9/17: Karakol: Przhevalsky's Adventures, Beach Time with Cows & the Dungan Mosque!

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Downtown Karakol:

As soon as we walked the few blocks into town, we headed straight for the bread stands in the food market at Jakshilik Bazaar to get a round bread called tandyr nan that cost just twenty cents apiece and was great to munch on if either of us got hungry. We got lucky this time as it was piping hot and tasted just like candy, it was so good.

Opposite the market was the marshrutka stand which worked out perfectly as a shared minibus left very soon going toward the Przhevalsky Memorial, located about ten kilometers north of town. The twenty minute ride only cost us seventy cents for both of us so we couldn't beat the cost and the experience of riding with locals.

The memorial park and museum was devoted to the famous Russian explorer, Nikolai Przhevalsky who gave Karakol its earlier name and who was a contemporary of Livingstone but who explored Central Asia beginning in 1870. Przhevalsky is less known in the West where people are more aware about Marco Polo and his Asian expeditions. 

The painting of Przhevalsky in the museum's entrance way showed him standing on the bank of a river in 1837. He must have been a commanding presence as he was just under 6'5" tall! After studying at the military academy in St. Petersburg and writing scientific articles on botany and zoology at the same time, Przhevalsky became a geography teacher in Warsaw.

When he was bored with teaching, he traveled to the eastern part of the Russia Empire when he was just 28. He drew maps and studied the cultures and lives of people. That trip opened the door to four later trips to Central Asia as he had a fascination with this part of the world and with exploration. The museum had a marvelous 3D map of this region that showed each of Przhevalsky's four journeys.

While at the museum, we were incredibly fortunate having the exclusive attention of a guide, Tamara, who was endlessly patient as she described in great detail and with boundless enthusiasm each of the expeditions Przhevalsky undertook in Central Asia. She told us that Przhevalsky and his teams traveled 33,000 kilometers altogether in their four journeys that began in 1870 and ended with his death in 1888!

In 1845, Alexander II's brother, Constantine, established the Russian Geographic Society.

Tamara pointed out depictions of explorers and scientists who traveled to Central Asia before Przhevalsky, including Marco Polo, at the top below.

Przhevalsky, in his first expedition from 1870-73, journeyed 11,500 kilometers as far east as Vladivostok in Russia, the Japan Sea and China. He and his team researched the people, their lives and culture in what is now North Korea. He continued on through Mongolia hoping to be the first European explorer to speak with the Dalai Lama and reach the mysterious and forbidden capital of  Lhasa, Tibet. But he was turned back as the Tibetans didn't want foreigners. British explorers based in Delhi, also in a race to visit Lhasa, were also turned back for the same reason. 

On his first expedition in Mongolia, he met the third man in charge in the country. On their return to St. Petersburg, there were all sort of balls, parties and celebrations to honor his exploits but Przhevalsky called them all a waste of time as he only wanted to write about them, not talk about them. After his first and subsequent treks, Przhevalsky was honored by geographical societies all over Europe.

He spent the next two and a half years writing books about his travels. As a result, he was able to get funding from the Russian Geographic Society and had 70 officers accompany him on his second expedition compared to just 52 on his initial journey. The second trip began in 1876 and ended a year later after traveling through Chinese Turkestan and rediscovering Lake Lop Nor which hadn't been seen by another European since Marco Polo's visit in the 13th century. 

This passport allowed him to travel to China.

I was so glad that Tamara told us to look at this mural from both directions as, when we looked at it from left to right, it depicted Przhevalsky and his team traveling West. When we walked the other direction, it appeared the explorers were venturing East! I have seen that sort of illusion only a few other times before and have been fascinated by them each time. 

Though known as an explorer and adventurer, Przhevalsky never forgot his role as a military officer. He had been given the secret task of drawing a map of Central Asia which he did at night so his fellow officers wouldn’t know what he was doing. They were told instead he was writing books about their explorations.

His notes were sent back to St. Petersburg in boxes via carriages from Ulan Bataar, the capital of Mongolia.

The horses Przhevalsky and his men saw in Mongolia were called yellow and wild by the locals as they didn’t like to be touched. The horses are genetically small because they lived in deserts with limited access to water and grass unlike ‘regular’ horses. The breed for whose ‘discovery’ the explorer is best known in the West is named for Przhevalsky. The horses are now being raised in Poland, Russia, China and Australia as they were so close to becoming extinct.

On our first overseas trip together in 2013, Steven and I were lucky enough to see a couple of extremely rare Przhevalsky horses in the wild in Mongolia while on a three-day trip in the countryside. That was the first time we also stayed in a yurt. Little did we think then we’d be doing that again!

