Sexual tension in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan 

Independence Day is a particularly big deal this year because it’s also (according to the government) the anniversary of “2,200 years of Kyrgyz statehood”. National anniversaries like this one are popular among Central Asia’s nation builders, trying to create a sense of unity and national identity among ethnically diverse populations. President Askar Akayev has already celebrated 1,000 years of the epic hero Manas, 125 years of Bishkek and 3,000 years of Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second city. 

On the morning of 31 August, I walk into town. My (mainly Russian) colleagues in the office all warned that the Independence Day celebrations could be dangerous for a foreigner, and still unsure about safety in Central Asia, I’d accepted a suggestion from my boss that instead of staying for the celebrations, I should go on a trip to the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. A young graduate of the American University in Central Asia now working for the newspaper, is meeting me at the underpass outside TSUM to escort me to the tour bus. 

Independence Day celebrations

Even at seven in the morning, schoolchildren are milling around with traditional Kyrgyz felt costumes over their arms, metal frames put up along the roads are being festooned with banners, and carnival floats are queuing along Chui Prospect. The policemen at the crossroads have cheap plastic cameras dangling from their round brown wrists. I wish now I was staying in the city to join the celebrations. 

Kira, who I haven’t met before, is 20 years old, with copper coloured ringlets down to her waist, pale blue eyes and a face like a china doll’s, which belies her ferocious disapproval of the day’s events. 

“Look at this! It is completely ridiculous! What is this stupid anniversary? Everyone knows that the Kyrgyz did not have statehood for 2,200 years. There was nothing here – nothing! – before the Russians arrived in the 1860s!

“Akayev says they found a piece of paper in China that proves it – well, I think the Chinese are very good at finding such documents!”

Akayev based his claim of statehood on early Chinese chronicles that cited the Kyrgyz people and their later subjugation by Chinese forces. Kira isn’t the only local person to be sceptical about this. Since the Kyrgyz were nomadic until around a century or so ago, there wasn’t a state in the modern sense of the word – arguably an independent Kyrgyz state was first created in 1991. 

Kira is further incensed by the line of shiny white police motorbikes waiting near Ala-Too Square. “Look at those bikes! They cost $3,000 each and Akayev has bought 20 of them!”

Parts of the square are cordoned off, so we have to clamber through the undergrowth on the edge of Oak Park and try to cut across in front of the White House. I trip on a rusty wire sticking out of the ground, provoking another outburst of rage from Kira. “See this sh*t! Everything here is sh*t, everything is broken! And they are spending thousands of dollars on these stupid bikes and this stupid celebrations!” The motorbikes seem to be a particularly sore point.

As we emerge from the trees, jump over a ditch and land on the tarmac outside the White House, some of the soldiers lining each side of the street approach us. After a short but acrimonious exchange in Russian, they point Kira to the other side of the road away from the parliament. 

“Motherf*ckers!” storms Kira, pushing her way through the crowds, as I follow, scattering apologies in her wake.

The soldiers watch us walk away, idly fingering their guns. 

International online dating

By the time we draw level with Beta Stores, the crowd has cleared slightly, and Kira has calmed down as much to ask how much I used to earn when I was in England. 

“My boyfriend – I have a British boyfriend – earns four times as much,” she says in surprise. “He is an engineer and he works for BT.”

They met on the Internet, and he’s planning to come to Kyrgyzstan for Christmas. “But it is so boring here. I want him to take me to Goa to see the dolphins,” she says wistfully. Kyrgyzstan is 1,500 miles from the nearest sea (off the coast of Pakistan) and the closest most people get is Lake Issyk-Kul. 

Ahead of us, I can see an ancient high-roofed minibus. I’m hoping this isn’t what’s going to take us into the Tien-Shan, but Kira tells me it is. 

“I do not go today,” she adds. “Always they take so much food and all they want to do is sit and eat. Last time I came they were sitting for an hour – an hour! – just eating and talking. They were all sitting there talking about Russia – boring! Just eat, eat, eat, drink, drink, drink, talk, talk, talk.”

“I thought we were going for a walk in the mountains.”

Kira shrugs. “Maybe you will walk. Sometimes she is a good guide, but sometimes she forgets she has a party and leaves them behind. That is her trait.”

Kira’s curtain of red hair disappears into the crowd, and I join the other passengers. Just as the driver is revving up and a smell of petrol is pervading the bus, two more people run up and jump in. 

An unlikely couple

Everyone turns to stare at this incongruous couple: the stunning Russian woman with long, honey-coloured hair, and the wizened American, at least twenty years her senior. Larissa and Ralph. 

There isn’t room for them to sit together, so Larissa squeezes into the front beside Irina, dismissing Ralph to the empty seat next to mine. Larissa doesn’t look at all unhappy at this seating arrangement, and starts chatting animatedly in Russian, paying no attention to her partner in the seat behind. 

