02
Road to Naryn
3 days
We leave early in the morning to start what we hope will be only a 2-day journey to Naryn. And to no ones surprise our hope was in vain and the reddit forums turn out to be right. Work at the Kok-Art tunnel is not finished yet so once we arrive in Jalalabad, we hear that our plan to reach Naryn the next day will not work out. We will first have to go all the way to Bishkek the next morning.
Friendly taxi drivers suggest us some hotels nearby. We find a free room at the "Good Night" hotel online. Once we see the beautiful garden, we are happy our plans had to change. We spend the afternoon in the hammocks under the cherry trees.
At 7.30 our marshrutka leaves for Bishkek. It is just us, a Japanese tourist and a group of babushkas. One golden teethed lady hands us a sheet of dried apple leather to try. By now we are used to sharing the road with all types of livestock on their way to the summer pastures. The green hills are colored yellow, orange and purple with the first flowers. We stop for lunch at a roadside trout restaurant with tapchans.
When we reach the Too Ashuu tunnel, the driver asks everyone to close the windows. The tunnel has already been mythified in our minds by our neighbour. He claims that he almost died while cycling through this tunnel. For once, it looks like he did not exaggerate. Once we are inside we can hardly see the car in front of us because of the toxic fumes.
The next day we take the marshrutka to Naryn from the same bus station north east of the city.