corner, where I was asked to produce my passport. Upon this my pockets were emptied and given a thorough inspection. The second officer in charge took the liberty of counting through the notes in my wallet, before handing it back unmolested. It was clear they were enjoying their work, and they could sense that I felt completely powerless. After another half an hour of slugging down poorly-lit boulevards, tripping over puddles and pot-holes in the pavement, I located the hostel.

Formerly a statue of Lenin

Kyrgyzstan's tourism stock has risen in recent years, partly due to the introduction of proper nouns in scrabble. It's also becoming an increasingly popular destination for mountain-climbers and trekkers, who visit for the staggering landscape and famed yurt hospitality. The 30-day visa is the easiest to obtain in Central Asia, and the tourist ministry is apparently toying with scrapping it all together. The political climate is far from stable, and there were ethnic riots in the south of the country in 2009, when hundreds of Uzbeks were killed. Soon after, the government of Kurmanbek Bakiyev was overthrown after more bloody riots in Bishkek. He and his family reportedly fled to Belarus, among them his son Maksim, who managed to smuggle £20m into a private bank account before departing. (Maksim turned up in Hampshire, of all places, and was arrested at Farnborough Airport in June 2010.) I had arrived just before the new Presidential elections, and the campaigning was in full swing.

Cleggov, Millibayev and Cameroski

After a couple of days in Bishkek, the weather started to turn. Blue skies were replaced by snow and sub-zero temperatures. It was only October, but it was already colder than it ever gets in England. Only a week ago I had been trudging round Bukhara in a puddle of sweat – now I was wearing thermals. There was no heating in the dorm rooms, so I sat in the garden instead and chatted to a French backpacker. "I started in Paris last year," he said, "and now I'm here." I asked him what methods of transport he had used so far. "None," he said. "I walked." I asked him how on earth this was possible, and he put it in plausible terms: He would walk for ten hours a day and then pitch his tent by the side of the road. The next morning he would pack his things away and continue. Indeed, he described it so casually that it seemed completely logical. If you want to get a true sense of time and distance, then covering a continent by foot is as close as you can get.

I told him about my brush with the Kyrgyz police, and he laughed: "The police in Central Asia are all the same." He told me how, while in Kazakhstan, he had accidentally pitched his tent in a military zone outside of Almaty, the capital city. As he was walking back after a trip into town, he was stopped by the green uniform patrol and told that he would be shot if he attempted to approach his camp. A few hours later, after the soldiers had departed, he found the remains of his tent scattered across the field in a charred ruin. He went back into town with only a few hundred dollars in his pocket, and walked around the streets at 3am looking for a hotel. Suddenly a police car pulled up and three green men jumped out, one with an automatic weapon. They took his money and sped off.

Ala-Too Square

A typical Bishkek residence

The next day I went for a drink at Metro Bar, the main ex-pat watering hole in Bishkek. I got chatting to two Australians at the bar, both of whom worked for a mining company up in the mountains. One of them had broken his hand and couldn't work for six weeks. "I punched a bloke in the face," he said. There were two Brits chatting away, Keith and John, who were impressed that I had chosen to visit Kyrgyzstan, of all places. We spoke of a shared embarrassment at the behaviour of our countrymen abroad, and how obnoxious they often are. Keith recalled an evening he witnessed in Bratislava, when a group of London investment bankers on a weekend binge started a row over a faulty credit card. "She was waving her card in the barman's face, shouting: 'What don't you understand about this?' I let them know what I thought of them." "You have to," I said. "People don't expect to be challenged."

John revealed that he was a veteran English language teacher who had worked all over Asia and Eastern Europe. I told him that I planned to teach in China, and he gave me some advice. "It's a shit career. You've got no prospects, no promotion, crap pay. All you can do is move around. I hope you don't enjoy it, because there's no future." I asked if they had ever had problems with the Kyrgyz police, to which they replied in the negative. I told them about the French guy who had his possessions destroyed in Kazakhstan, but Keith was unsympathetic: "Imagine if some Kazakh kid walked to London and pitched a tent in the garden of MI5 in Vauxhall. What do people expect?" He had a point, and it's hardly surprising that the authorities in countries like Kazakhstan don't exactly cater for the eccentricities of Western backpackers. It's a totally alien concept to them, not least because so few of their own can afford to do it. in China camping is considered dangerous and absurd. We drank up and I told them I would walk home, but they implored me to get a taxi, for safety's sake. The advice proved prescient the next morning when I learned that, as we were knocking back drinks in Metro Bar, my Japanese roommate was being mugged a short distance from the hostel.

Street food - the traveller's friend

Mutton something

My stomach was still recovering from Uzbekistan, so I took the opportunity to indulge in some Western food. I took a trip to Fatboys cafe, popular with American ex-pats from the local US air base. I gobbled down pancakes with cream and jam, and got talking to some British students on the next table. They told me that security was high for the elections, which is why I had been searched by police on my arrival. One candidate, Atambayev, was expected to win convincingly, which could potentially flare up more riots. The main trouble spot would most likely be the town of Osh in the south. Unfortunately I would have to travel through Osh to get to China. I was starting to think my timing could have been better – indeed, the British foreign office had warned against "all but essential travel" to large swathes of the country due to the recent troubles. I had paid little heed to this, assuming it to be worst-case-scenario scaremongering. As it turned out, it was.

