While researching things to do near Naryn I came across the Eki Naryn Valley. I tried organising a trip there myself but I kept coming to dead ends as transport options were too expensive and hitchhiking was out of the question as the road is too quiet so I decided to ask our friendly host for help again and she sorted everting out for us. She called the yurt owner we planned on staying with and it turned out he knew about a shared taxi to his village in the morning so they arranged for us to be picked up nice and early. The taxi took us to a village where our host was working and from there we were transferred into his car and driven a further 15 minutes along dirt roads to the yurt. We knew the yurt experience would be totally different to the very traditional one we had a couple days before. This one was very much set up for tourism and they had 5 yurts plus some permanent structures for the kitchen and dining rooms. They even had a flushing squatter toilet instead a hole in the ground!

It’s very much the end of the yurt season now so we were the only tourists there and had a large yurt all to ourselves. We didn’t hang around for long though as we wanted to go for a hike in the area. We’ve both been feeling very lethargic lately so instead of an uphill hike we took it easy and walked along the empty gravel road where occasional herds of horses trotted past us. The views were very pretty with the fast flowing Smaller Naryn river flowing in the gorge below us and endless, lush green hills and rocky mountain tops. We were glad we opted not to hitchhike as in our 5 hours hiking we only saw 1 car driving our direction. It was two guys that pulled over to get water at a freshwater spring and they asked us for a photo and somehow I managed to encourage them both to stand in a very gangsta manner with their arms crossed.

We ended up walking about 6km along the road until we got a nice view up the valley of the mountains and then we turned back. It was a nice little stroll but nothing wow and it was blowing an absolute hooley through the valley and whipping up the dusty road. We did spot a very tiny and brave stoat though who seemed to be patient enough for a photo but by the time I got my zoom lens on we lost track of the little thing.

When we got back to our yurt camp there was a Dutch guy that had arrived and was staying at the camp next to ours so we spent the evening chatting with him. We asked for dinner to be ready for 6:30pm and our host actually drove back to the village and collected his wife to cook our food so it was a very untraditional experience because the family just had the yurts for a business, they didn’t live there and they didn’t have animals. She cooked us a sort of tomato soup with giant pasta shells and then a tomato, potato and cabbage dish. Another thing we didn’t like was that the dining room was in the concrete block, not a yurt. The host spoke basic English and we managed to discuss the difference of prices, in Kyrgyzstan and England and he said a packet of cigarettes costs just 65p here so it’s no surprise they smoke so much. While we were chatting we noticed the wife was frying eggs which was odd and then she put them all on one plate and popped them on the shelf, uncovered. We realised she was pre-making our breakfast as she wouldn’t be there in the morning and the son, who was probably 20 wasn’t capable of frying eggs in the morning.

After dinner we had a go on the funny swing they have at many yurt camps which has a long plank of wood roped up on a wooden frame so one person can stand on either end. As the sun went down the clouds turned a golden orange colour and darkness quickly crept in. It was a clear night so the stars were incredible and luckily we were warm enough under our blankets.

We never sleep very well in yurts but we crawled out of bed for breakfast – and what a feast awaited us. Ice cold fried eggs. There was a frost outside so the temperature of the eggs weren’t far off zero. They were served alongside a plate of buckwheat which was also prepared the night before but it was heated this morning. So we had steaming buckwheat that was so over salted it was almost inedible alongside 3 ice cold eggs. Luckily as always in Kyrgyzstan they also had bread and jams so I filled up on them instead. The son was going to take us back to our guesthouse in Naryn for a very small fee as he had to go to work in town. He drove like an absolute lunatic, as per the standard in Kyrgyzstan. His car was like a classic boy-racer car and way to low-riding to be at all practical on a dirt road, let alone at tackling the many speed bumps we had to awkwardly brake for and navigate sideways. At one point he actually got Craig’s attention and proudly pointed to the absurd speed of 140kmh on the dashboard to which craig push his hands in the down motion to say ‘that’s too fast you fucking hooligan, slow down’. Remarkably all the cars in Kyrgyzstan have had their seatbelts intentionally removed which just makes me feel even less safe.