After a few days in Bishkek failing to get a Chinese visa, I headed east again towards Issyk-Kul, which is the largest lake in Kyrgyzstan and apparently a real resort spot for the locals. On the way I had no less than three people tell me it would be cold (it's at about 1600m). Of course I knew that and wasn't planning on swimming. I followed the north side of the lake at first, which is where all the resorts are. They also have enough money to make the place look nice.
Most of the time I could see across the lake to the snow covered mountains on the other side
I spent most nights camping and spent a night in Karakol in a homestay before heading back around the south side of the lake, first stopping to go a bit up a canyon by jeti oguz. This part of Kyrgyzstan seemed to be a lot like New England with leaves changing color and a pleasant fall feeling including lots of birds chirping. Also the south side of the lake seemed to have a bunch of abandoned resorts and nice empty beaches. There was less farmland and more desert and canyons making it look like the west part of the US.
After making my way around the lake I started heading up into the mountains towards Song-Kul which was at 3000m. I spent most of a day climbing up a dirt road to make it there.
Cooking lunch with a view:
When I made it to Song-Kul, aside from a handful of yurts I was the only one there. It dropped to below -10C at night and I woke up with most of my water frozen. The lake itself wasn't too interesting as it was about 5k from the road in places and there was nothing but dead grass surrounding it for miles. I guess I came late enough in the season that most of the locals had already left.
Leaving Song-Kul was one of the nicest days of riding in a while because after climbing a few hundred meters I descended about 1600. I also didn't see another car until about 5pm when I returned to the main road, so it was blissfully silent (of course even in a day when you only see about 10 cars total you still get honked at)..
The day after was a slow climb back up towards the pass I had done a few weeks earlier. I somehow managed to find a perfect camping spot that looked to be an old river bed so there was absolutely tons of dead wood and grass around. I had also picked up about 3kg of coal that was dropped on the road by one of the many trucks passing through, so I had an amazing fire that lasted most of the night.
After that it was the same road I had already done to return to Bishkek and wait for my plane flight.
One interseting thing that I saw a lot around Issyk-Kul was all the towns that had old Soviet monuments. Apparently they either don't have the money or just don't care to remove them, so I saw Lenin all over the place:
Also, lots of Afgan war and WWII memorials, mostly in the form of tanks:
This one looks almost exactly like the huge statue in Volgograd:
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