Przhevalsky and his men had brought 120 kilograms of silver with them to pay for supplies, new horses, etc for the expedition. They were followed by bandits who were shot at by Przhevalsky’s men. The bandits, never having seen guns before, retreated!

These were some of the original instruments Przhevalsky used on his journeys. With the same device he was able to watch stars through the telescope and draw accurate maps.

The third expedition also took a year from 1879-89 and took Przhevalsky and his 13 military officers and team just 200 kms away from Lhasa. The Dalai Lama, hearing of Przhevalsky’s wish to speak to him, dispatched a team to Przhevalsky indicating the Russian would have no opportunity to meet with the Dalai Lama so he was turned back yet again.

On the fourth expedition, from 1879-80, with 21 officers, they crossed Mongolia and into China, exploring more of that country and new regions of Tibet, again hoping to reach Lhasa and the Dalai Lama. That was the only expedition where pictures were able to be taken.

They came to Karakol in 1888 preparing to embark on a fifth expedition from there as it would be a much shorter trip to Lhasa, rather than beginning in St. Petersburg where the other trips had originated. They bought horses and sheep to prepare for the journey. Karakol, an outpost known as the ‘place of no return,’ ended up proving to be prophetic for Przhevalsky as he drank infected water on a hunting trip in the Chui Valley and fell ill with typhus. In worsening health, he returned to the shores of Issyk-Kul Lake to die. He died in a military hospital in Karakol at age 49 on October 20, 1888, without ever having achieved his greatest dream of entering Lhasa. He requested he be buried on the shores of the lake.

After Przhevalsky's death, his fellow explorers embarked on the fifth expedition they had planned together and later wrote books about their journey. 

Tamara said the sheep flanking both sides of the museum's entrance were called Marco Polo sheep after the great explorer. 

The small chapel and monument to the famous explorer, geographer, botanist, zoologist, ethnographer and military officer were built on the site of his grave in 1894, just six years after his death. According to Lonely Planet, in 1957, the Soviet authorities removed and desecrated most of a village graveyard to build the museum and gardens honoring Przhevalsky.

I was glad we waited until after visiting the museum to see the  symbolic structure of the Przhevalsky monument as I felt it could only be appreciated after knowing something about its namesake's life. The statue was comprised of twenty-one blocks on a precipitous mountain peak: ten blocks represented the total number of years for Przhevalsky’s expeditions and eleven blocks signified the number of years the explorer spent writing about his travels, according to Tamara. 

Again according to Tamara, the eagle atop the monument symbolized Przhevalsky's bravery and sense of adventure. The olive branch in the eagle's mouth represented peaceful Central Asia at that time.

Here's my fellow adventurer!

I thought it fascinating that the explorer chose to be laid to rest near Karakol in Kyrgyzstan as Przhevalsky apparently "held a low opinion of many of the people he traveled among and despised the indigenous people of the region - the Kyrgyz, Mongolians, Chinese, Tibetans and Uighurs - as lowly beings that required the enlightenment of Russian colonialism to render them half decent."

When the monument was installed, it was located just 30 meters from the shores of Issyk-Kul Lake but, as the lake has shrunk so much, it was now 500 meters from the lake.  

Behind the statue to Przhevalsky was a view of Mikhaylovka Inlet where torpedo testing had been done in the lake. An entire military research complex had grown up. After independence in 1991, Russia’s new president, Boris Yeltsin, asked that it be continued but Kyrgyz President Askar Akaev shut everything down. Now that the Soviet torpedo testing facility had closed down for good, I would have thought there would be little reason for continued military secrecy but that wasn’t the case.  

There were fifty varieties of trees and plants in the memorial park, with the oldest trees being 80 years old.

The changing colors reminded us of being at home in the mountains in the fall with the aspens turning although that's fast becoming a memory since we began traveling each fall overseas in 2013!

When we saw Tamara walking in the gardens, we asked her about the statue we had just seen. The huge statue honored a local writer, Hussein Karazov, who helped write a Kyrgyz-Russian dictionary. 

She kindly showed us next the four balbas at the museum, stone faces drawn by ancient people more than a thousand years ago. She indicated there used to be lots in the mountains but, sadly, people removed them and placed them in their yards!

We were so relieved we hadn’t come to Karakol during the summer months as Tamara mentioned there were about 500 tourists a day visiting the museum in July and August! There used to be mostly French tourists but more recently, she said, were a greater number of English tourists. 

