Figure 8 On A Bike

Karakol is a cute little town at the head of Issyk-Kul Lake. In the summer it is a bustling tourist spot, and in the winter it hosts a ski resort. Most of the tourists that we ran into were internal tourists mostly coming from Bishkek. The downside to Karakol is the smog. For such a small town it had worse air quality than Almaty and every evening it seemed to get really bad as many people seemed to heat their homes with coal or wood burning stoves. We also never did figure out the industry there but there were a few very short smoke stacks in town that would send some noxious fumes into neighboring apartment complexes in the evenings. Ah fresh mountain air! View of Karakol from the ski resort

Frozen Barskoon Falls high over the valley From Almaty in Kazakhstan we took a bus to Kyrgyzstan as we had read about a very cool ice climbing area there. The bus meandered slowly west to the border with Kyrgyzstan. Once there we had to get all of our stuff off the bus, waddle to the Kazakh border desk, stand in the wrong line, and waddle to another line. Once in the correct line, I was met with a border agent’s halting English and I didn’t recognize the name of Almaty’s airport so I got a few more questions, but eventually he allowed me to leave Kazakhstan. Ben benefited from my hard work and made it through with no questions.

It's not the capital (partly due to the major earthquake fault just a few kilometers away), but Almaty is the biggest city and by far the most metropolitan area of Kazakhstan. It didn't really exist until the early 20th century, and expanded greatly during Kazakhstan's time under the USSR, so all the construction is relatively new and most of it distinctly Soviet. The city takes its name from the Russian word for apple, "elma", and the plentiful nearby orchards combine with its cultural significance to fuel its reputation as "The Big Apple" of Kazakhstan. The Alatau mountains towering south of Almaty

Erzurum had been a decent first stop for our winter tour, but Susan and I were both excited to go see the higher, colder, and hopefully snowier mountains of central Asia. But since we're Americans, and any land route from Erzurum to that part of the world has to pass through Russia or Iran, it was back west to Ankara first, before catching a long flight east, to Almaty in Kazakhstan. Besides, that gave us time to do a little sightseeing that we'd passed up during our previous stopover there. Walking through central Ankara