On Sunday we had a job to do and that was to cycle to the chinese border. The other travelers who accompanied us in Sary Tash during our ordeal there could look forward to yet another day in the village since they would take a transport on Monday morning. It would be to lie to say that it wasn’t a relief to finally leave Sary Tash in the early Sunday afternoon.

According to a signpost at the junction in the village it was 71 km to the border and our intention was to camp some 10 km before getting there. The altitude profile we had made already in Osh told us it was going to be a flat ride the first 30 km and then a little bit uphill.

We all know that travelling along the same road a second time usually gives a feeling that it is shorter and thus we felt that the first 15 km of the day went past very quickly. Then came the uphill section. We were already at 3500 meter and although not very steep at all the road slowly brought us up to 3760 meters altitude. Our speed up that hill was very low but that was soon to be changed.

Every uphill has a downhill on the other side and so did this one. With a perfect road, a gentle slope and no traffic made both of us beat our speed records. The new record is now 68.8 km/h. With our heavy loaded bicycles it felt like riding a motorcycle 🙂

What took us 90 minutes to go uphill would take less than maybe 10 minutes to roll downhill if it wasn’t for the many stops to take photos and just admire the stunning scenery.

Our late start and the many stops made us ride through the sunset. The wind picked up in the evening and when we looked for a spot to pitch our tent we had to find one that provided some shelter from the wind. The spot we found had a wonderful view but when we finally had time to sit down and enjoy it, it was already dark.

The following morning was the day we had waited for for almost a week – the day of our entry into China. It is always sensitive to take photos in border zones in this part of the world and thus we don’t have very many pictures from this area.

After only 5 km from our campsites, we had our first encounter with the border formalities. Kyrgyzstan has a pre-checkpoint 10 km from the real border and here they checked our passports and noted our names in a book before we could continue.

A few kilometers before the real border we got to the village of Nura. All the buildings looked very similar and all had bright blue roofs. We had never seen such similarity in Kirgizstan before, but later we were told that the village was destroyed by a earthquake and a following landslide some years ago. When rebuilding the village all houses came out in the same way.

The proceedings at the Kyrgyz side of the border was smooth. We cycled past several hundred trucks that were waiting to get through. With our exit visas stamped into our passports we could ride 500 meter to the chinese side where a lone chinese soldier took a quick look in our passports and told us to go to the next checkpoint 4 km down the road.

The chinese have moved the real border checkpoint 140 km inland and the second checkpoint in the mountains was only a sort of a thorough pre-check. We got a few of our panniers inspected and they even asked us to show the content of our computer and camera.

Since it is only a pre-check we didn’t get any stamps there and the chinese don’t want independant travellers inside the country who haven’t yet passed the proper border checkpoint. This is a wellknown fact among cyclists and we knew that the officials would put us either on a shared taxi or a truck. We had prepared for this by buying some ropes at the bazar in Osh to tie our bikes and bags to the truck.

A chinese officer found a truck for us and we removed the pedals and turned the handlebar and loaded our things into the empty cargo hold only to find that there were no holes, no hooks, no nothing to tie our bikes and bags to so we tied them together hoping that one big and heavy piece would move around less.

The road is mostly on gravel but a new road is built and some sections are ready and in use. At one of those sections there was a long pile of gravel across the road. It was maybe 20 cm high and I saw it long before we got there. When we approached the driver didn’t slow down and a few seconds before hitting it I understood the the driver hadn’t seen it. Wej and I held on to our seats and then a huge ”baaang” sent us airborne for a second or two. When we landed the loockers over the windscreen got open and the drivers private clothes, blankets, food, tools etc. fell out over us.

We got seriously concerned for our bikes. They must have gone airborne too and we feared that something must have got broken, but when we arrived at the real border checkpoint 4 hours later we found out that the bikes and everything was OK.

When we arrived to the border it was already 6 PM and 100 km remained into the city of Kashgar. We had forgot to buy food and water at the border and were hungry and thirsty, we had no map and no chinese currency so we decided to hitchhike with another truck into Kashgar city. This was our first proper cheat on this trip. When we took the train in Georgia it was because of Wej’s injured knee, but this time the only reason was laziness and bad planning.

