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Mourning Our Awning (or Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish!)
So after celebrating getting our Chinese visas we both ended up suffering with traveller’s tummy! Not the best Wedding Anniversary as we had to postpone our special meal out! Because of this we decided to stay another night in Bishkek at the Guest House as it was nice to be near proper facilities (ie an en suite bathroom!).
We then headed to Lake Issyk-Kol and have been there ever since! On the first night we met a lovely German couple, Michael and Sabine, who invited us for dinner and drinks in their behemoth of an overland camper (it even has a washing machine!) They were part of a group of 20 vehicles who had just come back from China so we had a lovely evening picking their brains and looking at their photos. The place where we’d met them wasn’t ideal as it was swarming with mosquitoes, although they weren’t the biting type they were still irritating. Because of this Michael and Sabine decided to meet up with the rest of their group about 120km further round the lake as they were told this was mosquito free. They gave us the co-ordinates and said we were more than welcome to join them. We decided we’d take a look to see what it was like although we were a little unsure about being with so many other vehicles. As it happened the site was a huge sandy peninsula with plenty of room for everybody. It was so peaceful that we have now been here 9 days.
It was quite bizarre being with so many Europeans in campervans on the edge of a lake in Kyrgyzstan surrounded by snowy mountains. At times it felt like we were in Switzerland! We had a great couple of days chatting to the other travellers and exchanging stories. On their last night they all had a big meal cooked over a campfire which they generously invited us along to. The beer, schnapps, wine, vodka and hideous Chinese spirits (Tom, you’ll know what we’re talking about – beautiful bottle, horrible taste) flowed freely and it was the first time since we’ve been away that we’ve both got quite tipsy! Michael and Sabine, we hope you are reading this, thanks again for your hospitality, we will keep in touch.
Since then we have spent our days bathing in the lake, reading, housekeeping and doing odd jobs on Mario, only leaving the site every couple of days to stock up on supplies from the local village shop. To give you an idea of prices over here, diesel is 50p a litre, cigarettes are 60p a pack, beer is £1 a pint and decent vodka is £3 a litre! As it gets dark at 7.30pm we’ve spent our evenings stargazing and watching our Breaking Bad box set (thank you Jamie for the recommendation). Being in the middle of nowhere the stars are really bright. Wherever we are in the Northern Hemisphere, we always look for the Plough – here it’s quite difficult to make it out due to all the surrounding stars being so bright. Breaking Bad is excellent although we are limiting ourselves to 2 episodes a night! As the story is about using a motorhome as a drugs factory, we now understand why Russian customs, after seeing the box set, went away and came back with a sniffer dog!
On one of our shopping trips we wanted to buy distilled water for our leisure batteries. After much pantomime and drawing of diagrams, we ended up in a hardware store in the next village along the lake. The woman here couldn’t understand what we wanted but then a very cute, small, old chap intervened and suggested he would hop in Mario and show us where to go. After driving through town with Papa Issyk-Kol (as we christened him) waving at his friends, we ended up at a house with a shipping container on the drive. Papa Issyk-Kol just walked into their kitchen, interrupting their dinner resulting in a girl opening the shipping container to reveal a mini Halfords! Thanks Papa, we would never have found it on our own.
One of the other jobs we did on Mario was repairing the awning. Pretty much every time we’ve used it, something has gone wrong with the winding mechanism or one of the legs, but after a couple of hours work we finally got it all sorted and it was working perfectly. However, a couple of days later while we were taking a walk around the peninsula, a storm came in from the mountains. It started raining so we headed back to Mario just in time to see a strong gust of wind blow the awning up and over Mario’s roof! This bent the mounting brackets and in getting it down we broke one of the legs – the awning was no more. Mixed emotions as although it’s been very nice to sit under it on a hot day, it has been a bane, we are now 60kg lighter and we don’t need to worry about cleaning it to get into Australia! It being 5 metres long, we ended up towing it to the local farm and donating it to them. It will probably be over their porch next week!
We have now been joined by another group of Europeans from the same tour operator as Sabine and Michael. They too have similar stories about China, one of the themes is how controlling the authorities are and therefore the lack of freedom foreign tourists can enjoy. These groups were in China for 6 weeks which they all suggest was too long. They seemed to visit more cities than we hope to and with us being in a much smaller group for only 4 weeks, we hope our experience will be a better one. As we’ve said before, we are looking forward to having a guide so we don’t need to worry about the route or accommodation, whereas the tour group overlanders have a guide for every country and always know where they will spend the night. We can appreciate the security that this would provide, but we think we would much prefer our freedom of independent travel.
One of the issues the group doesn’t appear to have is the police stops. We were caught ‘speeding’ twice on our way here resulting in a further £50 added to the Kyrgyzstan Police Pension Fund! One of these stops they didn’t even have a camera to support the fine, but when we argued this they just started trying to find things wrong with Mario – such as it not being on Kyrgyz plates! We just chucked them some dollars to allow us to be on our way.
We have heard from our Chinese agent that all of our group now have their visas, but we are waiting to hear whether we have the Tibet Permits. We hope to meet up as a group around about the 20th September, a few days before crossing the border. One vehicle only left the UK a couple of weeks ago, which to us seems crazy as it feels like we’ve been on the road for ages. However, in reality we are only 6000 miles from home, which isn’t really that far. As if to prove this, a few days ago a couple of travellers, Andrew and Antonella, were walking around the peninsular and we got chatting together. It turns out that Andrew was born in the same hospital in Chertsey as Caroline! It truly is a small world!
We are currently on the southern shore of Lake Issyk-Kol, next week on the northern shore they are holding the 1st World Nomad Games – a sort of Olympics for traditional Central Asian sports, most of which seem to involve a horse and a goat’s stomach! We plan on trying to see a few events, especially as it is free. It will be interesting to compare to our trip to London 2012!
We will update again when we can - TTFN
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