I was invited back to their flat, on the second floor of a dismal apartment building near the centre of town. They were expecting two more backpackers whom they had met on couchsurfing.org, a social networking website for travellers. The idea is simple: hosts offer a spare room for travellers to stay, free of charge, in order to meet new people and share ideas and stories. It's now extremely popular, not least with people tempted more by free accommodation than the founding spirit of the website. Fortunately the two Couch Surfers who turned up, Jake and Aleksandra, were very much interested in the latter aspect. They had left home in Toronto in May and had been travelling ever since. We were both eager to get out of Bishkek and explore the famed Kyrgyz wilderness, so we arranged to head to lake Song-Kol.

It was quite a stroke of luck for me, for various reasons. Alex is half-Polish, which meant, for reasons I never quite established, gave her a basic command of Russian. This meant I had a legitimate reason to chicken out of all future negotiating, which was probably a good idea for all parties. It was also refreshing to not have to constantly make solo decisions, and just go with the flow. They were both experienced travellers and very chilled out, which made coming to group decisions far less stressful than I had envisaged when I decided to go it alone. We negotiated (i.e. she negotiated) a shared taxi to Kochkor for 200 Kyrgyz Som each, roughly equivalent to what a local would be expected to pay. The four hour journey gradually revealed the side of Kyrgyzstan that people come for – stunning, remote countryside.

In Kochkor we found the CBT (Community Based Tourism) office, part of a network that helps tourists link up with local people for activities and accomodation. The woman there informed us that we had arrived too late, as all of the yurts had packed up for the winter. We weren't going to be put off that easily, so we took another lift to a small town near Song-Kol and arranged a homestay. It was dark when we arrived and incredibly cold. The husband showed us to our room, and got the fire oven going by burning sheep dung, which kept us warm all through the night. He showed us his scrapbook of visitors, mostly Swiss, who judging by the photos had come in considerably warmer months.

Our host was very hospitable, but had a worrying habit of bursting into our room without knocking. He had a fascinating voice, very gruff and throaty, using soup-thick consonants, especially when switching from Russian to his native Kyrgyz. His passion for looking after our every need was exceeded only by his appetite for vodka, which seemed to incapacitate him each day from about 2pm onwards. His poor wife was brought out every now and then to give us food and drink, although she was clearly under instructions not to talk or engage with us in any way. Alex would occasionally converse with her, upon which the husband would spring into action and interrupt as swiftly as possible. After breakfast we discussed the best way to walk to Song-Kol, and eventually decided to take the short, steep route over the mountain.

The mountain looked small-ish. It wasn't

Overall it was the most physically demanding day of my life. I had never been higher than 2000 meters before, and even then I was being carried upwards by ski lifts and the like. The town itself was at 2100m, and the summit was 3400m. Jake led the way, followed by Alexandra, and for the first three hours or so I kept up, trudging in their thick snowprints. After a while I began to fade, and every step became a force of will. The mountain seemed to go on forever, and every time I thought we were nearing the summit, another vast slope would reveal itself. Eventually, after a further three hours of agony, we made the summit. The weather was deteriorating, and an enormous black cloud was but a few miles away, so we decided to immediately head back.

The trudge downhill was thrilling, fuelled by the knowledge I would never again have to put myself through that ordeal. I learned that mountain climbing really does get progressively and disproportionately harder as you go along - the slope gets steeper, the snow gets thicker, the temperature gets colder, the wind gets stronger, and - crucially - the air gets thinner. I descended with a newfound respect for people who take on beasts like Everest and K2, which make my exploits look like a tea party. We got back before dark, and were greeted by the husband. "Good?" he slurred, before stumbling off to throw things at his wife. Jake and Alex revealed that they were members of a mountain climbing club in Canada, which certainly explained why they left me trailing in their dust.

The summit

Song-Kol

The way home

The kid was listening to music on his mobile. Seriously

A Kyrgyz cemetery

The next day we decided to leave, and hitched a ride back where we had come from, through Kyzart Pass, which was submerged in a snow storm.

Kyzart Pass

A nice fish supper at 2664 meters

One thing that struck me about rural Kyrgyz life was the alcoholism. There's absolutely nothing to do in these towns and villages, so people pass the time by drinking cheap vodka. It warms them up and occasionally makes them aggressive. As we were waiting for a shared taxi in Kochkor, we saw a young man being dragged into a car by about 15 friends, drunkenly lashing out at everyone. This sort of thing must happen every day. Later, another car pulled up and an old man crawled out of the boot, shuffled over to our taxi and began tapping on the window. He was a drunken write-off so we just ignored him.

Top speed: 20mph

Cow blocks traffic. Again

Chasing mountains

In the next town we came across a large gathering, watching a local game. Basically they each took it in turns to throw a wolf's tooth at a pile of other wolfs' teeth.

My Dad flew out to see me, as it was the only time I knew where and when I would be for the next few months. We didn't do a great deal, other than indulge in some quality father-son time.