Bishkek to Hong Kong

Since I never did a proper summary of Bishkek, here it is:

The capital of Kyrgyzstan is basically like the rest of the country: very much former soviet, central asian, and all the drivers (particularly the minibus drivers) are trying to kill you. There are some nice bazaars with very cheap fruit and vegetables (30 cents for a kilo of tomatoes). Bishkek also has a lot of parks which was nice, and there was tons of western food as well since a lot of expats apparently live there. I can see why since it's a cheap and relatively modern city compared to the rest of central Asia.

The inscription says "We were fighting for communism"

Of course Bishkek also has the standard wide open squares, with more statues in them:

My flight out was at 4am on the 9th, so the day before I had a bike shop box up my bike, then call me a taxi to the airport where I managed to score one of two plugs in the whole place to pass the time on my laptop. I flew on S7, a Russian airline, that was actually quite pleasant. The seats were much better than the two flights I flew on Aeroflot a few years ago, and they didn't even charge me any extra for the bike though that was probably just a mistake on their part.

My flight connected in Novosibirsk, where since I didn't have a Russian visa they wouldn't let me through customs. I was ferried directly from the landing zone back into the terminal, where I proceeded to wait a solid 14 hours, again scoring a plug. The Novosibirsk airport is weird because since they only have a flight every few hours many of the shops open up shortly before the flight, then close down after. It was annoying that while I had my itinerary, I didn't actually have my ticket for the flight to Hong Kong, and since I couldn't leave the terminal I couldn't check in, and I had to repeatedly ask the security people before I finally had someone from the airline come, take my passport to the check-in desk, then come back with my ticket. Also about half the passengers on the plane were drunk. I was browsing through the duty free shop at one point and one of the attendants mentioned something about how I should buy some alcohol for the long flight.

I arrived in Hong Kong around 6am where things were much more organized, except the cheap bag I had bought in Bishkek to combine my 5 bags into 1 to save on luggage fees had come apart as I suspected it would so they had lost my luggage (at least I had the bike, camera, and laptop). Luckily the bag was at least in Hong Kong and I received it a day later. However, no bag meant no multitool which meant I had to take the train and a taxi to get to the place I was staying rather than put my bike together in the terminal like I had planned. Not wanting to go without the bike for what I had assumed might be a while (since the next flight from Novosibirsk wasn't for days) I bought a multitool and put the bike together, only to find the genius in Bishkek had forgotten the topcap to the headset. Of the four times in my life I have had a bike boxed up, twice there has been a missing part so I guess I should've learned by now to do it myself, even though he only charged me $4 to do it.

I made up an itinerary and applied for and received a Chinese visa (without needing an invitation letter). After that I figured I should probably apply for a Vietnamese visa as well rather than be forced to extend my visa in Kunming, where if I wasn't granted the extension I wouldn't have time to apply for the Vietnamese visa and I would essentially be forced to fly out of the country before being deported. This has left me with a lot of time to explore Hong Kong.

Hong Kong: A city that takes itself waaaaaaay too seriously.
Warning signs everywhere.

Signs denoting fines everywhere. $1500-5000 fine for smoking in most places. $1500 fine for feeding the pigeons. $1500 fine for eating on the metro.
A sign in a public park:

"No dogs, no skateboarding, no drying clothes, please keep clean, no cycling, no  loud noises [and no FUN!]"
I've been yelled at plenty of times now for riding my bike in a park, or on a waterfront promenade.
If you look closely in this picture you can see the guy walking towards me about to yell at me for riding here, because clearly a bike is a menace to society.

Batumi, Baku, and now Hong Kong. Places where no fun is to be had in parks. Jogging in designated areas only. Biking in designated areas only. Oh well, I make up for it by jaywalking which most people here don't do. It's not as crazy as Munich where I was the only one jaywalking, but still I'd say about 90% of the people here will obey the law and wait for the little green man before bravely crossing the street.

Anyway, some pictures from Hong Kong:
High rises in the middle of the jungle/beach:

Gigantic Buddha:

Both the old and the new near Aberdeen:

Some old and impressive temples:

There are over 12000 Buddhas in this one, keeping the ever burning incense company:

Interesting skyline:

Monkeys:

Avenue of the Stars:

The biggest thing I've noticed is that the drivers are mostly polite, and you can actually go more than five seconds without hearing a car horn. In fact it's quite rare to hear someone honk. After more than five months of constant honking, this is a welcome change. I've been told the drivers in the mainland are as awful as ever though, so I'm preparing myself for a return to the onslaught in a few days. My other impression with Hong Kong is that there are just too many people. I've decided I definitely don't like big cities. Also, It's quite expensive here compared to other places I've been. It's hard to find a meal for less than $50HK. The food that I have had tastes almost exactly like Chinese food in the US, with one major difference: bones. Stir fry, sweat and sour, curry chicken. All of it has had the bones still in it, which really ruins the eating experience.