We cycled 10 km from the truck parking area and checked into a nice hotel. It was wonderful to shower again after a week without. We also soaked all our clothes in the bathtub for one entire night and they came out like new….

Kashgar is a small city by Chinese measures but big with Swedish. We stayed for two days and enjoyed strolling around, going to restaurants, buying some electronics (extra harddrive and battery pack) and just be in a big city again.

The distance from Osh to the border is 250 km and even if it is uphill most of the time we planned to do it in three days. When we decided to postpone our departure with one day Bartek, our Polish friend whom we have cycled with from time to time since we left Azerbaijan, decided to go as planned with some Chezch cyclists he had met. We decided to meet them either after 180 km in or near the village of Sary Tash or at the border and enter China together.

When the day of departure finally came, we didn’t leave the city until 3 PM. It was a bit late but the road was good and the distance short so we didn’t worry or feel any need to speed up.

In the summer of 2011 we spent a month cycling on the Pamir plateau in Tajikistan. The landscape in the Pamirs resembles a lunar landscape and is very dry, rocky and dusty. Although being located close to the Pamirs, the mountains of southern Kyrgyzstan looks very different. Instead of the moonlike landscape on the Pamir plateau, the Kyrgyz mountains are green and water is never far away.

The road south from Osh towards Sary Tash is actually a part of the famous Pamir Highway, but on the Kyrgyz side of the border. Until only a few years ago the road was in very poor condition with broken asphalt and lots of potholes. Chinese money and labour has now led to a road in perfect condition that is a dream to ride a bike on.

Between Osh and Sary Tash there are two mountain passes. The first is at about 2500 meter and the second is at 3600 but from Sary Tash to the border it is flat almost all the way.

Since we didn’t leave Osh until 3 PM we didn’t manage to get very far the first day. The late start combined with a stunning landscape that made us stop to take photos many many times led to us not getting across the first pass during the first day. We decided to camp just below the start of the climb up to the first pass.

After the pass at 2500 meter we enjoyed a wonderful downhilll ride along a couple of switchbacks. Unfortunately the downhill part took us down 700 meter to a level which was below the altitude we had started at in the morning. Riding downhill is normally fun, but when you know that an even higher pass waits for you later in the day you wish that the downhill ends as quickly as possible.

We didn’t know if there would be villages were we could stop and shop food, but there turned out to be many. Finding water was also never difficult since almost all villages had a tap of running water somewhere along the main road.

When we had a short break to buy some cold drinks at a teahouse during our second day, we saw some cyclists approaching us from the opposite direction. When they got close we saw a familiar face. It was the german cyclist Johannes who we had cycled with for some time in Uzbekistan, but who we split from in Samarkand since he was going to the Pamirs while we headed for the Fergana valley. He was now cycling with two polish cyclists and it was a dear re-union and the brief stop to buy a drink turned out to be a one and a half hour long stop to exchange experiences and tips.

After having crossed the first pass in the morning it was upphill the rest of the day. Our plan was to camp just below the switchbacks that would take us up to the 3600 meter pass before Sary Tash. We were riding without a proper map and when we saw what we thought was the beginning of the steep climb we decided to stop and camp even if it still was a bit too early.

When we woke up in the morning it was only 9 degrees. We were now at 2400 meters altitude and had 1200 meter to climb before arriving in Sary Tash where we planned to have lunch before continuing to the border where we had made an appointment with our friend.

After having climbed the first steep climb just next to our camp site we understood we had made a mistake. We were not camping below the switchbacks – they were still far ahead of us and this meant that we would arrive to Sary Tash in the afternoon rather than around noon as we had planned.

Climbing the switchbacks was hard. The road was good and not too steep but we started to feel the lack of oxygen and had to stop to catch our breath quite often. When we were resting at one of the turns a boy on a donkey appeared as out of nowhere. We exchanged a few words with him and then we continued up the hill. The boy on the donkey followed us closely. Everytime we stopped, he stopped. He rode his donkey between us and started to whistle songs and copy our heavy breathing. It really annoyed us and finally we had to chase him away only to see him again at the top of the mountain pass.

Sary Tash is a little tiny village that sits at the intersection where the road from China joins the road from Tajikistan (Pamir Highway). It is not a town – a village is a more proper word for this community but since it is located at an important junction it has a few homestays/guesthouses.

Very exhausted and hungry after the long climb we rolled into the little village at 2.30 PM on Wednesday instead of 12 as planned. We went to one of the guesthouses to get something to eat before continuing to the border at 4.30 PM.

When we left Sary Tash the wind had picked up and the sky had also got some ugly dark clouds. First we had the wind on our backs but then the road turned and the wind became a strong crosswind. After having cycled 15 km from Sary Tash we got an SMS. We suspected it was from our Polish friend we were going to meet so we quickly stopped to see what he had to say. The message started with the words:

”Bad news guys”….

And the message that followed was that he had got to the border only to find out that it would close the following two days (Thursday-Friday) in addition to the normal weekend closing. It was 17.40 on Wednesday afternoon and 20 minutes left before the border would close for four consecutive days. Our friend did the only reasonable thing to do and went across but we had still 55 km to go and quickly understood that there would be no chance for us to get into China until the border re-opened on Monday morning.
We stopped a truck that came from the border and the driver confirmed that the border would be closed for four days.

It was cold and windy, we had got bad news and to add some spice to the situation it also started to rain. We were too tired to ride back to Sary Tash and decided to camp and ride back the next day. When we had just spotted a perfect camp site and brought our bikes down the steep sides of the road we saw a truck stopping 100 meters ahead of us. The driver jumped out and ran down to the stream to fetch some water close to where we were going to camp. We hurried to him and asked if we could go with him back to Sary Tash. His truck was carrying some construction machine and there was plenty of room for our bikes so we loaded them and our baggage and jumped into the passenger seat. 15 minutes later we were back in Sary Tash – our place of confinement for the coming four days.

In front of us was the closed border to China and not far in the other direction was Tajikistan to which we had no visa. Behind us was a high mountain pass that we didn’t want to climb again. We were simply stranded in the tiny little mountain village of Sary Tash that is completely without any modern facilities such as running water or showers. Internet access – just forget about it.

We checked in at one of the guesthouses and there were other tourists who didn’t yet know about the closing of the border and who quickly understood that they were also stranded in a village at the end of the world. Too add to a situation that was far from what we had expected we saw the annoying boy on the donkey we had met on the mountain in front of the guesthouse and soon it became clear to us that he was a member of the family who runs the guesthouse we just checked in at.

Things started to get clear during the evening. It turned out that the border would be closed on Thursday due to the celebration of the end of Ramadan, but we couldn’t understand why it would be closed on Friday too and during the Thursday morning we walked around the village to try to find information. Some people said it would be open and some said it would be closed.

Since many people in the village work at the border we got 3-4 people we met to call to someone at border to get confirmation if it would be open on Friday or not. All those phonecalls resulted in the same information ”border will be closed on Friday and open again on Monday”.

Since we were still not sure if the border would be open on Friday or not we all decided to go out to the intersection early on Friday morning to see if there would be any trucks heading towards China which would indicate that the border was open. The road was completely empty and there was absolutely no traffic and we lost our last hope of being able to get to China before Monday.

We were obviously stranded in this little mountain village so what to do?

Some travellers decided to catch a ride back to Osh while others decided to stay. We were exhausted after the ride over the two mountain passes and thought we could as well enjoy the extra rest days. But without any sort of entertainment in the village there has been nothing to to do other than sleep, write blog posts, sort photos, watch movies on the computer and keep an eye on the road from China.

Late in the Friday afternoon convoys of trucks started coming from the Chinese border. How should we interpret that???? We walked up to a small restaurants where some trucks had stopped and asked and it turned out that the border had been open during the Friday after all. It was now Friday evening and we had blown our chances to get to China until Monday. We had tried to gather and analyse information instead of just taking the chance to go to the border to see with our eyes.

Having missed getting to China on the Wednesday was bad luck, but missing the Friday’s opening was a little bit more annoying, but we didn’t get upset since we had accepted the situation already when we got the first SMS. We had come to terms with our fate that meant that instead of riding to China we could look forward to two more days in Sary Tash that although it has marvellous views over the snow capped 6000 meter peaks of Pamir still is a dead boring little village.

We stayed two days in the first guesthouse, but then decided to change to a cheaper one.

Most travellers who come to Sary Tash only stay for a night and continue the next morning. We will have spent four nights here and we think we will be the new record holders…. 😉

Our plan is now to cycle to the border on Sunday in order to cross into China on Monday morning and arrive the city of Kashgar on Monday afternoon or evening.

This entire episode of our journey between Göteborg and Bangkok resembles the ferry ride across the Caspian Sea which also included long waiting time, no or conflicting information and frustration that in the end led to giving up and just accepting the situation as it is. It could after all have been a lot worse. Just imagine the extreme frustration if the closing of the border for example had occured very close to our last entry date of our chinese visas.

Half a year ago I would have kept myself busy trying to answer questions suchs as ”what if we had started earlier, didn’t stop too long, gone longer the first day” etc.. Now it seems that I instead quickly accept the new situation and conditions. So it is fair to say that all these hardships have at least led to some personal development…. 🙂

The lessons learned is to always try to enjoy things as they are even if this means spending four days in a boring village where the shower is a bucket in the backyard and the toilet is a hole in a dirty wooden floor…. 🙂

Osh is the second biggest town in Kyrgyzstan and the country has decided to become a tourist destination and has taken away all the bureaucratic regulations that its neighbour Uzbekistan still maintains. This has led to a large influx of tourists and in Osh there are lots of nice restaurants and hotels.

We didn’t like the guesthouse we stayed at and since Osh is the midpoint on our trip between Göteborg and Bangkok we decided to celebrate this by stopping a little longer and stay at a better hotel than the guesthouse we checked in at the first night.

This little hotel was very nice. It was very quiet, had a nice lounge area, a lawn, an outside sitting area and wifi internet that was accessable from everywhere within the premises.
We spent the first few days just relaxing and only left the hotel to have dinner with our friends who still stayed at the backpacker guesthouse we stayed at the first night.

One afternoon a french-malaysian couple checked in at our hotel. They had been trecking in the mountains in the south of Kyrgyzstan and would stay one night in Osh before going home. The french guy is a chef and runs two french restaurants and a cooking school in Kuala Lumpur while the wife is a writer for a cooking magazine in Malaysia. Having had only simple food during their two week long trek they wanted some proper food and asked to borrow the hotel’s kitchen and offered us to help in cooking and share their meal.
It was wonderful to see professionals at work and the steak and the kidneys fried with pepper and paprkika tasted wonderful.

The city of Osh doesn’t have very many tourist attractions apart from its bazar. We went there to buy some rope to tie our bikes on a truck when entering China (it is forbidden to cycle through the noman’s land and we will need to get on a truck).

In the bazar it is possible to find almost everything, even cycle parts…… But they are not of the latest standard and this is why many touring cyclists prefer to use old components of older standards instead of the newest which can’t be find in places like this.

We also spent some time to do a thorough maintanence of our bikes. We took off chains, cassettes and chainrings and cleaned them carefully. Our clothes also liked to get a proper wash in a washing machine instead of the rinse in a sink somewhere they lately have got used to….

Kyrgyzstan doesn’t require us to have visas and without feeling any pressure from the visa clock we decided to postpone our departure from Osh with one day because we simply felt we wanted to stay longer. Instead of leaving on Sunday we would leave on Monday but that wouldn’t cause any problem. It was a three day ride to the chinese border and our new plan was to enter the country on Thursday. The border is closed during weekends but our plan to arrive to the border on a Thursday would give us plenty of backup time in case something would slow us down.

Day 92 Olmaliq – mountains east of Angren
It is a late Sunday evening and I am sitting in the garden in our little B&B in Osh, the second largest city in Kyrgizstan. Today has been a nice day with some clouds and cool temperatures (still above 30 though). This evening we enjoy a cool breeze that makes the leaves of the trees in the garden tremble and in the afternoon we even enjoyed a light summer rain. Tomorrow is our cycling day and we hope this kind of nice and cool weather will keep us company on our journey up to the Kyrgiz mountains.

So how did we get here?

Uzbekistan is a country we only planned to visit for a few days but since we couldn’t go through Iran due to the presidential elections we had to re-route and take the ferry across the Caspian Sea and then cycle across Uzbekistan from the very west to the very east. It turned out to be 2068 km and Uzbekistan is the country that we have cycled most kilometers in so far and it has been an interesting experience I will later write a separate article about.

Uzbekistan has large deserts but after we left Samarkand we were in densely populated areas. We traveled through the cotton areas around Yangiyer and Gulistan and passed Olmalia which is a town of heavy and dirty industry.

Just as in the former Soviet union Uzbekistan still requires foreign tourists to register every 3 days and this is an issue that lessens the joy of traveling in this wonderful country. When we left Samarkand I was tired after pressing hard for almost four consequtive weeks and I needed a rest, but since our Uzbek visa was running out we couldn’t afford to stop for any more days and had to press on in order to get out in time.

I was tired and exhausted in Olmaliq and to be honest I was a bit worried about my ability to continue according to our plan. When we left Olmaliq I immediately felt that my legs were not up to the task of riding long distances. There was no pain or muscle ache in my legs but I felt they were stiff and powerless so we could only progress slowly.

The Fergana valley is a small but important part of Uzbekistan and there is only one road leading to it across a high mountain pass. As soon as we got out of Olmaliq city and onto the highway towards the Fergana valley the intensity of the traffic grew significantly. I was not in the mood for anything and just kept pedalling behind Wej to make the kilometers pass as smooth as possible.

It was not very far to the town of Angren, only some 55 km from Olmaliq but whithout power in my legs it felt like it would be closer to the moon. Some 10 km before the town a car pulled up beside us and the guys inside wanted to chat. I was extremely exhausted and were not in the mood for talking so I went to the side and let Wej take care of the talking. We didn’t stop but Wej managed to have a conversation as we cycled beside the car and it ended with the guy in the passenger seat handing over a handful of peaches. After the car left we stopped and ate those God sent peaches. The strenght we got from those sweet fruits only lasted a few kilometers and when I saw a bus stop I just had to stop and get a rest. After sleepting on the narrow seat of that bus stop for about 45 minutes I felt I had got my strenght back and we could ride into Angren without problem.

40 km beyond Angren there is a massive climb up to 2200 meters and our aim was to find somewhere to stay that was not far from the start of the climb. But how to do that when completely out of power?

We were hungry when we cycled into town but we didn’t stop at the very first eatery. When we finally stopped for lunch we chose a place where we could both eat and enjoy an afternoon nap. The restaurant had no menu and we opted for the simple solution and ordered something we knew – a ”lagman” which is a traditional noodle soup.

We have had Lagman many times before and they are neither good or bad. It is a simple noodle soup with meat, noodles and vegetables. But at this place we got something different. The noodles were not served as a soup but more like a spagetti dish with only a little liquid at the bottom of the plate. We also got a little side dish with a brown-red paste that we didn’t know what it was but we put it on the noodles and……… wow…….. 🙂

That paste was a chilli paste and it was very spicy and did lift the experience of the lagman to a new dimension. With that side dish of chilli the lagman actually turned out to be very similar to ”khao soi” which is a traditional dish in northern Thailand. The lagman-khao soi lunch brought our spirits back and Wej enjoyed it so much that she even ordered a second plate. Wej also carefully noted what that chilipaste dish is called in Uzbek in order to be able to order it again later on.

We were heading towards the Fergana valley which is a politically sensitive are that has seen heavy and deadly military crackdown on riots that have caused Sweden and most other western countries to issue warnings against unnecessary travel in the valley. However, travelers we meet keep telling us that people in the Fergana valley are even more hospitable than in the rest of the country so we continued towards it with high expectations.

Between us and our high expectations of the Fergana valley stood a tall mountain range. We didn’t want to climb it the same day but we wanted to get as close to the start of the climb as possible. Due to the political unrest the single road to the Fergana valley passes two military check points where we as foreigners had to register. It was not any big issue and the soldiers where very friendly and since it was already late they invited us to pitch our tent on the little lawn in front of their office. We thanked them for their kind offer but told them we had to go and eat at the restaurant a kilometer down the road and then maybe come back.

We have been to similar situations before and we know what to expect. Once the soldiers are off duty they will start to drink and ask to try our bikes which is something we never let anyone do. Riding fully loaded bike is difficult and it is easy to fall and break some parts that we will have troubles to find replacements for.

When people ask to try our bikes we politely decline, but how to do decline when a guy carrying a Kalshnikov asks??? Besides this it was still to early to camp so we decided to proceed further and some 15 kilometers later we found a tea house that was clinging on the rock next to the river. We ordered some food and asked if we could stay for the night and just like everywhere else in Uzbekistan the answer was yes. After having a bath in the river below the restaurant we quickly fell asleep on the same platform as where we had eaten our dinner.

Day 93 Mountain pass – Kokhand
Today was a mountain stage and the climb started only 8 km after we left the restaurant where we had slept the previous night. The weather was pleasant and although it was warm it was far from the intense heat below the mountains.

We still were suffering from the previous days of hard riding and thus we climbed very slowly in order to preserve our strengths. There are tea houses and vendors selling drinks all the way and we stopped at a few of them to rest and drink.

There are lots of military posts along the way up to the mountains and all of them had clear signs telling that photographing was forbidden. As mentioned earlier – we avoid playing with guys carrying Kalashnikovs – so there are very few photos from this part of the trip.

The road we were traveling on is the only road that connects the Fergana valley to the rest of the country and thus there is a lot of the traffic there and one thing was sure and that was the we were the ones who moved up most slowly that day. Endless number of trucks overtook us.

One car that overtook us stopped in front of us and wanted to talk. It turned out to be a Malaysian family on a ”half-around-the-world-trip” who now were heading to China. We have previously met European car tourists, but now when we are half ways they seem to be coming from the other direction too. It was great fun to meet someone from a neighbouring country, talk for a while and exchange experiences.

At the top of the climb there are two tunnels that saved us a few more hundred meters of climbing. In front of the first tunnel there were soldiers checking our passports and in the other end there were another soldier, but he didn’t bother to check them.

The top of the pass was just between the two tunnels and once outside the second our time as the slowest vehicles on the road was up. Cruising at +50 km/h we flew past the long row of heavy trucks that had to descent down the mountain using their lowest gears. It is not who is quickest up that counts….. it is quickest up AND down…. 😉

After 50 km of not needing to pedal the road finally evened out. The heat was back and two hours before entering Kokhand we experienced a sensational strong heat. The road was newly made and still completely black and we felt a strong heat radiating from below, just like when sitting too close to a fire. Since we were still rolling downhill at high speed it was only uncomfortable, but if we would have been riding the other directions it would have been completely impossible to pass that section since it felt like the road below us was burning.

Day 94 Kokhand – south of Andijon
It is 170 km from Kokhand to Osh and that could be doable in a day, but not if also crossing a central asian border so we decided to cycle to somewhere beyond Andijon in order to be close to the border.

We had checked in to Hotel Kokhand in order to get our last registration slip. When asking for it before going to bed they said thay we would get it in the morning which we accepted if they could it to us at 7 o’clock which they promised. The next morning the very same guy asked us if we had got our registration slips……

The stamp was locked in the hotel’s office safe and he didn’t have the key. He told the manager would come and open it in 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 1 minute and so on. The manager came at 7.50 and opened the safe so that we could get our slips stamped. We cursed this soviet style hotel since we now had lost one hour of cycling which on a flat road like the one crossing the Fergana valley means loosing 25 km or one more hour in the striking afternoon heat.

We managed to do 85 km before the heat struck and we had to seek refuge at a tea house beside the road where we stayed for two and a half hours.

