Day 5: Karakol, Kyrgyzstan - The taxi and the seven mountains

One tourist highlight that Karakol has to offer is the nearby ski resort. Although it is rather small with a total of 20 km of slopes, the surrounding mountain landscape is all the more impressive.

However, since neither of us is a skiing pro, haven't skied in a long time, and don't want to end up in a Kyrgyz hospital with broken legs, we decided to go for another scenic highlight: Jeti Oguz.

This is a region on Lake Issyk-Kul and gets its name (jeti = seven, oguz = bulls) from a part of the mountains that has been divided into seven individual mountains by the weather and supposedly resembles bulls - or so they say...

So we set off to the bazaar in Karakol, from where taxis went to these special seven mountains.

We quickly found a taxi driver who surprisingly had a relatively new car in which we could even fasten our seat belts! (It's the little things in life after all...)

He sped along the roads at 80 km/h, overtook some old cars and only slowed down for speed bumps. But we felt very safe, and when we arrived in the small village near the mountains, we tried to convey to him if he could pick us up again after a few hours. Because there was no one to be seen far and wide, only a few houses and stray horses. After a bit of back and forth in German, English, Russian, Spanish, and sign language, we quickly found another way to communicate with him: his dirty rear window of the car.

And behold, after two drawings, he understood that he would pick us up 4 hours later and gave us his phone number. When we wanted to pay and he couldn't provide change, he explained to us that he would just keep everything and that the return trip was also paid for right away.

Hoping to return to our hostel in Karakol from this beautiful spot on earth later on, we walked along a path that led to a hill. From there, we had a beautiful view of the seven Bull Mountains and the surrounding mountains.

When it eventually started to get a little cold, we still had an hour until the taxi driver would pick us up. And since there was no way to sit somewhere warm, we walked along the only road that led out of the village, towards our hopefully returning taxi driver.

And although almost all of the 8 old cars that passed us stopped and offered us a ride, we politely declined, kept walking, and trusted our taxi driver and his comfortable, heated, and almost new car.

But then, a few minutes before the agreed pick-up time, a silver, much too fast family car came towards us and almost drifted during the turn to bring us back to Karakol.

And that's exactly what we've noticed so often in Kyrgyzstan: the people are incredibly helpful, reliable, and friendly. They are happy that we want to get to know their country and try to communicate with us, even though we don't speak Russian and they don't speak German. And if they have been to Germany before, they proudly talk about it. Whether it was for work in Frankfurt or as a soldier in Potsdam, Magdeburg, and Dresden.