Ends of the Earth : ADVENTURES IN FARAWAY PLACES YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF : Kyrgyzstan

We went to Kyrgyzstan because Roza Otunbayev, then the dynamic young Kyrgyz ambassador to Washington, suggested that it was the undiscovered Nepal of Central Asia. A few Americans, including Tipper and Al Gore, had been to this new country deep in the heart of Central Asia, but not many.

So, primed for adventure, we set off in mid-September. We were four old friends who, when we lived on the Indian subcontinent, never expected we would ever be allowed to travel through the forbidden lands on the other side of the Himalayas. They were the playing fields of the Great Game where, over the centuries, China, Russia and Great Britain spied and fought to checkmate each other’s dreams of expansion. Now, if all went well, we would explore Kyrgyzstan, the former Soviet state that became an independent country in 1991. It is surrounded on three sides by Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, with China running along its eastern border. Later, we would cross the Tian Shan mountains to Kashgar, the great oasis in Western China and a crossroads on the legendary Silk Road.

Surprises we were prepared for--they are the stuff of adventure. But the surprises we encountered were not what we expected in Central Asia. For openers, our first morning in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, we had breakfast in a casino.

Bishkek is not a colorful Asian city spreading out from a central bazaar; Soviet-style public buildings and blocks of flats dominate. On one of its tree-lined side streets was the casino where we were served caviar and horse meat sausages. The fare was bountiful: three fried eggs apiece, heavy cream, yogurt, luscious tomatoes, tasty cucumbers, cheeses, piles of fresh round loaves of unleavened bread, and finally, a melon beyond compare. Carl, a former U.S. ambassador to Nepal who considers himself a connoisseur of breakfasts, declared that this one should receive honorable mention on any short list.

Happily, we had hit the harvest season, when food was abundant. But we soon found that the best way to travel was with our own provisions. In this part of the world, there is not the strict sense of time that there is in the West. Breakfast may be at noon, lunch a bit later and dinner whenever it can be arranged. So for three weeks, from Bishkek to Kashgar, our chins dripped with juices of the fabled fruit of Central Asia that we bought at roadside stands: small, crisp apples; sweet melons, apricots, plums, pears, grapes and peaches such as we had never tasted before, all pure poetry.

Our next surprise was to be assigned as our guide, a poet. Shakir Soltonoev came compliments of a local travel agency, and looked as if, in another incarnation, he could have ridden with Genghis Khan and his Mongol horsemen. In fact, Shakir was a gentle, much-loved Kyrgyz poet, a bard in the great oral tradition. But he didn’t speak English.

So, as our interpreter, appeared Snow White--a Russian college student, so nicknamed by Carl for her fresh beauty and winsome innocence. Svetlana Yanushkina was 23 and charmingly old-fashioned in her attitudes and antiquated English.

After a second day of waiting for a promised van in which to start our trip, Shakir came to our rooms in Bishkek. He was very serious. We gathered round him. He spoke at length, gesticulating, shaking his heavy head of black hair, furrowing his brow, smiling so that his gold teeth glittered, then frowning again, his voice dropping to a mumble, his chin to his chest.

“Good heavens,” said Jane, an old Asia hand. “What is he saying?”

We turned to Svetlana. She wrinkled her forehead and sighed. “He says a vehicle will be ready for us in the morning.”

Her translation was like a cryptic subtitle in a foreign movie full of drama. “That can’t be all he said,” we protested.

“No,” she agreed. “But Shakir is so very abstract.”

And untranslatable, as we were to learn that bards are apt to be.

But Shakir was right and Svetlana’s abbreviated translation was accurate. A Toyota van, driven by a lanky, taciturn lad named Sultan, arrived the next morning and we set off on a good, hard-surfaced road for Lake Ysyk-Kol (sometimes spelled Issyk-Kul), “the pearl of Kyrgyzstan,” about 100 miles east of Bishkek. At 5,400 feet, it is one of the largest and deepest mountain lakes in the world, more than 100 miles long and 38 miles wide.

Lenin’s monumental statue, with his arm upraised, had waved us off from Bishkek’s central square. Now, every few miles, his portrait and Soviet-style stone statues of heroic youths and noble animals loomed up larger than life in the rocky landscape.

