Dust in my ears.
Dust in my nose.
Dust in my eyes.
We drink water out of a dust covered water bottle.
Dust on our chain.
Dust on our clothes.
A car flashes by, leaving us in a thick cloud of dust. Luckily for us, there are only a handful of cars here and we are able to enjoy this dusty road all by ourselves. Hurree! 😉 Well, did I say road? I meant trail. It’s nothing more than a bunch of rocks kept together with.. yes, dust! I have to sneeze! And I sound funny when I speak, dusty funny. I wipe the dust from my sunglasses, but it’s useless. Within seconds I see the world through dusty sunglasses again. Apart from the dust, it’s pretty hot as well with 35 degrees Celsius and we crawl to another nameless pass at 3469 meter, with an inclination of at least 10%. I take another deep breath.. dust in my longs! A car passes by, filled with tourists. A camera flashes and two thumbs up.. have fun with our dusty faces! I imagine his family laughing out loud seeing two crazy cyclists with dusty faces. The top is near! God, we love this!
Yes, we have reached the pass! Let’s go down! We jump all over the place and reach a spead of no less than 12 km per hour. Cramp in my hands because of using the brakes so much. My muscles in my legs are tight and we try to manouvre our bicycles down. Every time we hit a larger rock, we are launched into the air! “Klabam!” Flat on my face, eating dust now. Not even a scratch with this speed, so I climb back up and continue the downhill.
People are so friendly here, they have nothing but they give us something every time. Last night we asked a family if we could camp on their land. No problem! She even invites us inside, but we’re ok to sleep in our own mini-yurt, we don’t want to bother them too much. The tent is just ready when grandma and grandchild pay us a visit. She’s carrying a lttle pot in her hand and invites us to join her. She opens the lid and a goat meet is lying there in a bad of grease. Come sit! She smiles, one gold tooth left in her mouth. We both take a peace of meat and show her we like it! She smiles again! When we’re finished they leave… what a hospitality! And this didn’t happen once, we often get food; bread of milk.
Tonight we sleep in a yurt near Song Kul lake. It’s no more than 1.2 degrees Celsius by the time we wake up. The wind has died down, but the sun is still there. We follow the contours of the lake and after a tiny pass there are 30 hairpins that lead us down to Ak Talaa. Here long winding roads lead us to Kazarman, Jalal Abad and Osh. We find a room in hotel Taj Mahal, with a lousy shower and a noisy night. A terrible shashlick makes us stay a couple of days and we decide to move to Tes Guesthouse, expensive, but a good starting point for the Pamir Highway that lies ahead of us.
Our yurt for the night
