After dinner when we got to the hotel that evening. I told Okcana "ok we should call some of these places to go ski to make sure its open and we can go." She went to get the list and realized she had thrown it away by accident at the restaurant!!! We asked the hotel lady if she knew of a place but no. Then we asked if there was internet, no.
I called a friend in Moscow and he got online and found a few places and sent us the phone numbers. So we found a place that was good now to figure out how to get there.
In the morning we asked the desk lady to call a taxi for us. She said taxis wont go 20km out of town. She said to take a taxi to the edge of town and they will drop of us and there is always other cars that we can negotiate a price and they will take us. Fine but how do we get back? "ohh someone will give you a ride back" was the answer.
Well we got to the edge of town and negotiated with a man and his car. His last passengers were sheep, you could still smell them, but we made it to the mountain no problem!
It was nothing special all the buildings were old shipping containers. It had a lift and all day snowboard rental and access to the mountain was $20.00
I had no urge to snow board so I just sat down and read a book but Okcana was pretty excited!
After about 6 hours she was ready to go. So she started asking around for a ride but nobody would take us. So we decided it was about 5km, 3 miles, back to the main road and we could flag someone down there so we started walking.
While walking one car stopped and it was a nice old man and his son. they said they would give us a ride to Bishkek.
We all started talking and we saw these people on horses.
We stopped and they explained they were playing Kokpar.
Its kind of like polo with 2 teams on horse trying to get a ball across a goal line for points. The catch is the ball is a dead goat.
We watched for a while and talked and our new friends asked if we had been to this traditional village thats set up kind of like a tourist area. When we said no he decided we needed to
So we stopped to check it out and got a private tour, nobody else was there
Our tour guide
Where they would sleep with coals smoldering under them
Inside of a huge Urt
Our new friend on the right
After that we went back to Bishkek and he stopped at a restaurant that served traditional food. We all ate and enjoyed the company. We tried to pay for the food and he refused! We offered to pay for the taxi ride, NO! He said we were his guests and this is how it works.
We were very humbled, thankful and a bit embarrassed.
It was the end of a great day!
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