The middle Kingham

Hello from China!!


We crossed the border 2 days ago through the Torugat pass; a 4000m pass that links Kyrgyzstan and China. It's amazing what a difference a day makes! The road from Kyrgyzstan was a rutted track that wound through the mountains and as you entered China the road slowly became paved then lane markings appeared followed by street lighting; all a bit of a culture shock.


We had a great time in Central Asia and moving onto China means finaly leaving the old USSR. its weird but other than our brief dip into Turkey every country we visited was once part of the homogenous whole and yet they were all so completely and utterly different.


We've done so much in the last few weeks its impossible to sum it all up but here are a few things:


To save cash we stayed in a cheap hotel in Bishkek. It had no shower so we visited the Russian baths - it was only inside once we'd been sent to the separate girls and boys bits that we discovered it was a naked free-for- all. Everyone kept staring at me, it took a while to realise that as the only Westerner there I was packing more body hair in my left armpit than most of the men put together which caused a lot of interest, I was also a bit of a novel colour. ..


We've eaten so much dairy in Kyrgistan, most of it within earshot of the cow/horse/camel/sheep/yak that produced it. The weirdest thing had to be cows milk fermented in sheeps lung till it becomes cheese. The lung is then sliced and eaten (we only discovered what it was afterwards) it was as revolting as it sounds, I escaped with a nibble but Roz was sitting next to a granny who encouraged her to keep going.



We went back to Uzbekistan to get our China Visa. It was really cool to see it again although we were held up slightly at the border while I filled in customs forms and every member of the border post queued up to have a mobile phone shot taken with Roz. I had also forgotten the odd fashion amounst Uzbek women of shaving off their eyebrows and drawing on a thick monobrow instead- it makes them all look a bit like bond villens.


Back in Kyrgyzstan we walked to a lake near the border and spent the night with some shephards. Their children were fascinated by our cameras and spent ages taking photos of each other till the batteries ran out. The parents were more interested in how Backpacks worked and wanted to try them on. They had a herd of Yaks and horses. Roz got to milk a Yak. I tried to milk a horse but it kept walking off as soon as I got the bucket under it much to the meriment of the locals (you milk a horse 5 times a day)



anyway all is cool here and the food is so much better- in Central Asia fatty meat is more expensive than lean meat and we had lots of meals in restaurantrs and peoples houses where the proprietor/ host would present us with a plate of fried fat and beam at us as we tried to stuff soem of it down for politenesses sake.



more email options here so should be able to put more photos etc up and get round to bringing the map up to date.