Ralph looks disconsolate for a moment, then turns to me and introduces himself. 

“I’ve been doing the Atkins diet for five months,” he adds by way of conversation, flexing his biceps and smoothing his check shirt over his stomach. He looks as if all his fat has shrivelled up, like a grape turning into a raisin. 

Ralph and Larissa met through an Internet dating site. I’m intrigued. I was staring out the window, admiring the view of Bishkek’s lush suburbs streaking past, where the tiny cottages almost look in danger of being chocked by the forest of trees and creepers all around. But I turn away from the sun-drenched greenery to listen to Ralph’s story. This is the first chance I’ve had to study one of those couples where a western man gets a woman about a million times more attractive than he is, simply because he’s western. 

Not that Ralph sees it like that. In fact he doesn’t seem able to see past her beauty and tongue-in-cheek compliments to the fact that she’s clearly bored out of her mind by his company. (I suspect she has agreed to come to the mountains to have people other than Ralph to talk to.) Ralph, though, is convinced she shares all his hopes and dreams. 

“She’s a real outdoor woman,” he tells me admiringly. 

“You – real – outdoor – woman,” he leans forward to tell her, very slowly, because she knows about ten words of English and he speaks even less Russian, but she shakes him off when he starts to talk about a hunting trip, and he turns back to me. 

This is the second time Ralph, who has a company building condos in California, has been to visit. The first time he stayed in the $160 a night Hyatt Regency Hotel, but this time Larissa has allowed him to stay at her flat in the sixth micro-district. During the day, when she escapes to her office, he hires a taxi and drives round the city buying things. Yesterday he was shocked to be offered the pelt of a snow leopard, one of the world’s most endangered species, for $200. 

We’re headed for Kegete Canyon in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, about sixty miles from Bishkek, and the first part of the journey is on the straight tree-lined road to Tokmok, a town near the Kazakh border. The driver, introduced as Gennadi, is bucketing along, bouncing over potholes, veering round battled old cars and the occasional donkey cart, and blaring the horn at pedestrians to get out the way. Then, just as we’re nearing Tokmok, we pass a crowd of people gathered around the body of an old man lying prone in the road. Shattered pieces of his wooden cart are strewn around him, but there’s no sign of a donkey. He must be one of those who can’t afford a donkey, and plod by the side of the road, pulling their carts behind them. 

Popping to Kazakhstan for petrol

This sobers Gennadi, who slows to a sensible pace, then announces casually that we’ll have to get out for five minutes because he’s just nipping across the border into Kazakhstan for some petrol. It’s probably no different really from checking the price per gallon at Sainsbury’s and the BP garage before filling up in England, but the sheer exoticism of popping into Kazakhstan for some petrol takes my breath away. 

After a drive through the outskirts of Tokmok, taking in some shacks, a derelict factory and various burnt out concrete structures, we regain the road and are soon driving steeply upwards into the mountains, through the gullies and rolling flanks of the foothills. 

The clear air fills me with energy and well being, which intensifies as we climb higher into the Tien-Shan, ‘Heavenly Mountains’ in English. The air and light in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan are supposed to be so pure here that plants grow twice as high and fast as in the valleys. 

Irina gets Gennadi to stop where a footpath winds its way up through the shrubs, beside a tinkling brook. The path leads us up a little gorge to a waterfall. All around it the bushes are covered in faded strips of fabric knotted around their branches. 

“For luck,” explains Galina, a sixth form student. “You can make a wish.”

Irina positions us so she can snap photos for her collection, then eggs on Igor, a young Russian man, to climb up behind the waterfall and strike a macho pose on a branch that juts out about 30 metres up the cliff face. 

“She’s got no insurance,” says Ralph, with a certain morbid satisfaction. “There’s no liability out here. If he falls, he dies.”

Larissa ignores him when he starts exclaiming over a plant growing in waist deep clumps by the roadside, so he calls me over. 

In a field of pot

“Hey! We’re standing in a field of pot! Hey, would you take a picture of me to send back to my buddies?”

I snap away while he cavorts happily among the marijuana plants, which grow wild in the Kyrgyz mountains. The Russians watch as we examine the leaves.

“We know that western people admire this plant,” says Galina. 

Higher up the road narrows, just a shelf hacked out of the grey rock that’s covered in coloured streaks from mineral deposits. We’re circling upwards through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, hugging the side of a gorge so steep that only the most tenacious plants can survive, their stunted roots clinging to its almost sheer sides. Far below, a roaring mountain river tumbles over jagged boulders, and looking up we can see a sliver of blue sky above the towering wall of rock. 

The minibus ploughs on, occasionally enlivening the journey by slipping towards the edge of the gorge, and once skidding out of control so that a front wheel is spinning helplessly over the canyon. The Russians have a good laugh over that, and cheer Gennadi on as he reverses back onto the road with a great grinding of metal on rock. 

