A family riding adventure through Central Asia showed my children the region I fell in love with 25 years ago
When it finished, I studied, travelled, worked and lived in the region, even setting up a magazine, Steppe, celebrating the arts and culture of the Stans, before the arrival of children pushed my life into another gear. Yet, like a dormant seed planted beneath the earth, this love of Central Asia waited for its moment to re-emerge. Alexandra, too, was captivated by this Kyrgyz jewel in the crown and, not long after we arrived home at the end of 1999, she started taking fellow travellers back to the mountains. Maybe then it was inevitable, our children being great friends, that we would choose to bring them here together as teenagers. Will my kids fall in love with the region as I had?
In Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s small, friendly capital, the teenagers – seven in total – run amok in the central bazaar, with its containers of vintage Soviet army equipment and rows of dried fruits, fresh herbs and stalls selling rip-off designer items. After a whirlwind introduction to Kyrgyz food – pumpkin manti, shashlik and plov – it’s time to head west, driving through the rolling plains of central Kyrgyzstan and into the mountains for nine days of riding and camping.
That first evening after we crossed the pass, our sprightly back-up team set up camp by a river so that the horses, tired after five or six hours of riding, can drink their fill. Sitting with Alexandra on a river bank aflutter with butterflies, we watch our children swimming as a band, constructing dams and devising rope systems so that they can be safe in the current without holding on to unstable branches. On other nights we take a dip in the still, cool waters of the lakes that dot the reserve, the boys trying their hand at fishing with rods and a hastily assembled hook and line while the girls do synchronised swimming in the reeds.
Blanketing the landscape are wild flowers, which fluctuate according to altitude and aspect, and bring the hum of bees. One night we camp by a meadow of faded hives and watch the beekeeper siphon the thick liquid honey into Coca-Cola bottles for us and offer a large piece of honeycomb for our mess tent. The next night we are deep in the heart of the wild walnut forests for which this area is renowned – an important source of income for the local community, including our guides, come harvest time. The light filters gently through the chlorophyll-green leaves onto our tents. Some of the trees are hundreds of years old, with broad, gnarled trunks twisting in different directions. Others are tall and whip thin, reaching upwards to the light.
By day we are in the hands of our guides, headed by Djuma. He is a man of many parts and knows the park intimately, having been a ranger here for more than 10 years. He impresses the children with tales of encounters with bears and wild cats, and can pick out the path from the countless animal tracks. The guides live in a village at the edge of the reserve, and we are riding their horses: well looked-after, adept at picking their way across mountains, sure-footed at altitude and raring to canter.
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