On Saturday I get my first taste of Bishkek nightlife. I hadn’t intended to. Constantly going through my head is the information from the “Dangers & Annoyances” section of the Lonely Planet: Bishkek smiles during the day but is neither safe nor well lit after dark.
So I’d been intending to spend the evening writing an email to everyone back home about what I’d witnessed. Instead, I’m sitting in my landlady and neighbour’s messy kitchen sipping a cup of heavily sweetened green tea. Lena’s hands are shaking as she tries to spark up a Pine Light with the stove lighter. She leans confidentially across the table towards me.
“Husan – he my boyfriend – not long time,” she whispers.
That clears up a matter that has been puzzling me ever since she invited me round for a cup of tea. Who was the dark young man in a sleeveless t-shirt who opened the door to me? He’s good-looking, soft-spoken and considerably younger than Lena, though not young enough to be her son.
As soon as Husan comes back into the kitchen and squeezes himself into a chair between the Formica covered table and a dresser overflowing with cutlery and schoolbooks, Lena hardly speaks a word in Russian, let alone in English.
There is an awkward silence. Lena’s quivering hand scatters ash across the table, and Husan moves the sugar bowl out of the way.
“So… what is there to do in Bishkek?” I ask them, after searching my limited Russian for something to say, and wondering what Bishkek nightlife is life.
“I have only been in Bishkek for three years,” Husan explains. “So I do not know the city very well. I work very hard. Lena has lived here all her life.”
Lena shakes her head again and fumbles in the packet for another cigarette. She has a small heart-shaped face that’s beautiful in a pale understated way, the complete opposite of the big haired, over-made-up girls in the street.
Let’s go to the panorama
“Lena and I can show you Bishkek,” Husan continues. “Let’s go to the panorama!”
“What, now?” It’s 10.30 p.m. and has been dark outside for two hours.
“Lena’s friend Oleg has a car. We will call him.” Life in Bishkek has been so simple and routine that I’m alarmed when things start moving rather fast. Husan gets out his mobile and five minutes later we’re piling into a big white Mercedes. Lena and Husan huddle in the back seat, and I’m next to Oleg, a burly Russian of around 30, in front. A crack running diagonally across the windscreen in front of me is sealed with transparent tape.
We do a circuit of two blocks on Erkindik Prospect, then stop for Husan to buy some beer and nibbles from a kiosk.
I’m very excited. It’s the first time experienced Bishkek nightlife since I arrived here. My evening entertainment has so far consisted of watching BBC World and, on special occasions, standing by the kitchen window with a solitary bottle of Russian beer, looking out into pitch darkness broken only by unsteady headlights or the flicker of a match.
As Oleg’s Mercedes roars through the streets I can see that the trees on Erkindik are strung with coloured lights like Oxford Street at Christmas, and Soviet Street is a bright, blaring jumble of cars and minibuses, lit by streetlights and neon shop signs.
The soundtrack to Bishkek nightlife
The same song is playing on every radio station, Shania Twain’s Ka-ching! Everywhere we drive we can hear it pouring from open car windows, kiosks and bars.
I bite back a scream as Oleg veers into the oncoming traffic to avoid a marshrutka that has stopped to pick up passengers. Marshrutka drivers are the white van men of the former Soviet Union.
Suddenly there are no more tall apartment blocks or brightly lit cafes, and Oleg turns off the main road onto a bumpy lane. The lights of Bishkek recede into the distance. Through in the gloom, I can see an old-fashioned caravan and the silhouette of a factory and a watchtower behind a high wall, and then nothing but gentle hills. We hold onto the seats as Oleg circles upwards.
Panorama is a bar/restaurant at the top of a hill overlooking the city, with PANORAMA in massive neon letters on one side. It’s a real fest of noise and gaudiness. Down in the valley another venue is strobing the sky and blasting out music in competition.
Instead of going into Panorama, we park by a wall and Husan opens our beers. All along the road outside the bar there are groups of people standing by their cars doing the same thing, and I can’t help thinking how strange it is that a woman with two children and a man with a Mercedes should be sitting outside a bar drinking beer from the bottle, like a group of teenagers who know they won’t get served if they go inside. Bishkek nightlife is very different from London’s.
We clamber up onto the wall to see the view over Bishkek – lots of twinkling lights spread out over a wide, flat valley. Bishkek is 700 metres above sea level, and at Panorama, we’re standing in the foothills of the Ala-Too mountains, part of the Tien-Shan range.
“Mmm, how beautiful and interesting,” I say politely in Russian.
“Do you really think it’s beautiful?” Husan asks incredulously.
