Our second Kyrgyz horse riding trip was to Kol Ukok, an alpine lake in the mountains surrounding Kochkor. This was a more enjoyable ride, going past wheat fields, old soviet irrigation canals and bush before heading into the mountains. I won’t bother to describe the scenery here, just check out the photos here.
The most unexpected thing happened over dinner at our host yurt (an excellent Kygyz style borsch – cabbage soup with lamb pieces). Let me describe our setting… we were having dinner in a traditional nomadic hut in a remote mountainous region of a developing country. There was no electricity, running water nor flush toilet. The host family had just slaughtered and disemboweled a lamb outside the door for food for the next few weeks. Essentially, we were in a super rural area. All of a sudden, we heard a series of 16 electronic beeps. It took me a couple of seconds to recognize the sound. It was the incoming SMS tone from a Nokia cell phone belonging to the host family! Don’t ask me how they charge that phone.
Talk about the how technology is changing the developing world. Almost everyone in Kygyzstan has a cell phone. There are booths selling prepaid SIM cards at every street corner and even the old grandma who ran our guesthouse in Kochkor had a cellphone in a nice pouch slung around her neck. Granted, wireless communications is the way to go for areas where its expensive to cable up, but its almost surreal to see the proliferation of wireless technology, deemed a luxury in most developed nations, in a place such as this.
My cell phone’s larger counterpart outside a store in Tashkent
