Dreaming of Kyrgyzstan

I have a bit of a silly dream. I say silly because it's totally unrealistic; not unachievable necessarily, but something where the reality would be far different from the fairy tale-ness of the dream.

My ridiculous fantasy is to live in Kyrgyzstan, marry a local nomad, and live in a yurt with a pet yak. One of the ways that reality comes knocking is that I doubt there are any yaks around that would be interested in being my furbaby. But that's just a minor issue, right?

I've actually been to Kyrgyzstan a few years ago, and I was pretty excited about the prospect of horse trekking and yurt camping. I think people I knew were starting to get a bit sick of my yurt talk, and wanted me to just go already. Yurt-ing was to be my first stop on my travels around central Asia, with the thinking that I would be least tired at that point.

I arrived in Kochkor, a popular base for tourists setting up horse treks to the nearby Song-Kol lake. I signed up for a trek through an agency that was recommended in my guidebook. I was as ready as I could possibly be, and super keen.

What I wasn't prepared for, though was having a saddle shoved up my butt for hours at a time. We're not talking a fancy saddle, either; this thing was more along the lines of a torture device. And I think I got the loser horse in the group, because he had no interest in keeping up with everybody else. By the end of day 1, my ass (along with the rest of my body) was so sore, my dismount from the horse involved me deliberately falling off and the guide sort of catching me. I had my suspicions that he was trying to cop a feel, but then again, there may not have been much of a choice.

On day 2, I was even more stiff and sore, which made getting off the horse even less controlled. Yet the groping seemed to get more deliberate, and there was a hand a little too close to my genital vicinity for my comfort. Then, at one point, he tried to hit on me. He was definitely not my Kyrgyz husband-to-be dream man, so from that point on I chose to just fall off my horse straight onto the ground rather than falling in his direction.

Aside from all that, though, the whole yurt situation was pretty cool. Granted, it was much easier to be a guest; the hosts seemed to be working pretty darn hard. A lack of indoor plumbing is never particularly fun, but they had managed to rig up sinks for washing, which I was rather impressed with. Their food was good, although I was not prepared to try drinking the fermented mare's milk that's such a staple there.

I got back to town on day 3 feeling sore as all get out, and a bit icked out by the gropey tour guide, but there was a significant sense of satisfaction.

Ever since, I've had the persistent back-of-my-mind dream of running away to Kyrgyzstan and marry into yurt-dom. It's unrealistic on many levels, not the least of which is my complete inability to function independent of the western comforts I'm used to. I would have no idea how to maintain a yurt, and even if someone showed me I'd probably be exhausted by the end of the day and the yak would trample me into the ground. Granted, I didn't actually see any yaks when I was in Kyrgyzstan, but it's still part of the dream.

There's so much to be said for travelling to other countries and seeing entirely different ways of doing things. And it's pretty cool to carry a small piece of that around with us to remind us every so often that there is always more than one way to cuddle a yak... or something like that, anyway....