The Agrinautica

   If you were to follow the ancient Silk Road east out of Europe across a thousand miles of grassy plains through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, north of Afghanistan and south of Kazakhstan, the “Mountains of Heaven” (Tian Shan) would rise up like a serrated wall before you. You would journey into their imposing embrace in the fertile Fergana Valley, at the end of which lies the 3,000 year old city of Osh, under a rocky outcrop noted in ancient sources as the “stone tower.” Once, snorting camel caravans had stopped here to prepare to cross the mountains, now it is dusty and post-soviet, full of crumbling monuments and grey apartment blocks. A statue of Lenin still graces a central square, ["gesturing with the hand of Ozymondias" or am I getting overwrought here?] but leaving town towards the mountains you pass a prouder more modern statue of Kyrgyz folk hero Manas astride his horse holding his sword valiantly aloft. I came into Osh by air, but then followed the approximate route of the silk road for two more hours by car up winding roads surrounded by increasingly large green hills, occasionally waiting for shepherds on horseback to move their sheep off the road, until I came to a village named Kenesh beside the icey Kara Darya river.
   The river valley seemed stark and empty in the cold of early Spring. Other than the village and river there was nothing to be seen but grass and distant herds of sheep or horses. The Tian Shan mountains looming at one end and the Fergana Valley at the other. The village itself consisted of a smattering of dull grey houses often with cheery red or blue hand-carved wooden scrollwork along the eaves. Each house had its own yard delineated by a rustic fence of rough branches, and each yard contained a kitchen garden, some fruit trees in the very beginnings of blossom, the family horses and maybe a cow or two. Some sheds and barns were actually thatched. Arriving at my host's house, I walked past a row of strangely large beehives set under some cherry trees resplendant with blossoms, I had arrived at my destination. We no longer live in the days of Bactrian camels on the silk road but still it took me 44.5 hours to fly from Melbourne to Canton to Paris to Istanbul to the Kyrgyz capital at Bishkek. Snow storms had blocked the passes to get from Bishkek to Kenesh so it took one more flight from Bishkek to Osh, and here I was, exhausted. It was March 2016, and I had traded the onset of Autumn in Australia, where I'd been living, for two weeks in the crisp beginnings of Spring in Kyrgyzstan.

   After this very long and arduous journey I was excited in the morning to have a look at those hives and see what the situation was. With the several trainees assembled in the flowery yard, we went to inspect the beehives under the cherry trees … only to find every single one full of dead bees. Freshly piled on the baseboard, diagnosis: recent and sudden. It would seem that in preparation to not have an embarrassing amount of varroa mites when the “bee expert” arrived, they had given them an extra strong dose of miticide the day before I arrived. I mightily facepalm and look to the sky, thinking of all the USAID money that went into getting me to this remote village, to say nothing of my volunteered time. Welcome to aid work.
   This project was one of many put on by a non-governmental organization with the inspiring name of ACDI-VOCA. The funding comes from United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through their farmer-to-farmer program.

   So then let's start talking about proper dosage and integrated pest management. What miticide do they use? The locals shrug, they don't know. Well, show me the container? Oh it's all written in Chinese. We're off to a fantastic start here.
   Soon, however, we were back in business, of a sort, because a short walk or horse-ride to the other side of the village and there was an older villager with dozens of hives full of live bees under some leafy trees by a gorge. These hives, like the dead ones, consisted of huge rectangular wooden boxes like steamer trunks. The frames were much bigger than our “deep” frames and the hives contained about 20 frames each, all in a horizontal line like a topbar hive with frames. My understanding is that during winter they'd use dividers to pack in three individual hives of six (giant) frames each per box, and, during spring and summer they lug these massive chests up to the flower covered mountain slopes and shift the frames so each hive is in its own box without dividers.
   It can be tempting, when one learns of a system so different, to start evangelizing the beekeeping innovations of the Reverend Langstroth as they have become canon to us – they use the same knowledge of beespace and frames, its just not our orthodox interpretation of box dimensions [I really wanted to insert an "eastern orthodox" pun here but it wasn't fitting easily and anyway it would falsely imply the locals are Eastern Orthodox rather than Muslim as they are]. But maybe this system works better for them in these conditions. They are high altitude (the mountains are essentially the northern arm of the Himalayas), and have cold snowy winters, so maybe combining three to a box like this is what they must do. On any account, I don't want to be that guy telling everyone to do things my way, so I listen intently and observe, and then by way of sharing I describe the langstroth hives I use. Maybe they'll be interested in the ease I describe of moving boxes and adding supers … but then again they don't need to remove supers to look at brood, maybe they think I'm the one who is backwards. They do tell me they have a type of hive like I'm describing, with boxes on top of boxes, which they call the “corpus” hive. When I later encountered it, however, I found it uses supers that are absolutely massive (see photo), such that one person would probably struggle to lift one alone, which kind of achieves the worst of both worlds.

