Related posts:

1. Kyrgyz – The noodle that got away

After Tajikistan I crossed back into Kyrgyz for a few days and then into China where I burnt myself on 5 days of trains from Kashgar down to Kunming for New Years Eve where I threw up in a urinal. In China I visited a Pagoda for Tripitaka who led a monkey, a pig, a fish and dragon masquerading as a horse to India in search of Buddhist scriptures. I was in Kashgar, the Muslim part of China where people speak a Turkic language and the people seem to despise the Han Chinese. The Chinese government is flooding the area with Han Chinese. I’m now in Laos and heading down to the 4000 islands that sit in the middle of the Mekong before I head into Cambodia. I was contemplating going to Burma but couldn’t bring myself to go against the wishes of the pro-democracy movement. The Kyrgyz Republic has tried to escape the disaster of the stans be renaming their country, dropping the stan. They have both Russian and American military bases and are trying to get the Chinese in. There visa is issued in a day and is relatively cheap at $40, in comparison to the $100 I spent for Tajikistan, plus $70 for the Pamirs permit or Uzbekistan that cost me $118 for a two week visa. Still they cannot escape the pervasive corruption of the Soviets, police stopped me constantly, searching me and trying to steal my money, one foreign girl had $350 stolen. The cops are paid $20 a month and have to pay a $5000 fee to join the force. Nor their architectural monstrosities or mountains of paper work. I was in Kyrgyz for four days before I realized the timezone had changed. There is not a mosque in sight, few have read the Koran or know the prayer and no one seems to know whether they are Shia or Sunni. Like all of Central Asia the borders were drawn by Stalin to screw the locals, to divide them up and thwart any pan-Turkic or pan-Islamic tendencies. The Fergana Valley in the west of Kyrgyz and the east of Uzbekistan is full of Uzbeks. This valley has the most Islamic of the central asians. There are Kyrgyz in the eastern half of Tajikistan. I ended up flying from Kyrgyz to Tajikistan. If i caught the train I would have gone in and out of Uzbekstian four times and across Turkmenistan. To get visas for this would have taken at least a month. Kyrgyz and Tajikistan share a large border but in the interests of control nearly all transport winds its way in an out of a few countries. There are pockets of Uzbekistan with Kyrgyz that the major road passes through. Tree lined streets, parks, cars that giveway and the closest thing to a democracy in central asia. Markets run out of a partly enforced grid of shipping containers. Sugar has left tea and on the border with China noodles are everywhere. They are a relaxed, formerly nomadic people that stumbled in from Siberia maybe a thousand years ago. Their lifestyle collectivized out of existence by Stalin. They make an odd contrast to the haughty Russians, they coexist but friendships and relationships rarely cross the divide. It is not religious because both groups are only nominally Orthodox or Muslim, both say their cultures are very different. Some Kyrgyz politicians are pushing to have Kyrgyz as the only official language whcih will make it difficult for the Russians who generally know only a few rods. The Kyrgyz are more east asian looking and think they are distantly related to the Japanese and Koreans. Their language may or may not by part of the same family. They speak a Turkic language There was an orange revolution here that brought the mafia to power and four politicians were killed early last year. The owner of the guesthouse where I stayed saw it happen on the BBC whilst Kyrgyz channels showed cartoons. A few Kyrgyz people said the US embassy was involved in the orange revolution but to me the new government hasn’t been to the benefit of the US. The new government said the past four years of payments for American military bases have to be paid again because all the money disappeared in corruption. The Kyrgyz I spoke to all seem pretty nonchalant about the larger game of geo-politics that is been played in their country. The Russians, Americans and Chinese are ally vying for control. As elsewhere in the former Soviet Union the old have fond memories of Soviet times, free accommodation, health, education and food was cheap. The collapse left all of central Asia in a mess, all their economies were integrated into the whole. The few parts of a tractor that the Kyrgyz used to produce are no longer needed. All the educated Russians, Jews and Germans have left. Tourist infrastructure barely exists and shared taxis are the mode of transport between towns and cities. One ride took 17 hours because the driver stopped when he saw someone broken down by the side of the road. Nice thing to do except someone else had already stopped, our driver did nothing except stand around, smoke cigarettes and watch. Once their car started again, we would head off speed ahead of them, stop, turn around and drive back looking for them. Eventually the other Kyrgyz in the car started to tire of the drivers compassion and lack of sensibility, berating him to drive on to the capital. I left Kyrgyz for Tajikistan on a propeller plane designed by Lenin, built in Stalin’s gulags, serviced by Khrushchev, decommissioned by Gorbachev, brought back by Yeltsin and flown by his son. I've uploaded photos of both Kyrgyz and Tajikistan to: http://wokling.com/v/Kyrgyz/ http://wokling.com/v/Tajikistan/

No related posts.