And So It Begins…

Four days after setting out from San Diego, we landed at Manas International Airport long before dawn on Saturday in Bishkek. 

Our Kyrgh guide Eldar was waiting and swiftly delivered us to Hotel Navat, where we promptly fell into bed. A hundred-year old villa converted in 2019 into a boutique hotel, the Navat was also once a newspaper publishing house, which we have decided is an omen that good stories await us in the Stans.

As if that weren’t promising enough, a city monument to independent journalist Gennady Pavlyuk stands steps from the Navat’s door. Though Pavlyuk paid for his reporting with his life, encountering “The one who sowed freedom with words” confirmed to us unreformed journalists that we are in our element.

It hasn’t taken long to recognize that nobody will ever call Bishkek a gem of a city, but the gardens and squares outside the front door of the Navat are sparkling jewels of public space — gardens, monuments, stunning examples of Brutalist architecture, an impressive Kyrgh history museum and a staggering number of public statues mostly explained by multilingual QR codes.

One of the squares is also home to Kyrghistan’s entry into the unofficial “who can build the tallest flagpole in the Stans’ competition that you will have to wait for Tajikistan to learn about. Suffice it to say, the changing of the guard at this one is not to be missed.

First, however, a word on why it took us four days to reach Bishkek.

The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but it can also be the most expensive line when it comes to travel, and we are nothing if not devotees of wringing every last experience out of our travel dollars.

So it was that, on Wednesday, we boarded an overnight French Bee flight in Los Angeles and flew to Orly Paris. There, we overnighted (on points) Thursday at the swell Novotel connected to the airport by a bridge before flying (now Friday, for those keeping track) via Sabiha Gokcen airport on the Asian side of Istanbul, all before landing in Bishkek before dawn Saturday. 

(For fellow bargain hunters, we chose French Bee because it offered a premium economy seat for less than $700 per person. We had to overnight at Orly because the only flight to Bishkek left an hour before our arrival in France. We flew premium economy on Pegasus Airlines to Manas International Airport in Bishkek because it was the only way to get here from Orly. And, no, this wasn’t Delta’s or Emirates’ premium economy, but it was good enough.)

Bottom line: $990 each from SoCal to Khyrgestan, not including the delicious French dinner at the Novotel that beat any class of airline food and two meals-for-sale sandwiches on the Pegasus flight. In all honesty, we would have gone point-to-point if Turkish Airlines (nonstop LAX to Istanbul connecting to Bishkek) hadn’t done away with all its upgraded seating except for stratospheric first class. As it was, we so liked the leisurely pace and restful intermission in France, we may make a habit of slower travel.

For now, off to the Tian Shan mountains for a day in Ala-Archa National Park. This is where I office in the Navat Hotel.

COMING SOON! An Ode to the Unexpected