   The bees themselves I found to be incredibly docile, as if they had never received the memo that stinging was a thing they could do. The beekeeper applied just the slightest wiff of smoke, and no bee ever gave anyone even an aggressive buzz. There were light head veils available which on this occasion one non-beekeeper donned, but most of the other non-beekeeper family members and villagers who my presence had attracted were at ease and confident in the bees' non-aggression, crowding casually right around the open hives. I never saw a full suit in all my travels in Kyrgyzstan. One piece of headgear I did see a lot was the distinctive Kyrgyz felt hat known as a “kalpak,” that forms a tall dome or miter above the head. I was quickly gifted one and though it felt silly at first was soon un-self-consciously wearing it all around the country (and then before leaving the country picked up half a dozen because all my friends clearly needed one).
With half the beehives in this village dead, and not nearly as many beekeepers to work with as I was led to expect, I looked around this remote wind-swept place, shivering, and wondered how I could make it worth the trouble. I had an interpreter, a young woman named Nurzat on her first interpreter gig. She was clearly anxious about whether she'd do it well enough but in fact she really went above and beyond. Realizing that we didn't really have much to do out here in Kenesh, she somehow lined up a whole slew of beekeepers for us to meet down the valley by the larger town of Kurshab. I really don't know how she did this since she wasn't already plugged in to the beekeeping community, but I couldn't praise her enough in the final report.

   We caught a ride with the brother of the village headman, who was headed in to Osh. Back down the valley (but we had to proceed up-valley first, because the downriver bridge had been swept away years ago), down to Kurshab, a slightly larger town just where the river met the Fergana Valley. In this town Nurzat's in-laws had a house, it was a nice house, but notably there was a yurt in the yard (or a “yurta” as they seem to call them). I have found the Kyrgyz to be practically allergic to being indoors, and to love their traditional yurtas. Even with highs in the fifties they would take most meals at a table outside happy and oblivious to my chattering teeth. The yurta, the traditional dwelling of their nomadic ancestors, they fondly hang on to and I noticed many houses in town had a yurta in the yard. Later as my perambulations took me further into the hills I would see that many herdsmen still stayed in yurtas while up in the high hills and mountains and probably many beekeepers too – the beekeepers I met with nearly all had a house in town surrounded by their hives but took them up into the mountains for summer.
   Because of a risk of theft, hives would not be left unattended but accompanied by the beekeeper or at least a family member 24/7. While this may seem costly, and the price they get for honey is certainly less than we like (writing five years later, the enticing detail of honey price is not in any notes I can now find), the cost of living is itself so much lower that one person can support themselves and family with a hundred hives. How I envy them! Give me a yurta, a hundred hives, and a horse looks off wistfully into the distance.
   Before, after, or both, every beekeeper we visited would offer me tea and a smorgasbord of fresh home made jams and other fresh delicacies either made at home or at least by a neighbor. Even the tea was often picked by the wife from local plants. For dinner every day in the Osh area we had a dish known as “osh,” a rice pilaf with meat in it. When I returned for my second project in the east of Kyrgyzstan I was staying in a crumbling Russian hotel that was a bit of a cliché of itself – assigned seating! Tickets for meals! Borshkt again? But when I ate out the food seemed to be cousins of things I've seen in Turkey – the Kyrgyz culture is part of a Turkic-Mongol continuum.
   Everywhere I go I find beekeepers to be innovative lot, and Kyrgyzstan was no exception, I witnessed many interesting home-made tools and interesting techniques. While it seems most common to simply put beehives on the back of a flatbed, one man who was also a math and chemistry teacher at the local high school had built an impressive bee trailer with sixty hives built into it which could be accessed from pull-out drawers on the inside, and also within the trailer was a miniature extracting room with two fold out bunks, a fold out workbench over the extractor, and the extractor itself drained into storage tanks slung under the trailer.
   Several of the more experienced beekeepers seemed to be adept at queen breeding, and yet one thing I saw over and over again was that beekeepers in Kyrgyzstan seemed to generally significantly rely on queens from far away in Ukraine. Even though it was hard to get them, there seemed to be a persistent belief that such queens were inherently better than anything locally bred could be. I am a firm believer in locally adapted stock. One thing I've seen again and again on projects is beekeepers hoping I'll bring them some golden bullet, expressing eagerness and hope I'll have some revolutionary new idea, but whatever change I really do recommend they don't really want to hear. In Egypt it was allowing hives to grow beyond one box in size (“ten frames? Time to split!”). Here it was breeding and buying local queens. Of note, Drs Sheppard and Meixner's research on bees in the area have identified a distinct subspecies, Apis mellifera pomonella, which, as the name suggests, has co-evolved in particularly close conjunction with apples, which apparently originated in the same region (see Sheppard & Meixner, “Apis mellifera pomonella, a new honey bee subspecies from Central Asia, Apidologie, 367-375, 2003).

