Kyrgyzstan Photos Pt. 2
Kyrgyzstan Photos Pt. 1
Kyrgyzstan Reflections
#1 Shipping containers are recycled in all manner of new uses (see my separate blog post!)
#2 There is a plethora of VW cars – Golf Mark 2, Passat, Jetta and lots of Audis from the same era too
#3 Morrison shopping bags seem to be cropping up in quite a few of the smaller supermarkets
#4 Yet more apples and huge mounds of the biggest butternut squashes I have ever seen
#5 All the taxis are Mercedes vans
#6 Many of the towns and villages have tree lined roads of huge Poplar trees – they are so beautiful
#7 As in the rest of Central Asia, honey abounds
#8 Men usually wear clothes of rather drab colours while the women are often sporting pinks, purples and reds
#9 There are car washing facilities everywhere – all manned by young men and cost about £1.50 for a wash
#10 There are lots of rose bushes – though I haven’t yet come across one that smells divine
#11 On many of the houses, and particularly fences, there are long diamond motifs
#12 Porridge and rice pudding are popular breakfast dishes
#13 The landscape is simply stunning – the snow capped mountains are quite frankly the bee’s knees!
#14 Lots and lots and lots of Vodka
#15 As with the rest of Central Asia the people are very friendly and hospitable
Some Super Statistics
On October 16th it will be 100 days since we left our lovely little flat in Tokyo and hit the road. So we thought we would do some statistical analysis……
Total distance travelled: 16,862km (10,047miles)
Highest elevation: 4655 metres (Ak Baital Pass, Tajikistan)
Snow leopard sightings: a big fat 0
Nights in hotel rooms: 10
Nights sleeping in Totty within a guesthouse complex: 16
Nights wild camping in Totty: 73
Nights as guests in someone’s house: 1
Bottles of gin drunk: 2
Bottles of beer drunk: too many to count
Bottles of good red wine drunk: not nearly enough
Countries visited: 6
Breakdowns: 0
Oil changes: 2
Police ‘fines’: 2
Fromewardbound Facebook friends: 252
Number of Scrabble games played: 5
Number of Scrabble games won by Clare: 0 ….. utterly ashamed
Car washes (paid for): 2
‘Stuck in the mud’ incidents: 1
So there you go…….everyone loves some statistical analysis every now and then 🙂
Kazakhstan: Video
Better late than never, here’s the edit of the footage we shot in Kazakhstan.
Apologies to the folk who are interested in seeing more of us as my videos seem to be going the other way and turning more and more into nature documentaries 😉
Enjoy!
Still droning on
Following on from my other piece about choosing our drone, here’s a more technical look into the finer details of using the drone day-to-day.
Casual readers will find this monolithically uninteresting!
Kyrgyzstan Route
Sadly, our time in Kyrgyzstan is just about to end….. We’re currently in the second city, Osh, and gearing up to set off for the Tajikistan border tomorrow, aiming to cross on Tuesday.
On the trip so far, not only has Kyrgyzstan been the most difficult country to spell, it’s also been the most beautiful. The mountains here are just amazing and the network of tracks that have enabled us to go way up into the hills equally so. Once again the car has performed beyond our expectations and will be treated to a car wash in the morning before we set off.
One for the Road
We drove over a mountain today! Where the Japanese would have built a tunnel the Kyrgyzs built a road. The said tunnel would have been expensive, over engineered, straight and pretty damn boring. This road, on the other hand, was cheap to build, extremely basic, curvy and absolutely totally exciting.
A Tale from a Drama Queen High on a Mountain Pass
On the way from Bishkek to Osh tourists sometimes take a detour to Lake Song Kol; a beautiful lake edged by mountains. There are various roads to this lake but we decided we would take a little used high road and travel over a mountain pass. It would be about 160km from the turn off on the main road to the village near the lake where we could refuel. Captain had found this route on WikiLok, which is an online resource for people who have made a journey (by foot, bike, car….) to share the details of the route with others.
Continue reading “A Tale from a Drama Queen High on a Mountain Pass”
Pardon me for droning on
Quite often when people have seen some of the videos we’ve been making the first question is often “What drone do you use?” So here’s a post to answer that very question.
