Cotton

Breakfast was rice pudding, crepe and gorgeous raspberry jam, as good as my mum made, and 2 fried eggs. It isn't easy being a veggie here. We had a relaxing morning as we are not to arrive arrive at the homestay till late so we pottered by the lake and dressed up in local coats/ hats.

We set off just before lunch which we had in a cafe placed over a river. Veg option - cucumber tomato and onion salad and chips.

We followed the small river till we got to its confluence with a big blue river which came from the reservoir, in mountain scenery. We Followed it high above with several tunnels till we reached the dam where we stopped. Sheep, goats and donkeys were coming down from the mountains led by a man on a horse with a red flag - I worried about them progressing through the dark tunnels with the speeding traffic.

We Stopped to see an ancient warrior statue. Further down was a second dam and a town built for extracting the Mineral antimony SP used in making electronics but this industry collapsed in 1991, at the end of the Soviet era.

On reaching the fertile Fergana valley (with the Uzbekistan border on the right), were cotton fields, where we stopped so that Olga could show us the yellow and pink flowers, and the bursting buds. Nowadays it is picked by hand for China, but in Soviet times they had machinery.

Finally we got to Jalal Abad, the 3rd largest city in Kyrgyzstan, pop 180,000. Poor Olga - There was an issue with the accommodation. The guest house had 2 sections for 6 people in each, one loo and shower between 6. No spare room for Ruth who insisted as she had paid for a single room she'd have to have one. Olga found her a place to stay, but what a palaver. The 3 couples got sent to the Sputnik hotel over the road with a double bedroom each and en suite. So lucky! We had 10 minutes to get to the foyer to go out to an Uzbek family for food. We are now in the western side of Kyrgyzstan where the ethnicity is mainly Uzbek, and there has been ethnic conflict in recent year. No visible alcohol was allowed as the old woman is very religious - she was praying when we went in and still at it on the way out. I shared Veg salad - cucumber, tomato and aubergine and had tough dumplings, (a kind of pasta) stuffed with very greasy pumpkin and onion. Little did I know - the food in Kyrgyzstan was heaps better than what was to come! But we didn't come for the food. - The vodka flowed.