   August 11th, 2017, Australia – I wake up wrapped in blankets against the Antarctic winter cold. I'm supposed to fly to Congo that evening. I put on my glasses and blearily look at my phone to see what emails came in overnight and find I am not in fact going to Congo, the plan has changed and I'm instead going back to Kyrgyzstan! If you had asked me in high school if I wanted to be a professional beekeeper I might have said “no, I want to travel!” Little did I know.
   This time I headed east from the capitol by car to near the large mountain lake of Issyk-Kul, a lake so big you can barely see the mountains on the far side (and a comfortable temperature for swimming in. Looking back at the beach you only see a smattering of yurtas on the shore and can truly wonder what century you're in). Up here in the mountains in the summer I saw first hand a great number of pastoralists living in their yurtas in quiet mountain valleys. One day as I walked along the road near my current host's house I encountered some young men with pet eagles. Not hawks or falcons, these raptors were huge and I had read of the eagle hunting done in the central asian mountains. I happily paid the lads the equivalent of about $3 to have my picture taken with an eagle perched (on thick leather gloves) on each arm, one proceeded to take literally 114 photos on my phone while the other failed to figure out he should take the lenscap off my DSLR, we had no common language and of course my hands were held in the grip of terrifyingly large talons. When I later told my host of the eagles, he made a face and said “they probably don't even actually hunt with them,” as if it is a positively shameful dereliction of duty to NOT hunt with eagles. Adds “have pet eagle” to Kyrgyz dream life.
   Early in my arrival in Australia, in 2016, one of those old guys that haunt beekeeping meetings (you know the type) had declared for one and all that you should never put “stickies” (ie extracted frames), back in the beehive because “they will have begun to ferment and any alcohol will kill all your bees!” At the time I had rolled my eyes because I think giving stickies to hives is the best way to clean them up, even if you're just gonna take them off 24 hours later to put them in storage (but in Australia you must put them on the hive they came from unless you want to literally play with fire, since you can't treat for AFB and must depend on barrier quarantine). I bring this up now because here in Eastern Kyrgyzstan I met a Russian beekeeper who swears alcohol aids queen acceptance and was out there dribbling vodka right into hives as he introduced queens!!
   In addition to reliance on foreign-bred queens another obstacle to the local beekeepers became apparent to me. Kyrgyzstan had been a part of the Soviet Union and during that time they had been freely able to transport their product throughout the vast Soviet empire. Now Kyrgyzstan is just a place the size of Nebraska that's separated from the big markets in Russia by several international borders. My sources told me even getting into the markets in the capital of Bishkek was hard because you had to know the right people and those people favored their existing friends (and, they alleged, adulterated the honey). This was beyond my purview as a technical expert though I suggested a strong national beekeeping federation could maybe help with these issues. I was informed that such an organization did exist but the people I talked to did not believe it was effective. I did leave a suggestion with the development office that they bring some specialists in these larger issues to help with the national federation.

   I will admit, like probably most of you, when I had first heard of Kyrgyzstan, my response was probably “Klargobarkastan? That's a made up place like Bashkortostan!” [this is kind of an in-joke because the next international beekeeping conference is in 2021 in Bashkortostan, which is, indeed, a place] But I came to love the kind, earnest, hard working people in this bucolic place whose loveliness is perhaps preserved by the fact that most in the West have no idea what or where it is. The fact that there is still a place on this earth where people regularly live in comfortable yurts in the mountains with their hives and ride their horse to go visit their neighbor warms my heart.

