by This was the day we start approach towards Kyrgyzstan and Sary-Tash. There was so much on the news about situation in there so we were a bit waiting mode to see what was the current situation over there.
Day started with usual breakfast followed by packing of bikes. There were also other guests who were on tour with jeeps, they were not daring to enter Kyrgyzstan at all!
I was not putting on any special clothes, morning looked like an warm one so just plain outfit with warm long inner clothes. No Gore-Text inside.
After that we went to the bazaar to find fuel since fuel station did not have any and we had heard that from bazaar we could still get this. And we did after few trials and questions from the people.
Got some fuel from bottles, no idea of the quality but at least bikes were running with it!
Again, so really nice views and one pass 4655 meters high on the way.
Continued further to find views like this:
Then we got to the Tajikistan border, this was something like three separate crappy buildings and lots of people. In first of these they again took some money out from us for whatever reason, second one they took same information again, but offered some tea, melon and candy when they were working on it, very nice. Last booth was the passport stamping place and off we went.
There was already new border house being built, but will take some time before that was going to be in use.
Then expecting to see Kyrgyzstan border control, but nothing. That was really far away and we ran into some obstacles as well.
On this I was walking through first to see what was in there, this was one lesson learned from previous exercises like this. Good that my boots are holding water out also when walking on it…
No issues with this, I went first, then Kari and last Anders.
Finally got to the Kyrgyzstan border which was not much. Probably some years ago there had been more, but now it was really nothing in it.
This was very quiet place, one guard opened port for us and started shouting something to the house where we were invited. So we took our passports and there was one man looking at them really carefully, no issues found except that he did not know what day was it and he needed this for his stamp! We were also wondering the same issue, but lucky for us we had one mobile phone with us…
Got quickly out from it and had to even open the port on our own, on Kyrgyzstan side there was nobody to do that… obviously they were not expecting many people as road was gone for the cars ahead of us.
Half of the road was gone, cars had been driving through just while ago, we had no issues with it.
Also on the way there were holes on the road were man could be standing so we needed to take extra carefully the last kilometres before Sary-Tash.
At Sary-Tash we found something called “Sary-Tash Guest House”, an homestay kind of place, just by the gas station.
This was a local cafe/bar/shop were we had one beer and I also managed to get rid of all Tajikistan Somon’s.
Got some dinner in our sleeping place and lights were out pretty soon after that! Dinner was some potato with onion and meat.
I was sharing a room with one bicyclist, Kari and Anders had a room on their own.
Sary-Tash was still quite high, 3181 metres where we were now located.
Today was quite easy riding, only 236 kilometres in 8 hours.
Total after this way was now 10751 kilometres.