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“We are going to stay at the Energetic House of Rest,” Sveltlana announced. The name sounded contradictory, but, as we soon learned, so were many of the features of these so-called Houses of Rest. Crumbling high-rise concrete dinosaurs, they were built along the shores of Lake Ysyk-Kol as health spas and vacation centers for workers and party officials from all over the Soviet Union. The rooms were small and basic, and we discovered that Western assumptions about plumbing and other basic amenities did not apply. After several stumbles on the staircases, we realized that the steps were of uneven height, and our maxim became, “Watch those risers!”

The two early risers in our group were Elisabeth, who had taught for three years in western China, and Carl, who joined other energetic guests to plunge into Lake Ysyk-Kol at dawn. They reported that the water was bracing, the air crystal clear and, the sunrise view of the snow-covered Tian Shan, or Celestial Mountains, resplendently beautiful.

Farther down the lake, we checked out a House of Rest built for the top echelon of the classless society. It was now available to tourists with dollars, provided one made reservations early and firmly, but we had not. Here behind large gates were rose gardens, crystal chandeliers and electric samovars. The fittings were faded, but the guests were tres moderne in miniskirts and jogging suits.

Back at the Energetic, we pumped water from the wash basin through our portable filter pumps into our plastic water bottles, grabbed our swimsuits and jackets, and set off with Shakir, Svetlana and Sultan for a picnic by the lake. On the way, we picked up Shakir’s cousin, to cook the shashlik or kebabs. His wide-eyed little boy climbed into our van and sat on a watermelon, his face aglow with anticipation.

Tiny dachas, like small sheds connected by rickety boardwalks, were clustered together among the birches at the edge of the sandy beach. We swam. The sun set and the moon came up. The dacha dwellers became our genial hosts and the vodka flowed. Driving back to the darkened Energetic Rest House, Shakir and his cousin sang us splendid Kyrgyz songs.

At the eastern end of Lake Ysyk-Kol in the town of Kara-Kol, Elisabeth spied a mosque hidden behind a hedge of trees and shrubs. Built in the Chinese style, its wooden pillars were painted yellow, its roof red and its minaret blue. We peeked in the windows at fine old tribal rugs covering the floor. In the courtyard, on a wooden plank, stood a long row of embossed tin ewers for ablutions, indicating that the mosque was well used. “Before perestroika,” Svetlana explained, “everyone pretended they didn’t know that it was here.”

Happily, we were now getting beyond the concrete block buildings of Ysyk-Kol’s resort area and into attractive, open countryside. A two-humped Bactrian camel munched yellow stubble by the roadside. Eight big red harvesters from a collective farm lumbered in a line across a golden field. Higher up, horses pastured and clear streams rushed over gray-green rocks.

At the Dzhety-Oguz House of Rest, about eight miles into the mountains from the northern shore of Lake Ysyk-Kol, we joined the vacationing proletariat--workers with black boots, gnarled hands and felt hats they never took off; old men with medals weighing down the lapels of their worn jackets and women in slippers, black stockings and flowered head scarves. Dinner was thin barley with a bone of mutton and corn pudding desert. Breakfast was cabbage, mashed potatoes and semolina. Statues of idealized young workers, both men and women, all painted silver, stood in weedy copses.

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Farther along the southern shore of the lake, where the beaches are rockier but the scenery is unspoiled, we took a last dip. The vista across the long, curving sweep of the lake to the great snowy range of the Tian Shan was stunning. No doubt, this could be a future Riviera.

The 375-mile road from Bishkek to Osh, in southern Kyrgystan, is an engineering marvel still in the works, with 10,000-foot passes, occasional boulders bouncing down off the sheer mountainsides and potholes broad enough to break an axle. But we were in the cowboy and yurt country that we wanted to see, on eye level with eagles. Later, around a bend in the road, a herd of 30 or more magnificent horses galloped toward us, backlighted by the sun, their manes and tails flying and their sleek flanks shining. A lone, Kyrgyz cowboy rode jauntily behind them.

The Osh bazaar claims to be the oldest in Asia and is three miles long. In the packed crowd, we struggled to stay together. A motor scooter with a live sheep tied over the back wheel edged us apart. Then a small, blue tractor tried to nose through the crowd. But a path cleared for a Kyrgyz on horseback, wearing high black boots and with a whip in hand.

Returning north from Osh the next day, our van gave its final death rattle in the early morning on a bleak mountainside. By nightfall Shakir had found friends to take us down the mountain to a deteriorating but many-roomed dacha once owned by a first secretary of the Kyrgyz Communist Party. Balconies, wooden floors, flowered wallpaper and a broken generator gave evidence of former luxury.