   By and by the second project ended, and I had to leave the flowery mountain pastures. A day's drive back to Bishkek, followed by 96 hours of flying: Bishkek to Istanbul (interrogated by secret police) to Dubai to Melbourne (47 fahrenheit) to Los Angeles (had to run to catch connection) to Atlanta (first Five Guys burger in years) to Managua, Nicaragua (is that volcano supposed to be smoking?), where another story begins.

April 1st, 2016, Kurshab, Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia - We drove back up the remote river valley away from Kenesh village. I was sad to see it go, it was a cute village. I had literally no idea where I would end up next. Maybe another cute mountain village? Or maybe I'd be stuck in a decrepit hotel in the city of Osh for the next two weeks. We followed the road up the valley a little ways, once again seeing many herdsmen on horseback, and occasionally having to stop for sheep traffic, crossed the river on the upstream bridge and then the road took us up the steep valley sides to the top, where we stopped for some photographs, as I posed with the family on the valley rim, wearing my felt kalpak hat.



Nurzat, my translator, took the above picture, then I took one with her in it.

   We continued over hill and dale through the foothills of the Mountains of Heaven for two or three hours until we passed through the town of Kurshab. There our ride (who remember was the village chief's son, a banker in Osh), dropped us off at Nurzat's in-law's house before continuing on to Osh.

   Kurshab is a much more "suburban" town than Kenesh was. Not in a track housing and stucco kind of way but it does seem to consist mainly of houses with smaller yards, not the series of self sufficient farms Kenesh was. It still has plentiful tree cover though, I feel like I rememeber constantly being under tree canopy in town. Downtown there was a small Soviet monument with some tanks proudly perched on pedestals like lion statues. Across the street from Nurzat's house was the ruins of a completely overgrown stone building with elegant arches, she said it was a former bathhouse. Another of the neighboring lots was a large overgrown lot of a large half constructed building that was seemingly never completed. Now horses graze in the lot.

   The single most surprising thing to me though was the house Nurzat and her in-laws live in. I was entirely unprepared for it to be so big! Three stories tall! Shiny and new looking! And, in a very adorably typical Kyrgyz fashion, there was also a "yurta" just beside it. The linked picture is someone else's yurta since I didn't get a good picture of theirs, but the design is always basically the same. Theirs had a nice carpet inside, as well as a table, a few odds and ends, and if I recall correctly two rusty old swords.
   Nurzat's father-in-law was the principal of the local high school I believe, and was well traveled. I forget what the mother in law did but she seemed very sharp as well. Her husband himself was a rather slight young man whom I got along with very well. He could haltingly communicate to me in English when Nurzat wasn't about to translate. They were a cute couple.
   That evening they asked if I'd like to take a hot shower and I eagerly said yes, having had no bathing options in the cold village for the past few days. After a bit they said the water was ready and I discovered the hot water was literally being heated over a wood fire!!
   They had a nice little guest room even for me, with among other things a traditional sort of lute sitting on the dresser.

   But still though I woke up the next morning, thinking well this is all very pleasant, but what will it entail. We've gone from where we had been lead to believe the beekeepers were to where we hoped beekeepers would be, but would they be??


   And I don't know how Nurzat accomplished it, considering I don't believe she had an in in the local beekeeping community, but somehow, she delivered. The next several days were filled with visiting beekeeper after beekeeper! Many of whom just lived blocks away, in the middle of town having a hundred hives closely packed in their yard.



   I was envious that apparently 100 hives is enough to support oneself in a comfortable middle class life in town with a house and family there... you couldn't dream of doing that with 100 hives in the West! My visits with beekeepers also confirmed that beekeepers tend to be really smart people who dabble in many things. Many of them had experimental hive designs or side projects. One guy was also a physics and math professor at a local school, and had build the most adorable-yet-utilitarian hive trailer, with sixty hives on each side, and an extractor, two bunks, and work bench inside:



   Most beekeepers said they take their hives up to the tops of the foothills in spring for the plentiful wildflowers up there. Several were even engaged in queen breeding which is among the most advanced beekeeping one can get up to.

   One beekeeper, when asked about his other hobbies, listed "hunting wolves" as a hobby. As I stood by a thatched shed and a wobbly home made ladder led up to a hayloft (and I watched a chicken hop up the ladder rung by rung to get to the loft!), I swear I could have been teleported back to medieval Europe. Wolf hunting!



