Day 113: Shepherds and Yurts at Song-Kol

I stayed in Karakol one more night to give my feet a rest from the pounding I’d given them, and the next morning I had yet another early start.  My aim was to catch one of the early morning marschrutky minibuses along the less-visited but more scenic southern shore of Issy-Kul lake.  It took a good five hours to arrive at the other end of the lake, where I was able to quickly jump into a shared taxi (they’re super-cheap here) to drive the one final hour to the town of Kochkor.

     
A few of the sights en route…

I wanted to get to Kochkor early enough to organise a trip up to Song Kol lake the next day, which I knew was my only chance to stay with a local shepherd family in a yurt up at their jailoo (summer pasture).  A great outfit called Community Based Tourism (CBT), a for-profit company set up by the Swiss development agency Helvetas, arranges the stays as a way of getting some of the tourist dollars into the local farmer’s pockets.  I teed up my stay and then caught a taxi to my local homestay for the night, where a delightful babushka (grandmother) cooked me a superb dinner meal.

    
Local kids after school.                          A traditional shrydak felt carpet.

The next morning we (Gurit, an Israeli friend I met in Altyn Arashan, who popped up in Kochkor and also signed up for the yurtstay) hired a taxi for a bargain $30 to drive us the three hours on horrendous dirt roads up into the mountains.  We drove up over a pass and had our first views of 3000m-high Song-Kol lake below.  It was a lot larger than I imagined and ringed by snow-capped mountains, and as it lies well above the tree line there was not a tree or even a shrub in sight.

    
Song-Kol lake.                                        The middle of nowhere.

After some searching we eventually found our host family’s camp close by the lakeshore, and were shown inside our yurt.  It was very roomy inside but cosy at the same time, with the floor covered with local carpets and shrydaks (handmade wool felt carpets).  In the centre of the room was a large, low table, where we had all our meals (sitting on cushions).  Our yurt even had a little pot-belly stove, which was invaluable overnight when temperatures plummeted to well below zero.

Home sweet home.

    
Complete with skylight!

I couldn’t have been more in the middle of nowhere and I LOVED the experience – the vastness and emptiness of the place was incredibly overpowering, and it was so delightfully peaceful, quiet and serene after all the constant noise and hustle and bustle of the past few months.

An “outhouse” if ever I saw one…

The rest of the day was free to spend as we liked, as the family was busy with “farm life”, gathering water, stoking the fire and preparing the meals, rounding up the cattle, feeding the dogs, milking the cows etc.  We wandered off and tracked down a two-humped camel (are they technically called dromedaries?) we saw coming in, and meandered through some of the other camps.

In the afternoon I bit the bullet and decided to ride one of their horses.  I hadn’t ridden a horse since I was about ten, so I asked for a guide to help me out – it turned out the be their 12-year-old son, who was, shall we say, an extremely proficient hand at riding a horse.  He first popped me on this grey, subborn mule (literally!) that wouldn’t go anywhere without either being pulled by a rope or being whipped, which I flatly refused to do!  After a short while I explained to the kid (or attempted to in Russian!) that I actually wanted to learn a thing or two about riding, so we swapped horses.  The other horse – and by the way they find it an entertaining notion that horses should have names – was a joy to ride in comparison, and I spent the next couple of hours riding across the fields.  Pure bliss…

Riding off into the sunset…

As the sun set we piled into our yurt, closed up the “sky light” and fired up the pot-belly stove.  Before long it was pumping out the heat and it was toasty warm inside.  After a hearty meal of mutton and vegetable stew the family helped up prepare our beds – the mattress was a few thick blankets and cushions, and we each had about four blankets on top.  We needed them too: once the fire burnt down it was freeeezing inside the yurt, and well below zero outside.  But what a night sky!  It was crystal clear and no moon, with every star and constellation visible.

Collecting water from the lake.

    
Poor donkey!

Sheep grazing at sunset on my final night in the yurt.