After having left the tea house and cycled through a village we saw a van coming up beside us. The guy in the passanger seat asked if we wanted icecream and showed two icecreams. First we thought they were icecream vendors, but when we stopped they just gave us the icecreams, said good luck and turned around and drove back to the village. Amazing hospitality in an area that is supposed to be dangerous….

Andijon is a big city and it usually takes long time to cycle in and out of big cities so we decided to go around it to find a tea house where we could sleep. Half an hour before sunset we stopped outside one and soon we were surrounded by people and one old man stepped forward and started to talk slowly in English. He asked were we were going to stay and when we replied we didn’t know he suggested we stay at the tea house (our tactic worked once again).

The old man followed us into the tea house and we sat down to talk. He was accompanied by a young boy that turned out to be his 12 year old grandson. The boy spoke basic but good English and since he wanted to practice his English he talked a lot. The old man told us he was 75 years old, used to be an radio engineer and lived 300 meters from the tea house. The man and the boy joined us when we had our dinner and told us they would come back the next morning.

We had hoped we could sleep on one of the outdoor eating platforms, but the manager then offered us to sleep in one of the private dining rooms. He thought it would be too cold outside, but sleeping in the dining room turned out to be like sleeping in a sauna…. The hospitality shown to us is amazing – it is like being back in Turkey again.

Day 95 Andijon – Osh
Knowing that we only had 40 km to Osh we didn’t even set our alarm clock, but we woke up at 6.30 anyway. When we got out of our room the staff was busy preparing the food and we enjoyed watching the chefs as they prepared the various dishes to be offered that day. They tried to explain what they did but once again the language barrier made it difficult for us to understand.

We decided to have spicy khao soi-looking lagman for breakfast and when as we were finishing our meal the old man and the boy came back and offered us to come over to their house to have coffee. It is always interesting to be invited to people’s houses and we had plenty of time so we accepted the invitation.

The house was actually two houses with a lovely garden with grapevines and fruit trees in between. We had coffee, bread, biscuits and I got some home made wine as a second breakfast. It was clear that both the old man and his grandson enjoyed to practice English and after a while the boy’s sister joined in and she was also good at English. It seems that this family is really focused on learning foreign languages.

After spending about 1.5 hours at the family’s house we finally left for the border. Since it is forbidden to bring out the local currency we had to stop at a shop close to the border to buy whatever they had that we might need. We ended up with coke, icecream, a new soap, some socks and a pen.

At the border it was extremely crowded and there was a long que to even get into the border area. We didn’t line up among the people, but went in the line for trucks and rode up to the front of the line. A soldier saw us and let us through into the border control area without having to wait in that long line.

There were many more lines to wait in. First line was to the customs to declare all our valuable belongings and foreign currencies. We saw a french backpacker couple in the front of the line and when an official took them aside, we quickly jumped the que and joined them.

Next que was to have our baggage X-rayed. We only x-rayed our handlebar bag since the bikes and the bikes wouldn’t fit thew x-ray machine and would have to be inspected manually.

After declaring the foreign currencies and getting our bags x-rayed it was time to line up in the long line for passport inspection. An official saw us and the french couple and came and told us to join him. He then put us at the front of the line and we got our passports stamped without even being asked to provide any of those registration slips we have worked so hard to get.

We were then released to go to Kyrgiz side of the border. Kyrgizstan has decided to become a country for tourists and got rid of all ridiculous visa requirements. We simply showed our passports to the official and 1 minute later we were through.

We spent about one hour at the Uzbek side of the border and one minute on the Kyrgiz side. If we had waited in all those lines it would definately have taken a full day to pass and we felt a bit guilty as we past the people that had been waiting for hours. It didn’t feel fair, but we didn’t oppose being treated as VIP:s.

It is only 7 km from the border into downtown Osh and we went to a guesthouse where backpackers usually stay. At the guesthouse we once again met the polish and german cyclists we have been cycling with before and we went out to have dinner together with them.

Unfortunately it was extremely hot in the guesthouse so the following morning we decided to move to a better place with airconditioning.