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From Rami and Gal in the Silk Road Bicycle Trip:
Welcome to Kyrgyzstan
We crossed the Chinese border through a concrete building. Our luggage was X-rayed, our mechanic tools were inspected (due to the X-ray), and we said good-bye, Gal with tears in her eyes.
Sort of a normal border crossing.
We cycled 7 km of no-mans land, in which other travelers had to hitch trucks and wait to be checked (who would believe the bike would be quicker), we reached 8,000km on our odometer and we reached the Kyrgyz side.
It looked like an army base from the 50's. Small wood shacks, with asbestos roofs, junk everywhere, dirt roads – a mess.
We quickly passed customs, no computers only people writing down our details, sort of funny.
One guard asked Rami to open one of the trailers, but very quickly became board of it and sent us inside the country…
We didn't reach too far. Immediately after the border was a big truck stop, with what we will call 'a village' next to it. There were maybe 200 trucks, probably waiting to be loaded with Chinese goods, arriving on trucks from China. We were told that 1 Chinese truck, carrying 100 tons of goods through China is being unloaded to 7 Kyrgyz trucks on the way to Osh (probably 3 of them will break down on the way), due to the bad condition of both the roads and the trucks.
The village was like something taken from the movie "Mad Max"; old caravans spread around, as shops or houses for whole families, 3-4 concrete houses – the hotels, everything improvised, built of old metals, old cloth and mainly OLD!
There is no running water. Pluming and running water are sparse in Kyrgyzstan, the plumbers have probably left the country with the Russians in 1992, but, there isn't even a river over there! Eater is being brought by tractors from a river 11km away!
Sometimes, during the evening, there was electricity, we were told. This was more than new or different for us. Just a few kilometers away was China, modern China, with its infrastructure (well, they did have problems with Toilets…), and now this.
It was 17:00, and we were sort of too lazy to continue, knowing there is nothing much for many km, so we took 2 beds in a dorm and wandered about, investigating.
It was incredible! We have just crossed the border and everything has changed. Everybody was speaking Russian (also Kyrgyz, but with us they spoke Russian), all the food and the faces have changed. Just crossing the border we moved from a 'Chinese' place to an 'ex-Soviet' 3'rd world country. It was like in a movie from east Europe: the Russian trucks and the funny old Russian cars, the canned salted fish and the vodka – Russian, the drunks the music, the faces, the blond hair – all Russian!
Pictures and story courtesy of Rami and Gal in Our Bicycle Trip website
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