ala-kul #3

the last day was pretty much just decending everything we'd climbed up during the previous two days. there was an old mountain bus parked down in the valley, and the driver held up 6 fingers when we asked how much he would charge to get us down the rest of the way to karakol. it's more or less just a long straight path from there onwards, so we weren't cheating anything. 600 som are just over 6 euro for two persons, so we were more than glad to agree. i had a gut feeling though and sure enough, after checking again, the guy turned out to be charging us not six hundred, but six thousand. classic.

we started walking again and it immediately started raining buckets. we had to take off our shoes to wade through a stream and i just decided not to put them back on and to see what these barefoot hikers were on about. to my own surprise, i managed to walk the remaining 8km and i'm not a hippie, but i do have to say it was pretty fun.

after some hours of walking through the rain, we finally arrived at the regular taxi spot, where we managed to get a much more humane fare back to karakol.Read more