Argh it was too hot last night! It was like a sauna in our yurt for the first couple of hours - so hot that we had to open the door and hope a curious horse didn’t wander in. However, we both woke up feeling better than usual, so perhaps an overheat in a yurt was what we needed.
I ate a normal amount for breakfast for a change. And JC enjoyed small sugary doughnut-like objects with his meal. Over breakfast we compared driving licenses and I was fascinated by how standardised they are - the Krygyz version above with the British below.
We left Tash Rabat and its yurt camp/valley for a 7 hour drive to Kazarman.
Jusup was kind and took us the pretty, but very slow and bendy, route to sate JC's landscape needs. This was the 109 km long 3M-13, Kara Koo Ashoo, dubbed the "best scenic road in Kyrgyzstan". It also appears on the 'Dangerous Road' website - probably because you have to know what you're doing to drive this. The road is closed from October through to March and the website helpfully adds "It’s not the best road if you’re prone to car sickness". Fortunately my travel sickness stayed off (I think Tuesday was actually a stomach bug plus travel nausea) and we enjoyed the huge vistas open to us.
There were so many wondrous views we couldn’t stop and snap each one. The air was warm, the breeze light and it was glorious.
The Chinese are building a railway in the area and the amount of dust everywhere was high. It looked like a moonscape. JC wandered off to take a picture of the lunar-like river and fortunately returned to the car before an approaching official reached us. We drove off rapidly. Jusup made the most of the dust for some drive-by advertising for the company, Pamir Guides (I highly recommend).
As this road was so high and exposed, there were the inevitable snow markers. Jusup and Timur were no longer bemused by my random requests to stop for photos - JC's were always due to the amazing views. It's important to calibrate these things (I am 1.64 m tall).
We passed numerous ancestral cemeteries but never really got a decent picture of them. They look like miniature cities from a distance: rural graveyards combining Islamic, Soviet, and pre-Islamic nomadic traditions.
We stopped for lunch by the Naryn River, Kyrgyzstan’s largest. Definitely a picnic with an epic view. We were there long enough for JC to be bitten a few times by a passing mossie - no idea how they missed me.
We continued driving up winding roads over passes, and crept down the other sides careful not to over heat the brakes. We stopped a couple of times to give the car a break and to shake out the engine filters which were full of road dust.
We were on an another untarmaced road (which I started to dub "authentic") but it was making me nervous about having another puncture. The Krygyz very helpfully mark a road’s length with marker posts, so I was able to count down the km to Kazarman. I was conscious we didn’t have a spare tyre, so the nearer we got to Kazarman, the shorter distance we’d need to be rescued if we had another puncture. However, the views continued to be awesome.
Crossing the River Naryn again.
We made it to Kazarman at 1745 and found the tyre shop was still open. Opening hours seem to be as long as the store keeper is around to keep them open. And, by the amount of business he had coming through, he was wise to keep longer hours but it was probably exhausting working long days. With the roads here, a tyre replacement garage would have a lot of business. Fortunately they had a spare tyre our size. It didn't have much tread on it but it was far more air tight than our duff version.
As we entered Kazarman, we saw the usual mounds of hay in fields/lofts/roofs. As the summer is so short, they must make provisions for their animals: most houses we passed had a stash of hay in their field or under their eaves.
All repaired, we had supper in town. It was fried aubergines again for me but, by the time I’d removed the batter (which would have caused a riot with my still delicate guts), it wasn’t a huge meal.
Kazarman is not a huge happening place. Like Kochkor, it's an intersection between routes, where people pass through to stock up on provisions, and then pass on. Kazarman did have an airport - but fancy missing the Kara Koo Ashoo road and fly here!
As I'd requested, we ended up in a homestay in Kazarman rather than yurt, which had been on the original programme. Since we were camping the next day, I really wanted somewhere to shower (my last shower was Monday afternoon, JC’s was Sunday morning) and a little bit of comfort. Our hotel offered this in buckets. We had an en-suite room - goodness, not only an indoor toilet but next to us! - charging points, a double bed, towels and aircon. We both smelt like a yurt: an earthy mix of wool rugs, felt, wood and charcoal smoke added to an accumulation of 6 days on a dusty happy trail.
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