Horse-ing Around 1

Swissish

Rohan is the most beautiful man ever. He's the warmest, gentlest, most caring person you'll ever meet. He's educated, knowledgeable, interesting and funny.

Rohan, who lives in Bangalore, planned to have a trip through Central Asia with his girlfriend, but just before they were due to leave she had a work crisis and couldn't come. So he had to cancel all their bookings, and decided to come alone anyway, with much less of a plan.

He knows all about Almaty, and all about the whole region actually, he's done the research, he knows about Kazakh food, culture, and knows exactly where he wants to go, what foods he wants to try, and what he wants to buy. He can answer so many of my questions about the place.

He'd already planned a little hiking adventure to Kok Zhailau, a mountain which is part of the range skirting the city, so we met up and caught a local bus up as close as we could, and climbed up.

It didn't take long to get beautiful.

"And fuck you too!" No no, I mean, "peace and love to you too brother."

Looking back at the city

So many grasses and herbs and flowers, and everything's looking so lush. It's a beautiful spring. This place really reminds me of Switzerland somehow, without all the wooden chalets, and without the crushing prices.

There's the occasional horseman about, and we saw loads of wild horses doing their own thing as well, generally horseing around, galloping around our tents, and even having little horsey domestic altercations. They're always so negative, neighing all the time, and whinnying about everything under the sun.

I'm very glad the herds of galloping equines dodged our tents during their fast runs through our camping spot though. Occasionally I was a bit worried, and thought we might have to suddenly hoof it out of there.

This was our water supply for the night, we climbed down.

Colour uncoordinated

Rohan guzzling a Nutella snack, wild horses guzzling fresh green grass behind him. Nutella! Yay! It came with these little crispy mini grissini sticks, the whole pack lasted about 2 minutes with us ravenous sweetteeth gorging into it. Luckily the horses are too smart to eat Nutella, and weren't interested.

Yeah, the sunset was something else.

And so was the sunrise:

My tent was right in the sun from sparrow's, I had no choice but to get up early, to avoid being cooked.

You have no idea how good having bread and cheese like this is for my soul.

Indian spicy porridge

We met some really sweet local uni students, and chatted for ages. The people are so super friendly here, so eager to connect. People just mingle automatically everywhere, share tables without asking, just start chatting with complete strangers and share their food.

In fact, on our way up the hill, as we were resting and eating delicious chocolates that Rohan had bought from the famous Rakhat chocolate factory down in town (very well named, as rakhat means pleasure in Kazakh), a couple of local men passed us and clearly motioned for us to give them some. We hadn't offered straight away. How rude of us. They would all automatically offer food and water to anyone who passed by.

We had a beautiful night up on the saddle, chatting for ages, and meeting a few other locals too. We also met 2 Indian students who, despite the acres and acres of space around, decided to pitch their tent right next to Rohan's. It's not the first time I've seen that happen. Safety in numbers.

Senseless

In the morning Rohan told me the most disturbing and harrowing news from Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, which the Indian guys had told him all about the night before.

A few days ago some sort of verbal altercation occurred between some local Kyrgyz guys and some Egyptian uni students in Ala-Too Square, a big park in the centre of the city. As a result of whatever happened, gangs of Kyrgyz guys broke into Egyptian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi worker dormitories around the city and started randomly attacking foreigners from those countries.

They also attacked people on the street, if they looked slightly like they may be of South Asian or North African descent.

According to news reports, after police were called to the initial attacks, they failed to intervene whatsoever, and simply joined the onlookers. It took them over 24 hours before they started making arrests, to stop the violence.

The chaos lasted for days, spurred on by the fact that some of the Kyrgyz guys filmed the beatings on their phones and proudly uploaded them onto Tic Toc. Someone showed me some of the vids, they're so horrible to watch.

A Bangladeshi man was killed, many people were injured, universities were closed down and offered their classes online, and thousands of international students and workers took refuge in their private homes and apartments, and then left the country, helped by flights organised by their own governments. Some got straight out overland and went to Kazakhstan, like the guys camping with us.

No wonder they pitched their tent so close.

The situation has apparently calmed down now, but, understandably, tourists like Rohan have decided to completely skip the Kyrgyz leg of his journey. It's so disappointing, as the Kyrgyz part was the one he was looking forward to the most.

The whole story really shocked me, it's hard to understand how this sort of completely illogical and senseless mob mentality can take hold, and, in a testament to the underbelly of some parts of Kyrgyz society, it also shocks me that apparently almost all of the local media failed to report on the violence in their own capital.

Although, if I think about it, this could be due to government attempts to not be perceived as having failed to provide sufficient security in their lucrative education and tourism sectors, or to stifle any bad publicity that may negatively impact those sectors.

But the fact that the situation escalated so rapidly is an indication of some of the tensions and divisions that already exist beneath the surface of Kyrgyz society.

After that sobering discussion, Rohan and I eventually decided to get moving again, and we hiked our way down the other side of the ridgetop, slowly making our way back to the city from another direction.

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Go to Part 2