“Hey! Don’t look so scared, Clare, the back roads in California are just like this!” shouts Ralph, giving me a cheering wallop between the shoulder blades. 

“Well they’re not like this in Hampshire,” I retort tightly.

An ancient minibus isn’t the ideal vehicle for the mountains of Kyrgyzstan where it has to ford rivers and churn through patches of scree left by the spring mudslides. At one point the stones across the road are so sharp – great grey stones like slate – we have to get out and walk. Eventually the bus can go no further. 

We’ve stopped in a small glade of pine trees, just where the gully widens out a little. The mountain here is dotted with pines, but most of its slopes are covered in loose rocks. Despite the beauty of the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, it’s not a hospitable place. The trees shelter us from a chill wind that’s whistling up the mountainside, but they also block out the sun. 

Picnic in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan

There’s no pretence of going for a walk; we immediately spread out a rug and start heaping food onto it… loaves of bread, jars of marinated aubergine, sausages, cheeses, a roast chicken, and sweets, biscuits and watermelons to follow. Larissa and Ralph produce a crate of beers and two bottles of vodka. 

“Have some sausage!” urges Irina, for whom the concept of vegetarianism is an alien one. “Have a piece of chicken! No? Some cheese then!” And she sifts through the sausage rinds and discarded bones to triumphantly unearth a sliver of cheese encrusted with chicken bits. “Eat cheese!”

Irina never stops talking and over lunch she demonstrates the new pair of dungarees she’s wearing. “For men!” she giggles, demonstrating the zip fly, then launching into a long anecdote. I turn to Galina for help. Irina has discovered a shop that sells nice second hand clothes because most of its stock has been stolen from people’s luggage by customs officials trying to improve on their $20 a month salaries. 

“You would find a nice dress for maybe thirty som [about 50p] because you have small size,” translates Galina. 

“Yeah, you are kind of small,” observes Ralph, who is gorging himself on chicken and sausages, while rejecting the carbohydrates Irina offers him. “How much do you weigh?”

“That’s a very personal question,” I tell him, accepting a square of chocolate and a beer from Larissa. 

“What? I said how much d’you weigh?”

“About eight stone.”

“Eight stone! What in hell is a stone?”

“Fourteen pounds.”

“Stone! That is so cute!”

Macho men

It’s getting cold but Larissa, perhaps hoping to postpone the time when she has to sleep with Ralph, wants to continue the party and urges the guys to build a fire. Soon Igor and Ralph are competing to see who can bring back the heftiest logs. When the blaze has got going, Ralph goes one step further and carries over two small boulders for himself and Larissa to sit on. Larissa yawns, but Irina is impressed by this display of manliness and urges Ralph to talk about his hunting trips to the Caribbean. 

“Were you in the army, Ralph?” she gushes. “Ooh! Look at his muscles. How strong you are!”

She’s plying him with slices of watermelon, which he tries to refuse, insisting they will interfere with his diet, much to the amusement of the Russians. When no one’s looking he tosses the melon slice down the mountain, upon which Irina immediately presses another onto him. 

Another round of vodkas are poured, and the party gets merrier. Gennadi turns down the vodka, and refreshes himself from a plastic bottle full of a clear liquid. 

“It is spirit,” he explains. After that I’m even less keen to travel in his minibus.

Ralph, drunk on two bottles of potent Siberian Crown beer, is belching himself. 

“Hey! Look at that!” he exclaims, pointing to a small patch of spilt vodka on the rug. “Hey! Who peed their pay-ants! Who shit the bed!”

At the other end of the cloth, Larissa is giggling onto Irina’s shoulder. 

“Ralph, I have new diet for you. You must have one glass of vodka for breakfast. And for lunch… one glass of vodka. And in the evening…”

Ralph sobers up a little. He doesn’t like people making fun of his diet. “Who peed their pants?” he mutters sulkily, pointing at the wet patch again. 

By the time we have all piled into the minibus to descend from the mountains of Kyrgyzstan it’s nearly dark. The bright lights of Bishkek’s bars and kiosks greet us as we enter the city, stopping in the sixth micro-district to let Larissa and Ralph out. 

Ralph bangs on the window to wave goodbye again. “Who shit the bed!” he mouths, before Larissa leads him away. 

The rest of us get stuck in traffic on the way into the city centre, and Irina pulls out a collection of photos from previous excursions. One is a close-up of Gennadi’s hairy chest as he stands under a waterfall in only a skimpy pair of briefs. Others feature Larissa with various men. 

“Oh yes, Larissa has five or six American men who come to visit her,” says Irina in answer to my question. “All she wants in her life is to go to America. But I think not with Ralph… She says Ralph is too old, and he is miser.”