We had come to Kyrgyzstan as part of a climbing expedition hoping to explore an isolated valley in a remote section of the Tian Shan Mountains. However, things did not quite work out how we planned when one member of our five-man team was suddenly taken ill up in the hills and had to be transferred back to the capital Bishkek.
I accompanied him, and so upon arrival we began a two-week alternating cocktail of exploration, waiting, boredom, excitement and Kafkaesque expeditions around one of the most interesting cities in the former Soviet Union. This is my personal, slightly quixotic account of our bumbling and - on at least one occasion - dangerously stupid adventures in the beating urban heartland of Central Asia.
The trouble starts before we’re even out of the taxi. Only a day off the plane and five of us are squashed inside a dilapidated old car, parked on some anonymous and unlit backstreet sandwiched between Bishkek’s worn hi-rise apartment blocks. We’re trying to locate our newly rented flat for the night but the driver’s once smiling features have grown increasingly angry over the argument erupting across the front seat concerning the fare. Not satisfied with my friend Mat’s 150som (£2) we had paid him for the journey - already twice the standard price - he makes a frustrated gesture for more.
It’s late, we’re fed up, tired and still suffering the ravages of jetlag and the five of us - two Brits and three Americans – have simply had enough. Emerging from the taxi into the blackness of a Kyrgyz night, we hand him one last note, still ignoring his Russian rantings and make to leave regardless. It would seem this was not the wisest choice of action; in the next instant an ear-splitting squeal of an abused engine makes my head pivot just in time to catch sight of Matt and Mike jumping down an embankment as the incensed cabby makes to ram his car across the very spot where we all just stood moments previously.
Now - barely 24 hours into our stay - all us are running in the dark; past sinister alleyways, past shadowy figures suddenly looming with threat in our paranoid minds, and through yet more streets with indecipherable Cyrillic names. Abruptly, almost unexplainably, we find the welcoming entrance our own old Soviet apartment block. Leaping up the flights of stairs two at time we gratefully reach our flat, marvelling all the while at what perfect idiots we are to nearly getting flattened before we’d even set foot near a mountain and any real danger.