Tamara shared with us she only lives in the Kyrgyzstan capital of Bishkek in the winter as it’s ungodly hot there in the summer with temperatures in the 40s Celsius. I was sad to hear that she had long had a dream of visiting Great Britain but she recently gave that up, figuring it was no longer realistic. I promised her I would send her a postcard from London, our final stop on our adventure, on December 22nd.

She led us to a hole in the fence where we could walk down a hill and on toward the lake as we knew there was a beach where we just wanted to hang out for a few hours. This fence was very close to the restricted area but we decided to take a chance and go this way rather than be safe and backtrack along the road. Since none of you got distress calls from us, you can gather we weren't caught and shot!

The path led us down eventually to the almost deserted village of Pristan which was also Karakol's port.

We figured if there was one bump, hay would be all over the road!

This looked like a high school judging from the age of a couple of students we saw walking toward it. I noticed each of them looked at us like we were from Mars as we walked through the village! I don't know whether they would have looked at any obvious foreigners like that or whether we just stood out because of our ages as we see hardly anyone our ages traveling outside of tour groups. 

The simple, mostly wooden homes were very similar to those in Karakol with the same pale blue shutters and fences.

I thought this was likely the village mosque but thought it was strange that it was barricaded behind a fence if it were a place of worship.

We couldn't help but laugh when we turned a corner in the path and saw a longish line of cows walk out of the brush and onto the beach. They acted like they owned the place and seemed very content to also just laze on the beach. This was the first time we’ve ever had a beach to ourselves, apart from cows that is! 

On one hand, it was too bad the tourist season was over in the sense it would have been fun to have gone on a boat ride on the lake. 

It was so pleasant to read for a couple of hours on the beach as the weather was warm and there was nary a sound except for some squawking crows. Later, about six other people came but we could hardly complain!

We began walking back through the small village after 4 and, after reaching the top of a long hill, had no more than one minute to wait for a marshrutka to take us back to Karakol for just .75. Lady Luck was sure looking out for us then!

What a gorgeous view of the Tien Shan mountain range overlooking Karakol we had after climbing the hill. 

We got off the minibus north of Karakol at the Dungan Mosque. The Dungans first arrived in Karakol as refugees from China in 1877 and created a small community.

The triple roof, carved-layered eaves and wooden exterior pillars gave the brightly colored mosque the look of a Mongolian Buddhist temple or a pagoda rather than an Islamic mosque. The similarity with Buddhist structures was no accident as it was constructed by the Dungans who were ethnically Chinese but with a Buddhist past before they converted to Islam. 

The mosque was built by the Dungan community from 1907-10 by a Chinese architect and a team of twenty artisans and constructed entirely without nails. They incorporated a great amount of Buddhist symbolism into its design adding details such as conch shells, the Buddhist wheel of life and representations of dragons and phoenixes to reflect the unmistakable influence of Chines mythology. 

Incredibly it survived the Bolshevik era which saw the town’s other eight mosques destroyed though it was closed for worship from 1933 to 1943. The mosque now serves the Kyrgyz and Chinese Islam communities and not just the Dungan community. 

At first, I was told that I couldn’t enter the prayer space even though the sign at the entrance said women needed to be covered up head to toe and I was. Then Steven was told he also wasn’t able to enter the mosque. 

Steven suggested we walk over to Karakol's Big Bazaar next which was only a few blocks away and I was fine with that. I so wish you could have been there to watch a woman with a stick running after an obviously drunk man to shoo him away. It was so funny to us and locals alike even though she never came into actual contact with the man! 

As you can see from the boarded up inside stalls, we arrived too late for most of them had already shut down for the night. 

Unlike other markets which were generally peaceful affairs, there were constant announcements from overhead public address speakers throughout the four or five square block area of the market. 

Seeing the Manhattan Restaurant as we walked back to our guesthouse made us think of our daughter, Nina, and her husband, Will, who live way too far away from us in Brooklyn, NY!

This was one of the comparatively grand former homes of Russian merchants and industrialists we saw in Karakol.

I don't know how beauty salons and barber shops make any money in small towns in Kyrgyzstan as we saw so, so many in both Kochkor, where we had come from a couple of days previously, and also here in Karakol!

Each time we walked through town we saw this statue, surrounded by pretty petunias, of Tagai Biy, a 16th century hero, in tiny Central Park. 

It was a lovely, relaxing day with a great combination of learning something new – about local history in the form of Przhevalsky – a sense of adventure walking where we shouldn’t have been, some R&R on the almost deserted beach, a small dose of religion at the unusual mosque and shopping at the bazaar to top it all off ! 

Next post: Hot springs, Karakol style!

Posted on October 1st, 2018, from Khiva, Uzbekistan.