Here we waited for two days like characters in a Chekov play, despairing of rescue. Finally at 3 a.m. of the third night, another van arrived from Bishkek and we started out on a marathon drive of 375 miles on washboard roads across the middle of Kyrgyzstan. We had a prearranged, prepaid date to keep at the 12,306-foot Turugart Pass in the Tian Shan Mountains. Our Chinese guides were to meet us there at the border post. Individuals cannot cross this pass into China without an authorized escort.

Fifteen hours after we had left the dacha, we arrived at Turugart Pass just as the border was closing. We hugged Sveltlana and Shakir goodbye. A Russian soldier with a Kyrgyz driver escorted us past watchtowers and through barbed-wire barricades across five miles of no-man’s-land to a demarcation arch. There we were handed over to a Chinese interpreter and a driver. Exhausted, we climbed into their new four-wheel-drive Toyota, crossed another five miles of no-man’s land and finally cleared Chinese border formalities.

Then came a six-hour drive--mostly down a gravel riverbed. The windshield wipers fought blowing dust that swirled in the beams of the headlights and created surrealistic shadows on the canyon walls. As if we were in a Fellini film, there would suddenly appear out of the blackness road crews of Chinese men and women working under generator lights with shovels and pickaxes and we would speed along a short, smooth finished surface, only to be swallowed up again in darkness and bruising jolts.

It seemed fitting that our first day in Kashgar we try to find Chini Bagh, the old British consulate, fondly recalled in the accounts of 19th and 20th century explorers. Hidden behind a new hotel that has appropriated its grounds, the old residence still stands in the remnants of its rose garden, a low, rambling pink bungalow braced on the edge of the hill by its fortress-like crenelated mud wall. Uighurs (the Turkic people who predominate here) now run Chini Bagh (variously spelled Hotel Biniwa or Qinibake), a hotel and restaurant. The furniture is solid and British, but the fare is high-class Uighur (much like Chinese), excellent and relatively expensive, at about $14 per person.

In this historic dining room we raised our glasses to all of the famous explorers who, after crossing mountains and deserts, dined here with relief and gratitude. Among them were Sven Hedin, Sir Aurel Stein, Eric Shipton, Nicholas Roerich, Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming. Their accounts had fueled our dreams of Central Asia.

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GUIDEBOOK: Ways and Means

Getting there: The most direct route to Bishkek is from LAX to Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, on Delta (connecting through Moscow or Frankfurt), Aeroflot (through Moscow), KLM and Northwest (Amsterdam) and Lufthansa (Frankfurt). Lowest round-trip fares start at about $3,000, including taxes and fees.

Lufthansa offers an economy “instant purchase” ticket starting at about $1,150 round trip from Frankfurt to Alma-Ata. This means the ticket must be paid for within 24 hours of making your reservation, and getting to and from Frankfurt costs additional, usually a minimum of $800 round trip from L.A. Due to heavy booking on these flights, we bought our instant purchase tickets in June for September travel.

In Alma-Ata we hired a van and driver for $35 each for the three-hour drive to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The fare varies; returning, we paid $23 each.

Tours: Because of language barriers (none of us spoke Russian) and other difficulties, we do not recommend local Kyrgyzstan travel agencies. However, REI Adventures (P.O. Box 1938, Sumner, WA 98390-0800; tel. [800] 622-2236, fax [206] 395-4744) has led several successful trekking, biking and climbing trips in the region. Explore South Asia Tours (500 Summer St., Stamford, Conn. 06901; tel. [800] 221-6941, fax [203] 348-6489) and Shangri-La Adventures (361 Main St., Unit 3, El Segundo, Calif. 90245; tel. [800] 843-8228) also have trips that include Kyrgyzstan.

Where to stay: Because conditions change so quickly, the most efficient and foolproof way to secure lodging is to work through a knowledgeable travel agent.

General information: The Embassy of the Kyrgyz Republic, 1511 K St. NW, Suite 707, Wash. D.C. 20005, tel. (202) 347-3732, fax (202) 347-3718, is enthusiastically promoting tourism and in touch with new tour groups as they form.

Until the new currencies of Central Asian countries stabilize, dollars are the preferred payment, but only in cash, not in travelers checks or credit cards.

--L.M.