In the Valley of Horses

Firstly, can I apologise for the lack of photos. Once again, we're in a country where this blog site is banned (this is coming to you via my wee brother) so doing anything other than text is a bit complex. You'll have to just make do with the boring wordy bit...

After weeks of desert dust, leaving Uzbekistan by the  verdant Fergana Valley was like jumping into the sea on a hot sticky day. Black smudges on the eastern horizon slowly thickened to become a rampart of mountains that marked the border with Kyrgyzstan. It was in Fergana that Central Asians were first met by Chinese travellers who had ventured into the unknown west to find the near mythical Fergana horse. The horses were rumoured to have wings and to breath fire, but the forlorn donkeys and scraggy old nags I saw gnawing on the fields didn't quite live up to expectations. It was this first meeting of east and west, however, that first began the exchange of goods and ideas that was to become the Silk Road.

*a short disclaimer: all history included in these blogs is based on stuff I've read and quite possibly misremembered over the last year or two so it could be complete rubbish. Let's just keep quiet about it and carry on...

We first stopped in Osh where the wounds of more recent history still lay unhealed. In 2010 Osh was the scene of serious ethnic violence and rioting (it seems Stalin sneezed while drawing the border and annexed thousands of Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan). Trying to find differences between these groups other than language is difficult. The best we could come up with is that they wear different silly hats. Traditional Kyrgyz men wear tall felt hats that, along with shiny boots, big belts and beards, gives them an almost gnome-like appearance. In Osh, they pottered around the  bazaar eyeing up bridles, horseshoes and shinier boots. The bazaar itself was patched together from rusty Chinese shipping containers and a few riot-damaged buildings. After the relative order of the more Sovietised Uzbekistan, we revelled in its filth and chaos.

We next took a string of minibuses into the  mountains, squashing in between head-wrapped country women until forest draped the valleys and white peaks surfed the clouds. We stayed in a homestay in the amiable and amiably named village of Arslanbob. The bridge to our house had been  washed away in the spring melt so we had to cross the gurgling  water via a makeshift construction of old plastic pipes. Every house has a yard with chickens, a donkey or goat (both if you're lucky), fruit trees and an outdoor mud ovens. Last year's harvest is stored beneath the seating platform and truly fresh produce is rare, the seasons here still mean something (generally wooly apples and hairy potatoes).

From Arslanbob we hired horses and a guide and  clopped through the dappled light of the world's largest walnut forest. My steed was not far from the Great Glue Factory in the Sky and wheezed along grumpily. I had visions of him collapsing beneath me with his legs splayed in all four directions. On the road we passed old 1950s Russian trucks  carrying dozens of hoe-wielding locals on their way to the high pastures. Here they planted potato and corn, hacking with mattocks at the damp earth in the shadows of the mountains.

We rode up to a rocky promontory where I really felt my horse should have reared up on his hind legs so I could wave my Stetson in the air. Instead he decided to turn around and sullenly chew the grass behind us so that my back was turned to the glorious view of the valley, twinkling as it was with zinc roofs and a thousand meltwater streams.

After only a few days in Kyrgyzstan we discovered the border to China was about to close for ten days and that we would have to make a premature dash to the frontier. We took a shared taxi to the village of Sary Tash. Normally, you share taxis with other people but his one was partly shared by a hundred loaves of bread, some putrid smelling eggs and a bag of meat that kept dripping blood on the floor. Sary Tash was a town of collapsing outhouses and muddy yards churned up by peasant boots and mountain drizzle. For the first time since Albania, we slept more or less fully clothed in beds so saggy we were nearly folded in two.

Early the next morning we stood by the road stomping our feet and praying for the sun to rise. We were hoping to hitch a lift to the Chinese border but for a while all we saw we're a gormless cow and man having a poo in his yard. We didn't have to wait for too long before a Tajik truck stopped and we clambered into the cab. 'To China!' we cried (well, that's at least how I see it in my memory), climbing the passes into pristine snowfields that stung the eyes. After only half an hour, we had to join  a queue of trucks that were attempting to cross a stretch of lethally bumpy ice. When some inevitably got stuck, I jumped off to relieve myself and, in a thoughtful bid to entertain the weary truckers, fell waist-deep into the snow. After a lot of waiting followed by a lot of juddering around painfully we cleared the ice and finally reached a border town of rusting caravans. Across the border lay China! 

But that will have to wait for the next exciting installment! Did our intrepid explorers make it to China? Did Nic have a sudden bout of food poisoning? Had the Chinese border inexplicably moved 150km to the east? Find out next time...