Kochkor is an interesting little town with friendly people, and everything happens slowly. It has an interesting market, everything taking place at one junction. Old Russian cars are being worked on while passengers wait inside. The taxi stand appears to be operated from a junkyard. The taxi we took to get here from Balykchy had to pull off the road due to compression problems. The driver had to pull over in the remote rode, scenery reminiscent of mountainous Oman, and put water in his car, then push start to get it going again. Fortunately he knew what he was doing and we arrived after nothing much more disconcerting than his trying to race other drivers in similar vehicles, humorous but also life threatening. When we arrived we found a quaint rural town where people in conical hats trade animals and watermellons and we stayed in a nice homestay run by Mira, with a classic Soviet interior and outhouse toilet, but with a nice spa-hot common shower room though.
The cabs here are box-shaped vintage soviet cars 20 to 30 years old. We got one from the town of Balykchy on lake Issuk Kul to Kochkor. Ainura had helped us board the Bishkek bus in Karakol and pay the fare only up to Balykchy and when we descended there, we were in one of those third world contexts where signs were in cryllic, men wore conical hats, and people were moving on the street in seemingly random fashion. But our bus driver teamed us with someone else who was supposed to be going to Kochkor and this man (and his young son) pointed us to one of those ancient cabs and put our bags aboard in the boot and we all squeezed in.
We had got him to write down the price first and showed that to the driver, so we knew what to pay, and the driver set out .. in the wrong direction! No problem, he had an errand to run. He had parked on a downhill slope and he started the car by releasing the brakes and engaging the clutch on a roll. A few minutes later he was driving through some trees. hmmm no problem, just heading for the gas station. There he wanted our fare in advance for gas. We refused, saying we'd pay in Kochkor. He pulled out a wad of cash, paid for the gas, and headed up the two lane tarmac into mountains resembling those in Morocco or Tunisia or Oman. Many km further on the engine started missing. It got worse and worse. Our driver pulled over in the middle of nowhere. Apparently it was a known problem. He had extra water under the hood and he poured some into the bowels of his automobile. His sidekick who'd been sleeping in the front seat was roused and the two of them pushed and the driver hopped in, the car sprang to life in a manner of speaking, and we proceeded toward Kochkor without incident EXCEPT when another similar box on wheels appeared alongside in a passing manoeuvre that turned out to be a race, which was fine as long as our car was on the right side, but the engine missed again, and ours fell behind, and our driver then felt compelled to pull alongside in an attempt to race up a hill and into the path of whatever was coming the other direction. I had to summon almost all my Russian and put a nyet to these antics.
In any event, we arrived in Kochkor safely, in the company of a veritable fleet of these antique autos either serving as taxis or movable stores with boots piled high with melons or other produce for sale by the roadside near the real bazaar situated at the town crossroads. We emerged into this and made our way back in a light drizzle to the CBT offices (community-based tourism) where we found our homestay with Mira and talked up the possibility of a horse trek starting the following day. At that point (after 6 days sleeping rough in tents south of Karakol and a 7th day on the road) we felt we needed a day to rest and look around Kochkor, which turned out to be an interesting, friendly, and pleasantly bucolic place.
But an odd place ... I remember the market setup - yurts where people could order tea or buy lunch. The "Big" supermarket in town consisted of a cavernous building filled with stalls selling outdated batteries, underwear, clothes and almost anything you don't need and can't use.
* Internet? Two computers at the post office running at squirrel on treadmill speed, about 5 min to open an email. I opened a few emails there and mainly wrote in Notepad in hopes of posting this to a wiki. It worked, eventually.
* How about changing money at the bank? Come back in 15 min, that lady who does that has gone to the doctor's. An hour later, on return, same thing, but she wouldn't come back to work 15 min before lunch would she? No, I guess not, so come back after lunch. After lunch we found her and changed money. We had to change there because the changers in the market were very critical of our dollars.
* The lawn mower goat ... other animals tied by the roadside effectively controlling the height of weeds there. Trash dumped on the dirt tracks to Mira's, the water pump at the corner, woodsmen blatantly taking trees from just beyond the borders of the park. No wonder there was a concrete wall around it.
* The stores with all manner of alcohols, variety of beers, wines with unpredictable surprises inside (sweet, fizzy, you name it) but not that much to eat. Some salami sausage and other more like baloney or mortadella, no decent cheese, mayonnaise and ketchup occasionally.
* Sleeping at Mira's, a pretty typical home in Kochkor we think, draped interior with carpeting on the walls, situated on the outskirts of town down a dirt road leading 50 meters past Mira's to fields with mountain backdrop, snow on the peaks. We had a nice room in the best part of the house. The family used a second annex not so attractive, seemed purposed for utilities and kitchen, would serve as servants' quarters in other societies. Dusty had his own room well appointed with carpeted walls, and we had a double bed, see-through lace curtains, shelves and closets and drawers stocked with personal items, an alarm that went off at 5:30 a.m. and we had a devil of a time explaining to them that we wanted it tracked down and switched off for the next morning (they thought we wanted a wakeup call at 5:30 NOOOOO ... finally we got through and they found it, apologized).
There was a shower room they fired up literally for us each evening (warm inside with a trickle of hot water, very rustic, walked past the goat pin and garden to get there). On the other side of the garden there was an outhouse toilet with a squat wooden floor kept scrupulously clean except when others had used it and missed and well stocked with toilet paper, but I have just listed only its positive attributes and I'll leave the negative ones to the imagination.
Breakfast was always bread and jam and tea kept out of reach of diners by seating them at the other end of the long table and served by Mira who kept checking back and asking if we wanted more, which was the Kyrgyz custom for dispensing tea. We took our dinners there, noodle soup with the ubiquitous bread and jam and tea dispensed again by a kindly, smiling Mira. One evening we picked up a watermelon in the souq for a dollar which she cut up for us. We brought our own wine and beer from the 'magazines'. The beer was interesting, varied, and worth experimenting with; the wine was not, fell far short of expectations and we stopped buying it.
After a day in Kochkor, taking pics at the market, Kyrgyz people churning outside yurts serving as restaurants and lots of stuff for sale on the sidewalks, having a beer with Philippe the Frenchman at http://www.la-balade.com, whose website has since gone defunct, we decided to push on to Sonkol, getting there after horse trekking through the mountains.
When we created the wiki, we never put the pics that we took around Kochkor on the wiki, except for the one at the top of this page. Obviously I had meant to. Now we'll have to find those pictures, but one of these days, hopefully ...
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