Day 65 to Osh, Kyrgyzstan, 103km, 5780 to date.  910m up, 1034m end

A full day on smooth pavement with only some minor climbing - wonderful.  I made it to the hotel for noon, so had the full rest of the day to relax and tomorrow is a rest day.

Osh is a very old city (3,000+ years old) and was a very important city, essentially the mid-point of the Silk Road, half way between East and West.  The market I refer to below is the largest and most crowded in Central Asia, referred to as the Great Silk Road Bazar.

I am really enjoying riding though the complete chaos of the markets in smaller towns - gridlock of traffic with cars, trucks, people, loaded donkeys, kids on horses, adults on horses, guys pushing 2 wheeled carts through the middle of everything.  The impressive thing is that everyone just goes about their business with a very thoughtful attitude of letting everyone else also get there work done.  Never do I see any “nastiness”, it’s quite impressive how everyone gets along.

Similarly riding into Osh (population 250,000) the traffic was awful by western standards, again almost gridlock, but as I rode along dodging between cars there were many many friendly honks - I’d look over and the driver was giving me a “thumbs up”.  They would commonly practice a bit of English, “where are you from?”.  Many times I have been asked via sign language and a couple words: “how old are you?” - I guess I am old by their standards, it is my birthday today, so I guess I am old.

After some basic cleanup, it was off for 2nd lunch - big problem…  we are now into a stricter Muslim area, that means lots of wonderful restaurants, but they don’t serve alcohol - no beer!  Irwin and I went off looking for a suitable establishment, after walking what seemed like 5 miles, we found a bar that serves food.  It was funny, the waiter just couldn’t understand that we each wanted a full pizza.  After the first one came we realized that the 2nd wasn’t coming we had to re-order - eventually two pizzas.

As we are getting used to, some of the women are dressed as in Europe/N. America, most are covered with headscarves, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t very attractively dressed.

After lunch today I wandered around one of the local markets, I’m enjoying this sort of shopping - I don’t think I manage the best “deals”, but I came back with a wonderful collection of dried fruits, pistachios, nuts, dates - but no beer.  I was aware that this market was very large but didn’t realize that I had touched only a very small corner of the largest market in central Asia. 

Speaking of food,if you like eating this is the trip to do.  We are needing about 6,000 to 7,000 calories a day - i.e. one needs to eat a lot.  The food has been wonderful, snacks in my tent at night include Dates fro Iran, Pistachios from Kyrgyzstan, Halva from Turkey, etc.,  

My phone ran out of money yesterday, so had to add today - 120 Som, i.e. $2.00

After a rest day tomorrow, we are off to Sary Tas, into Tajikistan and the Pamir Highway, known as the roof of the world - this is the very high section of the full ride, 4 passes over 4,500 meters (15,000 feet) also the most spectacular for mountains.  This is one of the highlights of the ride, an extremely hard section, but I am really looking forward to it.

Until Aug 5th when we get into Dushanbe I am expecting essentially no web connection, so it may not be till then that I am able to post again - we’ll see, I’ve been very surprised at how electronically connected I have been “in the middle of nowhere”.

A couple people have asked about our plans for Turkey - we don’t get to Turkey till Sept 16th, so much could change, at this point we are carrying on.  I hope I am wrong, but I suspect things will get worse there, so we may change the ending stage of the ride possibly ending early - we’ll see, this was advertised as an adventure…

Some pics:

I was surprised to see rice paddies, although shouldn't have been as rice is a common food basic here::

Entering Osh:

Notice the difference in dress foreground vs background:

A little tiny corner of the largest market in central Asia: