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.

Pizza and a beer can never be wrong… 🙂

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.

We can warmly recommend Eco House B&B in Osh

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.

Lounge area

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.

Pro’s in action…

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).

At the bazar

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.

A very interesting section of the bazar

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.

Having dinner with Bartek from Poland whom we have cycled with since Baku