We drove Kyrgyzstan roads for maybe eight or ten hours and I find driving to be a great learning experience, all by itself. I never spend time driving in other countries without feeling like I learned some things. I just can’t help myself when it comes to these road trips, so I’ll share a few of my favorite photos from Kyrgyzstan road trips.

Kyrgyzstan is really a quite modern country but there were regular reminders of their nomadic past. Kyrgyzstan is also no Mongolia, where we’ve traveled, but we did have numerous encounters with animals on the roads, like in the first photo. This is about half the goats in their herd and there were a couple more cowboys on the crew.

Traffic was not much of a problem but we did have some slow-downs at times on drives. But when the scenery looked like this, who cared?

I have traveled in our New England states and seen pie stands along the road where you take a pie and leave them the money. We saw the same thing in the countryside around Bishkek, except that they were selling mare’s milk. Yes, milk from a horse which is called Caamaa. Of course we purchased some and drank it. I will say this for their Caamaa, it’s much better than the mare’s mile we drank in Mongolia. This mare’s milk tasted sour and smokey. I happen to like sour and smokey and again, it was much better than in Mongolia.

We passed and were passed by the parade in the fourth photo. It was a wedding party and they were driving to their reception. As it turned out, we ended up at the same museum where they had their reception. The date was June 1st, which happened to be our 44th wedding anniversary. Vicky mentioned that to some of the uncles of the newlyweds and the next thing we knew, we were drinking vodka shots….and then more vodka shots. Happy days!

Signs are interesting and difficult in central Asia. This area has had so many languages at various times. Plus, some parts of the culture were translated from different languages and often, they use a different alphabet than the alphabet of the language. An example of this is the various central Asian languages that use Cyrillic in their signs. But for the most part when driving, they use signs that don’t need words to describe the correct legal driving information. However, that is not always the case. In the sign in the last photo, I have no idea what we were supposed to do or to not do, but I was really hoping we were in compliance because it looked like if we were in violation, we would be shot.