   Another fun cultural occurrence was the evening Nurzat's family made "Kyrgyz chocolate." The boiled up some sort of beans in the large cauldron you see pictured above and stirred it for hours. I took a turn myself at stirring it. It resulted in a brown pudding-like substance that was admittedly kind of like chocolate. Kind of.



   After what turned out to be a very productive week of meeting beekeepers in the area it was time to go home! Nurzat, her husband and I returned to Osh, and I was finally able to spend a day seeing the sights of this ancient city. We were joined by several of her students, she teaches an English class, young men who were eager to practice their English with me. I was surprised by how many of them had their heart set on getting a job in and moving to ... Dubai.
   We climbed the rocky landmark known as Sulayman Mountain, reputed to be the "Stone Tower," ancient writers reference as the midpoint of the silk road, and also revered as a Muslim holy site. 2/3rds of the way up, a museum is actually located IN an extensive cave system in the mountain, which was interesting.
   At the base of the mountain was an impressive three story yurta, alleged to be a model of one owned by some famous khan whom I'd remember if I wasn't writing this nearly a year later. Entry was a few dollars, which Nurzat insisted was a scam but I was curious, and then they let her in for free to translate and it was kind of interesting. Nearby there was a big museum chalk full of both extensive historical stuff and natural history exhibits (many taxidermied examples of local wildlife, among other things), but all the information was in Kyrgyz and Russian and even with Nurzat translating key bits I wished I could more readily absorb the wealth of information around me. Then I had to bid adieu to Nurzat and her husband -- I wrote her a rave review for going above and beyond and basically saving the project and I think she's had a lot of interpreter gigs since then (recall when she joined me she was anxious because it was her first).
   The Organization put me up in the obligatory decrepid hotel for the night (okay it was one of hte better ones in town I think, but it still had a bit of a mildewy aura), next day flew over the beautiful Tian Shan mountains back to the capitol of Bishkek. Spent a day in Bishkek, made final reports, bought some souvenirs (which I don't usually do actually, but I picked up a Kyrgyz flag because I do like the ole Pastry Jack, a copy of the Epic of Manas, and a Red Army elf hat because I can't believe I found one!) flew to Istanbul ... where I had purposefully insisted on having a day to spend with my ex Asli, but she had neglected to mention she apparently has recently fallen in love with some shlemiel in Denver AND gotten a ten year visa, so she bailed out of Istanbul a day or two before I got there.. I'm not bitter ::hides voodoo doll, and voodoo map of Denver that has been placed in the freezer:: So I wandered around Istanbul for a day, it's a lovely place anyway. I wouldn't mind moving there, it's central to everywhere else.
   From there to Dubai and on to Melbourne, the end!

   So I've been following this thing called the Out of Eden Walk, wherein this journalist sponsored by National Geographic is aiming to walk all the way around the world retracing roughly the route of human migration, beginning in Ethiopia and ending at Tierra del Fuego. I've been following it for awhile because I think the whole idea is neat, and he started in Ethiopia, which is dear to my heart. While I was in Osh in Kyrgyzstan I realized hey it's likely he will take hte Silk Road, and thus pass through Osh itself! At that time I think he was just entering the western -stans. I've been even more eagerly following his progress as he gets closer to Osh, and it looks like his most recent updates are from just across the Uzbek border in the Fergana Valley! I can't find his upcoming route (though my computer is really slow to browse the official project pages due to too many moving parts I think), but I anticipate even if he doesn't hit up Osh he'll probably head up past Kershab at the head of the valley and up the narrow Kara Darya river valley that I went up. I'll be even more eagerly following in the next few weeks for sure!



And this is a picture of the fishing mentioned in my last entry that I liked but couldn't quite fit into the entry (though it was linked). This isn't the Kara Darya but a tributary that joins in just a few miles further down. There should be a pin on this map by Kenesh.

March 29th, 2016, "Manas," 02:00 - It's two A.M. when we shuffle off the small airplane, through the cold night air and into small airport terminal. The sign says "Welcome to Manas." Manas? Where is Manas? What am I doing in Manas. No one seems to speak English, there aren't any signs. We're all being disembarked but I have no idea what I'm doing here or where to go. The security guards wear vaguely soviet olive green uniforms with peaked visor-caps, and have a stony unhelpful set expression on their weathered asian faces. I wander the (very) small transfer section of the airport but determine there are no outgoing flights any time in the near future. The signs are all written in cyrillic, though having studied Russian long ago in college I remember just enough to decipher cyrillic into the latin alphabet. I decide to follow all the other passengers even though it looks like they're going out to the baggage claim where I might not be able to get back in.

