The Short Night

After two nights collapsed into one (very brief) airport-studded sleep, I arrived in Bishkek a little late on Tuesday morning, around 5, having jumped over many time zones and through the very big ring of fire that is the visa line that precedes customs in the Bishkek airport. The waiting crowd members arranged themselves by language, commiserating in whatever dialect possible, and I shifted from foot to foot behind Ake, a very kind Swede who explained to me that this was my initiation into life in a former Soviet republic - there was no use getting impatient with the one track-suited man behind the window whose job was to hand-copy the information of hundreds of bleary travellers whose flights all arrived at a god-awful hour of the morning, and stick it into their passports in the form of a Kyrgyz visa for $60. As it turned out, Ake didn't have enough US dollars for his visa, so I lent him $20. A small return on the gift of a Anglophone conversant who knew Kyrgyzstan well - Ake is a programmer who works on mapmaking in Kyrgyzstan. As he explained it, Kyrgyzstan looks like a mapmaker's dream - a complex puzzle of how to map out a place which largely has never been owned, due to its nomadic past. Little did I know, I was soon to be steeped in this mountain-nomadic heritage over the days of the coming week...