"It's a dangerous business, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." - J.R.R. Tolkien

Monday, July 25, 2011

The Epic Travel Adventures of One Peace Corps Volunteer in the Summer of 2011 (or What I've Been Doing For The Last Month)

Dearest reader, thank you for your loyalty and patience. I was traveling without internet access for the last month, and have finally returned to tell you all about it. Just a warning, fitting a month's worth of travels into one blog post has been scientifically proven to be impossible, so I'll be dividing the post up into a few parts. With the cooperation of the internet, I'll post all parts in the next week. Your patience and good humor, as always, are greatly appreciated. And thus, I present to you...

The Epic Travel Adventures of One Peace Corps Volunteer in the Summer of 2011
(or What I've Been Doing For The Last Month)


The travel saga begins over a month ago on June 16 in Shymkent, Kazakhstan. After a rather disappointing spring in the office I had finally packed my backpack and hefted it, much to the amusement of the locals, to the train station, where I boarded a train for Almaty. My mid-service medical examination was scheduled for the next day, and my friend COBC and I had plans to leave for Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan the day after that. I'd spent the previous two weeks preparing for the trip. Knowing that I'd be gone a month in various locales, I had a lot to do before I left.

Pre-Departure Checklist:
1. Get my annual leave forms signed and stamped by my director
2. Submit annual leave forms to Peace Corps
3. Inform my landlady that I would be gone for a month, and convince her not to give my place away to another renter
4. Get a 30-day Kyrgyz visa
5. Get over the fact that I paid $115 for a visa for a trip that's only 6 days long
6. Submit summer calendar to Peace Corps regional manager
7. Buy a train ticket to Almaty
8. Pack
9. Pay the bills
10. Consume all of the food in my fridge so there are no moldy surprises in there upon my return
11. Leave my keys with a site mate

By the time I got to the train station, I had checked every single item off of this list, and was well on my way to a month of bliss out of my office and out of the blistering heat of the south.

I arrived in Almaty on the morning of the 17th and spent the morning and afternoon getting my medical and dental exams, finalizing travel permission with Peace Corps, and hunting down a Dungan restaurant for dinner with my travel companion. The morning of the 18th the real excitement began. We left the Peace Corps office early and headed to the bus station where we were hoping to catch a bus to Bishkek.

Marshrutkas (mini-buses) leave the station at least hourly for Bishkek, so we had no trouble finding one. Luckily there were two seats left, and room in the back to cram our hikers packs into. We paid the driver 1200 tenge (~$8) and were on our way. The trip to the border took 4 hours and I was sitting next to a mom and her 2-year-old son who was only minimally annoying, so the time passed quickly.

At the border we pile out, strapp on our packs and headed for the gate. Now, I've never crossed a border on foot, so I don't know whether or not the, ahem, “system” for letting people into the border crossing at this particular border is typical, but I do know it was pure insanity. Picture this, we get off the bus and walk towards a huge crowd of people simply milling about the gate surrounding the border office. We join the crowd, are sort of confused what everyone is waiting for, and before we know it the guards have opened the gate and every single person is making a mad dash to get through the gate to the office beyond. And I mean a maaaaaad dash. Old lady's are clawing their way past young men with huge bags of Kazakhstani goods they'll try to sell over the border, young women made up with enough body glitter and eye shadow to keep a hundred call girls in business for an entire week hold hands as they force their way through the crowd. Now the moment the chaos began COBC charged the gate and made it through to the other side. While she was making her move, my midwestern sensibility was too busy telling me that if everyone would just form a line things would go a lot smoother to kick my butt into gear and get me through the gate. Thirty seconds after the gate was opened, the guards start yelling at everyone to get back. I try to force my way through the gate, but don't make. Just as I'm beginning to silently panic to myself, COBC jogs back to the gate, speaks in purposefully horrible Russian to the guard, saying that I'm her translator and she doesn't know Russian so she can't go without me. Perhaps it was the winning American smiles we both flashed him, perhaps he was was feeling particularly nice that day, whatever it was, he opened the gate just enough to let me through, screaming at the crowd not to move.

Having made it over the first major hurdle, we make our way through the border office, get our passports stamped, change our money, and hop on a bus to the center of Bishkek. Bishkek is a strange but wonderful place. It's smaller than Almaty, less developed, yet holds the title for the Ex-pat Aid Worker Hub of Central Asia. The first person we talked to in the city was a man that approached us as we were studying our Lonely Planet to ask in English “Can I help you?”. He turned out to be a Russian man who lives in Bishkek and works for the UN Development Program. Oh and he went to Columbia Law School. This was only the beginning of our run-ins with ex-pats and aid workers over the next few days. We would later meet a British couple who was simultaneous making first ascents (or climbing as of yet unclimbed mountains) and studying how NGOs factor into stabilization in Central Asia and we would run in the Country Director of Peace Corps Kyrgyzstan at a cafe. In Bishkek we would find a small Lebanese cafe with the world's greatest hummus, a cafe that offers hard cider on tap, and the world's creepiest zoological museum that houses a terrifying number of taxidermied specimens.

After a comfortable first day in Bishkek, and a morning filled with iced coffee and scrambled eggs, we set off for the bus station to make our way to the town of Kochkor which would be our starting part for horse trek through the mountains.

The adventure continues the next time I have internet access, stay tuned!