When the going gets tough Nick gets going
Trip Start
Oct 01, 2005
1
140
158
Trip End
Jul 21, 2007
Naryn,
Kyrgyzstan
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
It was the most depressing establishment ever, straight out of the Russian days and looked for all the world as if it had been abandoned when the Soviet union collapsed. In fact the whole town was the same. It was impossible to tell what a shop was selling from the outside; they don't go in for window dressing at all here. Just a nondescript concrete building with a grated window and a sign above the door in the puzzling Russian Cyrillic alphabet, which made no sense to us. We had left behind incomprehensible Chinese characters and swapped them for nonsense which looked enough like English that our brain tried to interpret it, but it quickly stalled on
Beard experiment final week
. The only thing for it was to go into every grey looking shop to see if we were interested in anything they had on offer. There are a lot of vodka shops and auto spares places in Naryn I can tell you. As we walked around the town it was difficult not to expect Borat to step out of a shop door.By sheer trial and error we managed to locate a place that was willing to exchange cooked food for money and were presented with a menu in Russian. We resorted to the usual default method; walk around the other tables and point. The diet here mainly consists of mutton, mutton fat, mutton fat soup and bread. At least the bread is not sugared.
We repaired to our apartment which had a vastly oversized plant in the corner of the living area that may have been a triffid. We 'showered' in the poorest excuse for a bathroom I have ever seen and went out on the town. Next door was a restaurant that was playing loud techno music, and at the unlikely hour of 6pm many people getting seriously down to the tunes. This place had too much vodka. We had a beer and chortled mercilessly at the dancing before going in search of another place to eat. We wandered around trying to decipher the poorer than normal Lonely Planet effort at a map, and ended up wandering into a government building, alerting one of the guards who discovered us picking randomly through the rooms. We asked for a cafe and gormlessly made the hand signs for eating with a knife and fork. In broken English he directed us around the block and we found ourselves right back at our original disco/eatery! So we gave up and ate there. What can you do? Actually there was a very helpful Kyrgyz student having drinks with his mates and he ordered some food for us so it was ok.
I regret to inform that the morning after, our long travelling companion Nick hit the ejector button. In spite of our plans to traverse the silk route together, he decided that he had had enough of the hard travel and required an injection of some serious beach leisure and good food. It was dissapointing that we had come so far together but this kind of travelling isn't for everyone so we agreed to meet up in Turkey a few weeks down the line.
