Kyrgyzstan
As if taking a cue from its geography, squeezed between the -stans, the geology of Kyrgyzstan feels compressed. White-capped peaks tower directly over craggy ochre and green hills, which slope into farmland dotted with roving horses, cows, goats, and sheep. In a few hours of driving you can come down from a lush mountain valley through deep red canyons to arrive at the shore of the second-largest alpine lake in the world. It feels like packing a roadtrip from Alaska to Utah into the time it’d take to drive from SF to Sacramento. It’s hard to take in.
Capturing the feeling of a place as a photographer is always difficult, but Kyrgyzstan makes it harder than usual. Its landscapes rhyme with the best of America, but the things that set it apart - the 360-degree emptiness, the biomes in superposition, the herds of animals that flow like rivers around you and then disappear, bleating, around the corner - are hard to shoot. There’s a pervasive, subtle displacement that dissolves if you squint - even the Cyrillic alphabet looks just-about-English from a distance.
Over ten days, we roadtripped a loose circle around the vast blue expanse of Issyk-Kul lake. Beginning from Bishkek, we passed through the green, lolloped hills of Chon Kemin, dropped through gravel passes to the lake’s north shore, and then continued east. We backpacked near Karakol, ate lunch with police officers in Barskoon, climbed the knobs of Skazka Canyon, and went horse trekking to Song Kul.
Though our algorithms suggested that every travel influencer on Instagram had set up permanent residence in the country, we found Kyrgyzstan mostly devoid of tourists. In fact, it seemed devoid of much of a human footprint at all. Climb into the pastures above Altyn-Arashan and most travel is done by horse or foot or, painstakingly slowly, on gutted roads with army surplus trucks sporting doubled-up four-foot wheels. Handfuls of yurts speckle the valley floor in clusters, connected by thin grey snakes of dirt road and the blue-white tumble of rivers. Between them and around them? Nothing but vast, open meadows that curled up into charismatic peaks.
We were intoxicated with freedom. Whimsy-maxxing, we called it. We wandered, jumping between hillocks spotted with yellow wildflowers; we bathed to our knees in silty glacial streams; we crept beneath groves of Tien Shan spruces searching for the nest of an eagle we’d just seen circling; we clambered up canyon towers too steep to be safe; we cartwheeled in front of the judgmental glare of a lone horse.
On a number of mornings, I set out on walks to watch the sun rise. The summer pastures are wide and treeless, deceptively steep but easy to navigate; I’d climb until I found a good rock to perch on and wait.
Sunrise begins with a shifting of colors, rather than a growing of light. The pre-dawn alpenglow hits the far mountains: blueish grey snowcaps shock into pink and white. The clouds melt yellow onto the opposing valley walls. The fog burns away. Horses neigh in the dark, and as the light swells the cows and goats join in; they dot the hills around me as if dropped from the sky while I wasn’t paying attention.
For the first time in my life I hear the squawking of geese and watch a V of them from above flapping lazily along a river now glinting silver. Herders call to each other across the valley, identifying their horses who have roamed the fields freely to graze overnight. A new haze stretches as the sun finally arrives and washes the land in white. With it, the breeze lifts as if given permission to start the day; the birdsong rises.
My experience as a landscape photographer is that even in the most pristine places, we are always contemplating civilization: either actively framing people or buildings or highways out of shots to capture a predetermined notion of wilderness, or including them, to make statements about our built environment. In neither case can we ignore the knowledge of our presence.
Recently, though, reading an essay by Tim Ingold, I came across an interesting way through:
First, human life is a process that involves the passage of time. Secondly, this life-process is also the process of formation of the landscapes in which people have lived. Time and landscape, then, are to my mind the essential points of topical contact between archaeology and anthropology. I believe that such a focus might enable us to move beyond the sterile opposition between the naturalistic view of the landscape as a neutral, external backdrop to human activities, and the culturalistic view that every landscape is a particular cognitive or symbolic ordering of space. I argue that we should adopt, in place of both these views, what I have called a ‘dwelling perspective’, according to which the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of – and testimony to – the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves.Tim Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape”
Kyrgyzstan is one of those rare, disappearing places where adopting this perspective comes naturally. On our final day in Bishkek, we visited the Kyrgyz national history museum, where we learned about the horse lords who’d ruled these lands over millennia. I knew of the Khans and the Mongols, of course, but the museum described in detail all the factions who rose and fell, fighting to control these rolling plains and mountain lakes. Through the years the Silk Road supplied trade and coins, Bibles and Qurans, Mughal daggers and Chinese artifacts; we saw these in this museum as echoes of those epic civilizations.
This long, syncretic history ties neatly to the Kyrgyzstan of today. In Bishkek and Karakol, young, well-dressed Muslim men and women spoke a mix of Kyrgyz and Russian amidst brutalist architecture. Newer Chinese cars and bikes abounded in the cities but thinned out toward the mountains, replaced by rugged Soviet-era jeeps and vans (and less rugged old Ladas). The museum’s final exhibit proudly displayed Kyrgyzstan’s anchoring role in the first World Nomad Games and its shared heritage with its Central Asian siblings. The country is changing, of course, but the people of this patch of paradise have always blended the cultures of their neighboring empires; that alone is nothing new.
Older traditions survive too. Towards the end of our trip, we embarked on a three-day tour of the mountains west of Kyzart, riding with a man whose family has been raising horses for generations. We stayed at his yurt camp on this summer’s pasture and watched locals build a collection of A-frame cabins nearby while he checked in on his herds of livestock. One afternoon, I asked him how he’d settled on this particular field this year. He replied: “It’s how we’ve always done it: we let the yak choose.”
