Bokonbayevo

We're on the road again! We hired a new car in Bishkek, which is somehow even bigger and more powerful than the last 4x4. We are calling it the The Tank. Driving in Kyrgyzstan is fairly death-defying, so it's good to have something big enough that we can bully other drivers off the road when necessary. The road around Issyk-Kul was patchy at best seven years ago–now it’s being repaired, but that means driving through roadworks. We are grateful for The Tank all the time.

Our road trip will take us all the way east to the hiking hotspot of Karakol, but on the way we have plenty of scenic stops, including an overnight in Bokonbayevo. This is a small town, most famous for traditional eagle hunting. We turned up at the meeting point coordinates, only to find that it was the house of a middle-aged woman, who just hopped into The Tank to direct us to the eagle location. She kept referring to Joanna Lumley as ‘Joanna’, having apparently become besties off the back of ‘Joanna’s’ Silk Roads series. Casual name dropping.

The eagle hunter was a 19-year-old called Tamerlane (like the king), who showed us how Kyrgyz warriors traditionally trained and hunted with golden eagles and hunting dogs, as well as horseback archery. At one point he said enigmatically: "I must search for my father," before galloping his horse to the top of a nearby hill... it was very badass behaviour.

Other highlights so far included a visit to the Burana Tower—an 1,100yo minaret in the middle of the steppe, which is the oldest in Central Asia—and a lunch stop in Barskoon valley, next to a giant carving of Yuri Gagarin's head (the first person to go to space).

On our drive to Karakol, we passed a couple of European hitchhikers but couldn’t stop, and then felt bad about it. So to assuage our guilt, we decided to pick up the next hitchhikers that didn't look too insalubrious. The first was a local woman and her baby, which was absolutely fine. Emboldened, we then stopped for a middle-aged woman who turned out to be quite the passenger. She was desperate to communicate with us but had no English, so just shouted at us in fast-paced Russian for ten minutes without seeming to need much response. Dan pieced together that she was an Uzbek doctor (her miming skills leave much to be desired). When we paused in a traffic jam because some trees were being felled at the roadside, she frantically tapped our shoulders to encourage us to just drive AROUND the queue along the dirt. When we eventually stopped in Karakol to drop her off, she decided now was the time to launch another long diatribe instead of getting out of the car, when we were obviously blocking the entire road.

10/10 hitchhiker experience, we look forward to more.Læs mere