We crossed the infamously difficult Torrugart pass with a disappointing lack of formality (although its possible that they were just saving the hassle for the 50-car convoy of French Paris-Peking road rally tourists headed the other way). On the far side of the pass lay Kyrgyzstan, a small central Asian republic with beautiful mountains, friendly people, a US Air Force base, and little else.
The scenery on the drive was stunning -- cobalt blue skies, snow capped mountains, and small bubbling rivers tracing through green pastures dotted with the white felt yurts of the Kyrgyz shepherds. Kyrgyzstan is something of a country without a proper history: the people in this mountainous terrain were mostly simple shepherds under the cultural orbit of the khanates of nearby Uzbekistan until the Russians decided to carve them up into more manageable units. The distinction between Kyrgyz and Kazakh was largely invented by Stalin.
The Kyrgyz passed the soviet era in relative calm, not having much arable terrain to be converted into "kolkhoz" collective farms. Many Kyrygz were forcibly migrated to the cotton basket of Uzbekistan, but beyond that, the economy remained largely based on the pastoral raising of sheep. They had similar luck in avoiding the worst of the soviet break-up, largely due to the wisdom of their first president, a former head of the Academy of
Science, who managed to refrain from embarking on the kind of ethnic nationalism which tore apart neighboring Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. President Askar Akayev instead pressed for closer relations to the west, and tried to leverage his country's natural appeal as a tourist destination through encouraging such innovative programs as a Kyrgyzstan's "Community Based Tourism" scheme.
The driver who met us at the pass to bring us to the nearest town of Naryn, as it turned out, was the "CBT" director for region. CBT is a uniquely Kyrgyz institution, a government sponsored organization that brokers tourism services provided by local people. Each town has a English-speaking coordinator who keeps a lists of all the services offered in his vicinity. He puts together an itinerary describing all the services a tourist is to receive, along with fees for each. The genius of it is that the fees are then paid directly to the local people by the tourists. While I'm sure that there are some kickbacks going to the coordinator for his favors in booking tourists, at least the local people are aware of how much the tourists are paying -- a far cry from similar "community tourism" efforts I've seen elsewhere.
Within a few hours of arrival in Naryn, we had a multi-day horse trek booked through valleys and mountain pastures of Kyrgyzstan's eastern Mountains.
1 comments:
I have to disagree with a couple of sweeping statements here. For one, the distinction between Kyrgyz and Kazakh was not invented by Stalin. The Kyrgyz and Kazakh people speak different languages. Kazakh language descends from the Kipchak, and is more similar to Nogai and Karakalpak, than it is to Kyrgyz. The Kyrgyz language is closer to Siberian Turkic languages, such as Altay. Which brings me to the second point. Your statement "Kyrgyzstan is something of a country without a proper history" is also false. The Kyrgyz have a very long history beginning with their early states in Siberia and subsequent migration to Central Asia where they are now. Also, the Kyrgyz history is well described in their national epic poem Manas. The Kazakhs have a separate history, starting with the creation of the Kazakh Khanate in 1456-1465 on Zhetisu (seven rivers).
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