Being a tourist in Kyrgyzstan is difficult. Things are done differently here. I spent days searching for a tourist office that might have some information about what to see and how to get there, before eventually giving up. Even the attractions listed in the guidebook are for the most part un-marked so I often found myself stumbling about the back streets for ages before discovering what I was looking for behind the dustbins in a forgotten courtyard.
When I approach my colleagues for advice on sightseeing – because I feel I should be doing something to explore further afield – they look blankly at me. None of them have been to the Burana Tower, for example, an ancient minaret just outside Tokmok. Nor have most of them visited Tokmok itself or other nearby towns like Kant or Kara-Balta, and they look oddly at me when I ask.
It makes me feel like a failure. I’m meant to be here as a writer, a journalist, yet I’ve barely ventured outside the six blocks between my flat and TSUM except to buy mineral water from Beta Stores. It’s time to be more adventurous.
Trip to Tokmok
On the first Saturday in October, therefore, I decide to try being a tourist in Kyrgyzstan and set out for the East Bus Station (short distance), intending to take a bus to Tokmok.
The adventure starts when I fail to identify a marshrutka heading in the right direction and have to pick my way along the dirt track running beside Jibek-Jolu Street, the main road out of town. ‘Jibek-Jolu’ means ‘Silk Road’ in Kyrgyz, and it’s said to run along the route of the original northern silk route.
Today it’s a busy road lined with shacks fashioned out of rough planks and corrugated iron. In this part of town children fill pails from rusty standpipes and groups of men loiter in the shade of the pine trees, where for the first time since I arrived I feel the chill of autumn in the air.
At the bus station, where rows of minibuses chug and swelter in the sun, I hop onto the bus marked Tokmok and pay my 25 som (30p) for the 40 kilometre journey. Then I lean back against the musty curtain and feign sleep, trying to look inconspicuous, and not stand out as a tourist in Kyrgyzstan.
With the sun streaming through chinks in the curtains it’s boiling inside the elderly bus, the morning chill has disappeared. As we draw out of the city, I peer out at residents using wooden boards to sweep the early autumn leaves into piles, then setting fire to them.
A little way outside the city we join the tail end of a convoy of lorries full of knobbly sugar beets. The queue is backed up for miles outside the Kant sugar refinery. (The town, which had a large German population until 1991, was named not after the philosopher but after sugar, which is ‘kant’ in Kyrgyz.)
Kant has been in the news a lot lately because of rumours that the Russian have been given permission to build an airbase there. Not only is this a sign of growing Russian influence in Central Asia, it would also make Kyrgyzstan the only country in the world to host both a Russian and an American base – within 30 miles of each other.
Watching ‘Brigada’ on the bus
Not that my fellow passengers appear to be thinking about this. For one thing, their curtains are drawn tightly across their windows to prevent a single ray of sun from peeping through. I, the tourist in Kygyzstan, am the only one looking out the window. For another, they are immersed in an episode of ‘Brigada’, which is playing on a TV mounted at the front of the bus. The smooth, broad face of the man next to me is tilted upwards, watching a convoy of black limousines glide through the streets of Moscow while the show’s theme tune booms out. ‘Brigada’ is so popular that half the men in Bishkek have downloaded the ringtone for their mobiles.
Cut to a swarthy long-haired man arriving at an airport, leaping to his feet when he hears: “Flight 903 from Dushanbe is arriving at Terminal 2”. Cut again to a sauna where a bomb goes off sending showers of plaster into the female changing room where the women drop their towels in alarm.
No one seems to mind that all the villains on ‘Brigand’ have a distinctly Central Asian cast to their features.
The episode has just finished when we draw up at Tokmok bus station, a grassy lot with a ticket office to one side. The other passengers, who I had been planning to follow into the town centre, just melt away. I’m surrounded instead by Tokmok residents waiting to catch their own buses, and Kyrgyz women offering trays of fresh samsi.
Lost in Tokmok
I walk to the edge of the bus station and peer out along the road, uncomfortably aware of the passport, credit cards and digital camera I’m carrying. In each direction I can make out apartment blocks, lower than those in Bishkek, hidden behind a wall of trees. Tokmok seems even more overgrown than the capital. Apart from the odd babushka hunched over a shopping bag, there’s no sign of life.
I try the other exit, which leads to a disused underpass with dank water full of dead leaves lapping against the bars that block the entrance. It has a nasty, dungeon-like feel. I hastily return to the bus station, and try the third, and last, exit, finding a road full of taxis and yelling drivers.
“How much to the town centre?” I ask an elderly Kyrgyz driver.
“The what?”
“The centre of town?”
He shrugs. He has no idea what this tourist in Kyrgyzstan talking about. I’m not sure that the concept of a high street exists here.
I try again: “To the main shopping street?” I don’t even really want to go shopping; I’d rather go to the Burana tower, but I can’t remember the Russian for ‘tower’.
“Shop? Which shop you want?”
I give up and go back to the bus station, confirming the old man’s belief in my craziness by looking left instead of right as I cross the road, causing a car full of young Kyrgyz men to come screeching to a halt.
“She says she wants a shop, but she doesn’t know which shop she wants!” the frustrated taxi driver yells to them.
Feeling I’ve completely failed at being a tourist in Kyrgyzstan, I take the first marshrutka back to Bishkek and am home within an hour.
Steppe in Style 
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