“Well, it’s all right.”
They point out some of the rights: “That’s micro-district six. That’s a textiles factory. That used to be a shoe factory but now it’s closed down.”
Little of this nomadic country’s history is preserved in fine buildings or ancient monuments. The 18th century Pishpek fortress, around which the town was built, is ruined. Even the ‘old town’ is less than 130 years old.
Many of the lights below us are from hastily built huts in new shanty towns around the city. Since 1991 Bishkek has almost doubled in population and now has around one million inhabitants.
Hitchhiker’s guide to Bishkek
Oleg announces he had to go because he has lost his job and is using his Mercedes as a taxi to earn extra money, and he leaves the rest of us to walk down the hill. “We will find another car,” says Lena.
As we walk down the hill, she first holds my arm, then insists that we should both hold onto Husan. It’s oddly intimate, the three of us walking along with my hand on his bare arm and Lena clinging onto his other side. Every time Lena has to light a cigarette, we go into a huddle to shield her lighter from the breeze.
At the bottom of the hill I discover that by ‘we will get another car’, Lena meant that we would hitchhike home. In Central Asia they say that ‘every car is a taxi’, meaning that most drivers will take on passengers either to be friendly or for a little extra cash. Back at the bottom of the hill by the deserted factories, she directs Husan to hide in an alley between two compounds.
“It is better if we are two girls,” she explains. Sure enough, the first few cars bounce by without stopping, but with only me and Lena standing by the road, a car soon draws up beside us. Husan runs out of the alley to squeeze in the back seat next to his girlfriend, while I get in front beside the driver.
He’s a chatty, if incomprehensible, fellow and after a while turns round to Husan to ask a question.
“He says how old are you.”
“25.”
The driver looks expectantly round at his back seat passengers, causing the car to narrowly miss a kiosk.
“I am 24,” says Husan.
“35,” says Lena, almost inaudibly.
“Why isn’t she talking?” asks the driver, pointing at me.
“She is English,” says Husan. “And Lena is Russian and I” – he adds proudly – “am Uzbek.”
“I am Kazakh,” said the driver, equally proudly. Excited to learn that he has a European in the car, he starts talking about his time training with the army in Germany.
“I AM PANZER TANK CHIEFTAIN!” he yells, taking his hands right off the wheel.
Then he screeches to a stop in front of a roadblock – concrete barriers and a policeman waving a red light stick. The driver sighs and gets out his wallet. He knows what’s coming next. With a salary of $20 a month, almost all traffic police supplement their incomes by stopping cars and ‘fining’ their drivers. Most cars in Kyrgyzstan are in such poor condition it’s not hard to find something wrong with them. Only this morning I saw two men driving a car that was basically a shell. Everything was missing – head and tail lamps, windscreen, windows, door handles… In the unlikely case that a car is completely roadworthy, who wants to argue with a policeman carrying a gun?
“Do you like vodka?” Lena asks, while we are waiting for the transaction to be completed. I’ve been told to keep quiet because if the police find a rich foreigner in the car they will increase the fine. “My friend Larissa lives not far from here, and she always likes to drink vodka with her guests.”
Before I can answer, Husan steps in and a whispered discussion between him and Lena ends in a request to be dropped outside the Assia Café on Soviet Street instead.
Rain must have fallen somewhere because all the ditches are suddenly overflowing and water is pouring across the pavements. Husan stretches out a hand to help me as I balance on the kerb, which is the only place not under two inches of water. Then Lena giggles and clings to his arm, nearly landing them both in the ditch.
Closing time
Assia, the next destination in our tour of Bishkek nightlife, is on the ground floor of one of the 12 story blocks, behind a kidney shaped pool and tall fountains. I go to the loo, which involves walking along a wobbling metal gangway over the pool, hugging the side of the building. “Don’t touch anything!” warned Lena, who is standing guard outside. It’s a porcelain hole-in-the-ground with a continually gushing flush. Next to it is a big pile of cut up newspapers.
“It’s Independence Day next week, isn’t it?” I ask the others as we wait for our vodka. “What will happen in Bishkek?”
Lena leans forward and puts her small white hand on my arm. “Independence Day very bad. Much drink – champagne, beer, vodka. Russians as well as Kyrgyz drinking all day.”
To our disappointment the restaurant, and all the others on Soviet Street, have stopped serving food.
“What kind of capital city is it where you can’t get a drink or some food after midnight?” asks Husan, starting to compare Bishkek nightlife unfavourably with Tashkent’s, where there is a metro and everything stays open till two in the morning.
I tell them about British licensing laws.
Steppe in Style 
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