Ironic travel, Central Asia, and earning a place on the map.

The cultural clout of the famous ‘International Brigade’ during the Spanish civil war won, and continues to win, a romantic niche in the sentiments of young artists and activists. In 1961 the (then) young Canadian author, Leonard Cohen, saw in the anti-imperialist fight of the nascent post-revolutionary Cuba a chance to fulfil his internationalist duties as an artist. With little haste, he grew out a beard, bought some khakis, and boarded the next boat to Havana. But rather than valiantly battling the boats of United Fruit at the Bay of Pigs, Cohen quickly found himself an unwanted accessory to the streets of Havana — eventually penning the mournful poem The Only Tourist in Havana. Finally, an embarrassing diplomatic telephone call from his mother warranted his return to Quebec.

It was an odd link, but mingling with the characters in the ex-pat hangouts of Bishkek, Cohen’s words weighed somewhat heavy in my mind as I slowly came to the realisation that, in the middle of March, we may well be the only people actually holidaying in a city whose architecture Lonely Planet charmingly described as ‘forgettable’. Among the myriad people we met, it seemed that we were the only tourists in Bishkek.

But this by no means brought the feelings of lonely melancholy burdening Cohen. We were in a part of the map of which an awareness is quite literally absent from the minds of most of our compatriots. This provided an enormous sense of freedom and discovery. Kyrgyzstan, as with most corners of Central Asia, remains unjustly unknown in Europe. Hence here we turn to the meta-narrative of the article; the purpose of the forum, to build a time-neglected bridge between these two worlds. This certainly isn’t an argument for cultural globalisation, manifest in a desire for a Hilton, Starbucks, and McDonald’s on every street corner from Astana to Osh — neither is it an attempt to weave further cobwebs of stereotypical narratives surrounding self-acclaimed ‘deep travel’ in the ’stans’. Rather, this is an ode to unfortunate unknown — what you make of it is up to you.

First, we have to ask ourselves why, along with her ’sister stans’, does Kyrgyzstan remain unknown? Why is it that, in moments of silence, the radical astonishment one has at the thought of actually being there (let’s go ahead and call these moments Kyrgyzstential crises) creeps up and leaves you nervously giggling?

We can turn first to politics and the hangover of the Cold War. Most of the Central Asian republics only gained independence from the USSR in the early 1990s — thousands of years of history had been subsumed in a couple of centuries of Russian rule: not only had the alphabet become Cyrillic and the city design Soviet, but the area had been effectively off limits to those west of the Berlin wall. Consequently, the countries of Central Asia have only had a handful of years to imprint themselves on the international consciousness, and some have had little agency in fashioning that imprint (take the free ticket the ‘orient unknown’ element has granted shows from The Ambassadors through to Borat, or the go-to stories about the amusing lives of certain dictators).

Politics goes hand-in-hand with geography. Whilst tourists are often happy to take the long flights out to tourist hotspots of the Thailand-Vietnam mould, the brute fact that countries like Kyrgyzstan are far away from highly-populated areas makes the trip out either an ordeal of connecting flights or one hell of a drive.

It’s, therefore, an esoteric rag-tag bunch that make it out. There are the lost business people, sent out by head offices to check on regional affairs, floating in flannel suits to the only establishments that sell a suitably safe Westernised cappuccino (thus negating the burgeoning local artisanal coffee scene) and wait for the return flight. There are of course the locals — amongst them a cosmopolitan youth with impeccable English and a penchant for the question, “How come you guys are in Kyrgyzstan? It’s not even the summer”.

In addition to the locals, there are the culturally-local, say, Russians taking the trip to their summer house by Lake Song Kul, or undertaking a section of their studies. Then there are those dragged there by the winds of fate — to whom a job opportunity, a desire to escape, or even brute chance, has thrown an atypical parcel of land in what to most people is ’nowhere’. Marion, a young French woman, was a neat microcosm of this last category. After growing tired of teaching French in the UK, she cut up each country in the world, placed the names into a hat and pulled out Kyrgyzstan. True to form, she took up a post teaching English, and set out to pass two years in Bishkek.

Unavoidable (although notably absent in the final breaths of winter) are the infamous ‘adventurers’ — with Tibetan garms, fledgeling dreadlocks, and dreams of following the craggy mountains of the ‘Silk Road’ — they neatly pillar blogs with stories of adventures in the nomadic steppe of post-Sovietistan. It would be unfair to be so blindly acerbic to this latter band, they can be as sagacious as they are sanctimonious by way of travel. Finally, there is the small collection of travellers there on a similar premise to ours — an ironic journey into the unknown — a small attempt to make a facetious answer the question mark nestled south of Russia and west of China, if only because it is a question.

This is why we should be interested in taking the trip to Kyrgyzstan. I can’t help but indulge in subjective experience — as a comprehensive answer would require far more room for starry-eyed diatribes. Put simply, there are the possibilities for peregrinations in the present, and potential paths for forging a fascinating future. Chihoon, a Korean man who has spent his last six years in Bishkek, is perhaps the best embodiment of this mantra. He saw in Kyrgyzstan the opportunity to create a community hub based around good food (Korean chicken, and recently, a café), music, art and dance. In doing so, he has sought to enact a cultural movement from the ground-up, so as to prevent Kyrgyz city culture falling into the clutches of corporate hegemony — what he calls the Almaty-isation of Kyrgyzstan. The proceeds of his restaurant support local artists, entrepreneurs and performances. However, the open mic nights of a nascent international scene within Bishkek represents only a small portion of what Kyrgyzstan offers the traveller. As a beautiful country with rugged mountainous terrain, wildflowers in the high grassy jaloos, fascinating cultural quirks, and glassy Alpine lakes; Kyrgyzstan could cater to the taste of any tourist; especially in the reals of adventure travel.

Yet, to open up to the world, a number of steps will need to be taken — and a number of murky risks lay loathsome in the foreseeable future. Surprisingly, blowing away typical stereotypes need not be one of them; tourism may well thrive off the mysterious muddling of facts and fictions — and keeping the romance of the mountainous steppe alive, as in the novels of Chinghiz Aitmatov, may well pay dividends in bringing in wondering wanderlust travelers. A real threat will for the domestic ownership of ‘opening up’. If opening the doors to the world is to ostensibly benefit the people of Kyrgyzstan, then movements to accommodate the new trade — from horseback travel to alpine boating — should come from the people themselves, and not international conglomerates and foreign investors.

It’s cliché to expound the ‘hidden gems’ within central Asia — but as a sentiment it is also entirely just. One hopes that one day the question will shift from “how come you guys are in Kyrgyzstan?” to “so, when will you next be in Bishkek?”.