2024-07-29 42 74

Location

Outside the city limits of Bishkek.

Participants

Stevage
KT

Expedition

The pre-expedition

KT has been riding horses through the the Kyrgyzstan highlands for the last 18 days. I’m at the start of a long central Azian hiking holiday. We overlap for about 5 days, just enough to squeeze in a few days of hiking in the Ala Archa region and…a geohash?

But the schedule is tight. We’re meeting in Bishkek on the afternoon of the 28th, and going hiking on the 29th. There’s not a lot of flexibility!

And then, I check the geohashes and…it’s a miracle! The point on the 29th is only a 30 minute drive southeast from Bishkek. It’s very close to a road, and looks like disused land. Our hike is south. We can make this work!

Our plan: spend the morning efficiently gathering maps and supplies, pack, and take a taxi via the geohash to the Ala Archa area where we will first dump some of our gear at a hotel.

Attempting to acquire a map of the hike is a hilarious shmozzles. I’ve already had one attempt locating a map shop “GeoID” but apparently gave up too easily. According to the guide I was supposed to continue inside the unmarked door, past the security guard, up to the fourth floor, down to the end of the corridor, and there would be map heaven. Full of confidence, we attempt this. It is definitely, definitively, not there.

Second attempt, we go to one of two addresses we have for the “Trekking Union of Kyrgyzstan”. There is a hairdresser’s. No map shop.

Attempt three, we go to the other address we have. It’s not there. There’s a mosque with people coming in and out. In desperation I take a few steps closer and notice around the side of the mosque, a small sign: “Trekking Union of Kyrgzstan”. Arrows lead to more signs which have more arrows, some of which point in the correct direction. Eventually we arrive, and ask about the promised map. The map they have for sale is terrible. It’s worse than either of the two digital maps we already have. I buy a different map for a different region I’m going to later, and we give up and head back to the hotel.

The expedition

We summon a YandexGo (like Uber) and ponder how to explain why we are going to the point. To our good fortune, the driver is a young Pakistani man with excellent English and a good sense of curiosity and adventure. We try to explain geohashing without getting too technical, and he seems pleased to be part of it.

Passing the time on the journey he tells us colourful tales of business misadventure (business partners in jail now), misdeeds (friends in jail now), and his home life (living with his brother and his two wives, who hate each other and each want the other divorced). He’s studying to be a doctor,

Traffic is heavy but he seems to know some clever back ways. Bishkek seems to extend out much further than I expected. We are quite close to the point by the time it starts to feel very rural.

I ask him if he has been here before. “No, never”. Then he reconsiders. “Yes. My girlfriend lives here.”

We start to drive over a bridge and I suddenly realise we’ll end up on the wrong side of the canal this way. I speak up and our driver is very apologetic. He got caught up in his stories, and immediately reverses, much to the consternation of a car behind us.

Now we’re very close. There are distant fields of corn, and much closer fields of dead thistles. This could be a pretty savage bush bash!

Our driver has no concerns about the rough dirt road, and gets as close as possible, barely 20m from the point. It’s so easy! In the bright sunshine we stride out across short grass, giving the thistles a wide berth.

Success! Hugs and high fives. First geohash in Kyrgyzstan! We take a celebratory photo with our driver (alas, we didn’t think of dragging him to the point itself).

Then we embark on what turns out to be the much more diffficult quest of finding our hotel at Ala-Archa. But that’s a story for another day.