Kristin Fagerback drives from Almaty to Issyk-Kul Lake in Kyrgyzstan with a travel companion, navigating border paperwork and a rough two-and-a-half-hour dirt road. The payoff: a sunset over snow-capped peaks she calls "freaking phenomenal," followed by a night in a remote yurt on the lake's southern shore.
Chapters
I'm in the car coming from Almaty, Kazakhstan, and going towards the land border of Kyrgyzstan. I am actually going with a friend of a friend of mine. I was planning to go on my own and go from Almaty straight to Bishkek and then to Issyk-Kul Lake in Kyrgyzstan, but my friend of a friend found out I was going and was like, okay, let's just grab my car and do a road trip. So I was like, okay, why not? I prefer traveling alone, but like, I'll give this a go. Allowing someone to come with me, basically. Yeah, so we drove from Almaty towards China over the— I want to say it's the eastern border in Kyrgyzstan with Kazakhstan. And the border crossing was kind of crazy. It was no problem for me, but my friend had to get like some special insurance or registration from Kyrgyzstan for his car going over the border, and he carried gasoline with him, like a whole gasoline tank. So you didn't have to buy gas on the other side and they confiscated it. Anyways, yeah, good times. Um, the road between the land border and Kazakhstan at Issyk-Kul Lake, it was pretty okay in the beginning and paved, and then the closer you get to Issyk-Kul Lake, it's super like potholey and dirt road for about 2 and a half hours. But yeah, fun times. And the Sunset was freaking phenomenal, so totally worth it, um, trying to do the whole round trip around the lake for sure. That's a slice of heaven.
There's like 2 layers of mountains, so the first one is like very green and the second one has snow on it. So beautiful. Oh, what was the last part you said?
And sunset. Yes, and the sunset here we're getting. Yep. It's just beautiful. Like, this whole area is beautiful. Oh, I'll get a picture of you. I didn't get to get any horizontal footage of my yurt adventure on the lake because basically I rented a yurt right alongside this lake. I only got vertical footage, so I did post that on Instagram, but I might post it here too. Anyways, after staying at the yurt for the night, for a couple days with the included breakfast, I moved on to Bishkek from there. So basically I stayed at a super cute remote yurt on the southern part of Issyk-Kul Lake, which was so Sick and really cool. I have to definitely come back. Yurt culture in Central Asia is awesome, and if I had more time between like my work schedule and so on, I would have also just stayed at a yurt in Kazakhstan. There to the east of Almaty, there's some yurts you can stay at and do horse rides and so on. You can do that in Kazakhstan too. I was thinking to do that, but yeah, in the future. Definitely you want to come with a decent-sized budget and plan well so that you can really make the most of it and see a lot.
