Genghis' Camp.
This didn't feel like Central Asia.
The road was smooth, the ride quiet, the old Mercedes van that did the honours as our marshrutka, or collective taxi, wasn't packed to the gunwales. Our driver, a faded Denver Broncos hat planted on his head, hadn't put on the stereo any hammering Russian hardbass music. In fact, but for a few squeaks and the sound of the wind, we could only hear chatting and laughing on board.
It didn't feel like the Central Asia I was used to. I sang my own earworms inside my head whilst the road took us through a sequence of small but lively villages, dotted along the Issyk-Kul coastline like pearls. Not even the odd statue of Lenin could dispel this feeling. You thought you had the region figured out, and then this.
Jailoo. In Kyrgyz, as well as in other Turkic languages, a jailoo is a summer pasture. A place where to take your herds in the good season, somewhere high up, where the grass is fat and green and water plentiful, whilst down below - in the flatland - the heat has dried the wells and the vegetation is golden-brown. Transhumance was a concept familiar to me: after all, how many times have I been woken up, in May and October, by the sound of cows parading to and from the mountains? But jailoo isn't just a place where to plop your yurt and caravan. Jailoo is also a place to party, for isolated families to come together: kok boru is played here, food is eaten and kumiss, fermented mare's milk, drank.
We were en route to the largest jailoo in Kyrgyzstan.
Kyrchyn - pronounced K'rrch'n - is full. Cars are parked on the near side of this valley created by the confluence of three gorges, on the right of a torrent. A metal bridge, of the kind that is usually plonked over a gully by a tank, connected our shore to what lied beyond. And what lied beyond was, for us, almost hard to believe.
The novelty of seeing a yurt, alone in a vast meadow or in somebody's back garden, hadn't quite worn off for me by the time we arrived at Kyrchyn Jailoo. To see dozens, hundreds of them, all together in a dusty plain, was truly something else.
Yet here they were. As far as the eye could see, on the left side of the valley, were outlandish ogive-shaped tents, not too dissimilar from gigantic missile heads poking out of the ground. Banners and flags flew in the wind: some big and some small, some bearing signs we could recognise - the Kazakh sun and eagle, or the yurt laths depicted at the centre of the Kyrgyz one - whilst others showed symbols whose meaning we could only guess. Strange palisades and watch towers had been erected at random intervals, and the pendulum movement of the giant swings (planks of wood large enough for two people) gave my overexcited mind the idea that this could be siege weapons testing time at Genghis' camp.
This place was real, not some construct engineered by an entertainment company, a Central Asian Disneyland peddling an idealised version of some imaginary world. This was first and foremost an encampment of herders, with added crowds of city folks and a few foreigners. The herders had brought in their yurts, and were there for a reason: that reason wasn't giving spectacle to us, it was having a good time. Of all the aspects of Kyrchyn, this was my favourite.
Lucid, lean horses roamed everywhere, with or without youngsters perched on their backs. Not stepping on their droppings, pulverised as they were by hundreds of hoofs and feet, soon became impossible, and even sooner we stopped caring. Food cooked everywhere, in cauldrons and barbecues and on fires, its smells - goat skewers, horse stews, vegetables - mixing with the smoke of wood fires or stoves running on dried cow dung. Gigantic cast iron cauldrons bubbled on top of fires dug into the ground, the cooker leaning on the margins of the pit and the fire burning down below. I'd always wondered how did nomads cooked in the steppe, without rocks to form a platform for their pots. Now I had an answer.
Smoke and dust waved up and down the valley with the wind. One moment they'd both be choking us, the next we'd be in crystal-clear air. In those latter instances we'd emerge, spluttering, to hear the unworldly sounds carried by the wind: the guttural beauty of throat singing, or the delicate melodies of string instruments that generations of refinement and travel along the Silk Road would've turned in our violins and cellos.
At sundown we'd leave the competition grounds and returned to what we'd called "the village". Those moments - long shadows, amber lights, the crowds thinning down as everyone headed down - were my favourites. At those times, the fleeting village of Kyrchyn Jailoo looked the most poetic. Old women in traditional garbs would play on stages and rehears in the background, tickling their version of the Jew's harp. Children, instead, would be engrossed in board games that looked as if they'd changed little since medieval times. And, around them, lone spectators sat on the short grass, taking it all in, witnesses of an ancient tradition that, there and then, looked very much alive.