   I've already been most of the way around the world and in transit for 44.5 hours by this point. Having begun in Melbourne a full day before (evening of the 27th), I flew to Canton, China, and from thence to Paris, France (passing my final destination roughly halfway)(arriving in the morning of the 28th), then to Istanbul, Turkey (where I was for several hours of the afternoon of the 28th), and finally, this final leg to Kyrgyzstan in the very center of the Asian continent.



   I found my bag on the baggage claim conveyor and stumbled past security to the outer lobby, still thoroughly confused. Leaning rogueishly against a pillar smokign a cigarette was a shifty looking fellow with a sign with my name on it.. so I guess this was the right place after all. Shortly I was able to put together than though the destination I was expecting was "Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan," the airport which serves the city is "Manas" airport a fair bit out of town. I had misapprehended Manas to be a different city entirely.

   The driver led me cavalierly to his waiting car and didn't offer to assist me putting my bag in the back. I had never thought hard about it before but when one picks someone up at the airport it's always seemed like what you do. The driver spoke pretty good English, but I wasn't feeling terribly talkative being as it was the middle of the night and I was still feeling pretty bamboozled after spending a full day in air travel across half the Earth's time zones and back again. Curiosity did keep me awake during the drive though I noted a long tree lined road through countryside, with occasional giant Soviet-esque monuments materializing after the slowly brightened day. After about half an hour we got into the city, which consisted of big crumbling aparment blocks, broad streets empty during the night, and more Soviet cubist monuments.



   We finally arrived at the little hotel I would be staying in, and, after not helping me with my bags, he said "see you at ten."
   "What? like in five hours?" I said with not a little bit of horror at the fact that I'd clearly not be nearly caught up with sleep by then.
   "Oh, no, not this morning, the next day." He corrected me. Oh thank god.

   The hotel was small but clean, about three stories tall with maybe twenty rooms. My room was actually quite large and nice. In the morning I decided to walk downtown. I was actually more fearful than I usually am in Africa, since someone had told "oh everyone I know who's been to Kyrgyzstan has been mugged" ... and everyone else I talked to who had been to Kyrgazstan.. had been mugged. But the school children who skipped past me in the brisk morning air showed little interest in doing so. I was in a quieter area of smaller buildings across the railway tracks from downtown proper, which I made my way toward. My general observations about Kyrgyzstan can be summarized as that it's a country of Asian looking people, with a Turkish culture, a Russian alphabet and Soviet political history, and a tendency to wear really unusual looking hats.

   I made my way to the national museum (pictured above), but it was closed. So I headed to another museum marked on the map I had found but it was closed too. I also found that nowhere would exchange my Australian dollars and I couldn't find an ATM anywhere. I had initially assumed I would inevitably pass an ATM from which I could get local currency but after crossing several of the main city blocks downtown in search of an open museum and not seeing heads or tails of an ATM I began to get desperate and looked up banks on my phone and headed to them and yet they still didn't have ATMs.
   I did however find a lovely sculpture park. Many of the sculptures looked like broken pieces salvaged from something larger but I wasn't sure if they actually were or had been made that way as a stylistic thing. I particularly liked this one I call "World's Saddest Rhinoceros" --



On the way back I found an ATM, and then stopped in to a Turkish restaurant (all restaurants appeared to be Turkish restaurants). They didn't have a menu in English but fortunately I happen to know the turkish words for many Turkish dishes, which I could read even though they were written in cyrillic, so through a filter of two languages I barely understand I was able to glean menu information.

   In the afternoon the Organization's country director came to meet with me at my hotel. She explained briefly the plan (I'd be flying to the regional town of Osh the next morning, where I'd meet the local staffperson down there and my translator and then head out into the countryside for the project site.

   Due to the previously mentioned tales of getting mugged in Kyrgyzstan (though to be fair I think it's possible even these people who had previously been in the area may have confused Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan?) I declined to venture out at after dark, even though I ended up a bit hungry -- showing up in the hotel dining room for dinner I learned I was supposed to put an order in an hour before I planned to eat and it was too late by then.

   And to be continued, wherein I travel to Osh, an ancient city on the ancient Silk Road, I travel out into the remote countryside and things immediately begin to go awry!


And here's a statue of Kurmanjan Datka, as it clearly says in the pedestal.


And here, watch a pretty promotional video for Tourism Kyrgyzstan