While I've been here, I've had some work done on the bike. I got a new bottom bracket, new handlebar tape, and another rear tire. My handlebars no longer look like this:

After receiving my Vietnamese visa, I took the ferry to Macau, and I will shortly cross into mainland China, where I will probably get lost beyond all hope.

Bishkek to Issyk-kul, song-kul, and back to Bishkek

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:

Osh to Bishkek

Coming out of the Pamirs, Osh was a welcome change. It was back to great, cheap food, with a healthy bazaar and being able to breath again because of the lower altitude. Osh has a bunch of statues and nice parks, such as this huge Lenin statue:

There is also a nice hill you can climb to get a view of the city:

Leaving Osh I decided to head straight to Bishkek, though that included a bit of a detour to avoid crossing into Uzbekistan. I ended up camping every day on the way there as I hadn't planned to do much except see the country. It was fairly standard central Asian scenery for the first bit, though many of the towns have statues of warriors like this:

I was pretty much following a river or lake the whole time, riding mostly in valleys. I met up with two Swiss cyclists headed the same direction and rode with them for a bit. We found some nice camping spots right beside the lakes:

The Toktogul reservoir was a bit disappointing because it was very hazy for the whole day it took to ride around. However you could still see the way the whole country is eroding.

After Toktogul it got a bit more interesting as the population started to thin out and towns were replaced by yurts and I climbed back up from 1000m to 3000m. All the yurts sit at the side of the road with little signs next to them, mostly advertising meat dishes and what is apparently fermented horse milk. I haven't been brave enough to try it yet as I've heard it's awful.

The day after making it to a sort of high grass plateau, I had to climb another pass that I had been warned about. This one I could see directly in front of me, with what looked like switchbacks all the way through the snow line.

Luckily there was a tunnel through the top of the pass that wasn't marked on my map:

After that it was a steady downhill until Bishkek. As I arrived on a Sunday, I checked into a hostel and on Monday I went to the visa service person that everyone uses and asked about getting a Chinese visa. I was told that due to the new rules it was only possible if I was a Kyrgyz citizen or had a one year Kyrgyz visa. This is what I was expecting as I had been told in Khorog by all the cyclists there that it was no longer possible to get a Chinese visa anywhere in central Asia. I went to visit the Chinese embassy as well but they were closed. I decided to stick around until they opened again but when I went back Wednesday morning there was a huge crowd of people all waiting outside the embassy door with an angry guard slowly letting people in. After waiting for most of the time that they were open I was told the same thing as at the visa service office. So I have now purchased a plane ticket to Hong Kong where hopefully I can apply for a visa
there and at least see the southern part of China. If not I should be able to fly to Bangkok and do a loop through south east Asia. In the meantime I will see more of Kyrgyzstan by heading towards the lakes I had planned to see.

Khorog to Osh

The first thing we noticed about being east of Khorog was that most of the annoying children were finally gone. Also less cars meant less honking. Over the course of three days we climbed from about 2100m to 3500m, taking it slowly because after the first pass there wasn't any easy way to turn back in the event of altitude sickness.

At the top of the first pass:

We made a detour to Bulunkul to look at a lake, and we stayed at a homestay there that had no electricity. On the road we also met two of the cyclists who had left Khorog to head through the Wakhan valley.

A few more days of nothing too eventful towards murgab. We were getting tired of the generally awful yogurt, bread, and tea meals that everyone was serving us, as well as sometimes uninspired rice or pasta with a single piece of meat.

We met up with a bunch of other cyclists in Murgab and had dinner and proper showers and a bit of rest. 

Lenin statue:

Leaving Murgab we detoured towards some lakes for a peaceful lunch before camping at the foot of the highest pass on this trip.

The top of Ak Baital pass, at 4655m. Every peak with snow on it is generally above 5000m:

A bit further down:

We again met up with some of the same cyclists in a Karakul homestay to rest a bit. The day we were going to leave I was a bit sick, so I waited an extra day before heading over the last two passes to leave Tajikistan. 

We had two days of terrible headwind bringing some very cold weather and lots of dust and even snow as we made our way to Sary Tash.

We then spent the next two days with two high passes and nothing but headwind, but we dropped from 3200m to about 1200 by following the Gulcha river valley into Osh. On the way up, some of the trucks were moving slow enough we were able to hold on for a free ride up a few hundred meters.

Osh had great cheap food and was nice to rest in for a few days. There was even a pizza place.