Bish - Karakol

I left Bish on Monday for the 5 hour drive to Karakol, chaffeured by my Russian driver, Raiz. He didn't speak much English, but my jet lag caught up with me and I ended up sleeping for the first two hours. When I awoke, we were near Lake Issyk-Kul, which looks quite a lot like the picture in my earlier post - lots of blue water with piles of snow-covered peaks surrounding it. For the remainder of the ride we bounced along the road, passing Soviet-era Lada cars, donkey carts, and a surprising number of Audis. The roads are almost all tree-lined, with open fields beyond, stretching up into the mountain foothills. The mountains themselves have very few trees below the snow line, and the overall impression is fairly brown and bare. Alongside the road were plenty of old statues: bears, lions, eagles, heroic-looking workers. Livestock, mostly sheep and cattle, grazed here and there, and sometimes wandered across the road. The towns echoed the brown, bare landscape - there is little new construction in sight, and many of the larger buildings are in a simple, drab, concrete Soviet-era style. The Kyrgyz women seem to compensate by wearing bright clothing or scarves, while the men seem happy to blend in with the browns and greys. As I took this all in, I was again serenaded by an odd combination of American music from the car radio - Michael Jackson, "Do the Bartman," lots of 80s rock, and the Black Eyed Peas again.