Note: This post was posted late due to lack of internet access. We have been here and safe for over two weeks now.
We made it to Kyrgyzstan. Our group was missing about half of our bags (surprisingly left behind in Frankfurt during a short layover, and not lost in Istanbul as was feared), with delays on nearly all of the flights, crowned by a massive 4-hour delay leaving Istanbul that had most of our group sleeping on the floor of the gate 204 boarding area alongside the entire Kyrgyz men’s hockey team, which was returning from a successful tournament in Kuwait. But we made it, and at the time of this posting, everyone has all of their luggage, amazingly.
Unsurprisingly, with Kyrgyzstan located 13 hours ahead of my family on the West Coast of the United States, the journey was long. We began in Washington DC (I’m leaving out my flight from the West Coast to DC, although we did get a special shoutout from Alaska Airlines, who thanked us for our service in “Kurbakistan”), where we had our ‘staging’ event, which is a sort of orientation to the journey and orientation.
While many of us were experienced travelers, the event was very helpful – both to meet each other and bond as a group, and to help orient all of us to what the trip itself would look like, particularly for the members of the group who had never left the country. In some groups like ours, travel to the staging event is actually the first time that some trainees have been on an airplane, so it helped them a lot to explain what the procession of flights would look like, and what to expect during the first few days in country.
After Washington, we all got in buses to Dulles airport, and checked in for our flight to Frankfurt. If there’s any justification for getting to the airport as early as we did (4 hours before our flight), it was this: the airline mistakenly didn’t tag our bags all the way to Bishkek, which meant that when I realized the error and insisted that they fix it, they had to spend nearly two whole hours re-printing and re-tagging the bags from our group, meaning that I just made it to the gate in time for boarding.
The flight to Frankfurt was the only rest I got on the trip, and I somehow managed to sleep for five of the seven hour flight. Then, in Frankfurt, we were lucky to be whisked through a side door exiting the flight from DC that allowed us to skip the security checkpoint and go directly to our connecting gate. This was a good thing, because when we got there, it turned out they had to manually check in our entire party again… which made our flight 45 minutes late. My apologies to everyone who was on that flight!
Finally, we reached Istanbul, where things for the most part began to run smoothly again. Checking in at the transfer desk was painless, if time-consuming, and the Turkish food we had for dinner was much appreciated (and, in light of the upcoming delay, an excellent decision). It turned out that shortly before we arrived from Frankfurt, a Turkish Airlines jet had an engine fire and made an emergency landing (we were just told that there was “runway construction”), which closed a runway and made every flight late. The takeoff line at one point snaked for over a mile. Because of this, our flight’s departure was pushed back 30 minutes at a time for three hours, and then we had another hour sitting on the plane waiting to taxi. For some strange reason, though, Turkish Airlines was the only airline delaying any flights.
Finally, as the sun rose two days after leaving DC, the fields of Chui Oblast in Kyrgyzstan began to rise into view, and we passed over a few villages until touchdown at Bishkek’s international airport around 7 or 8 in the morning. It was a joyous moment for me. Customs, baggage claim (one of my bags was missing), filing a claim with the airline, being greeted by tens of current volunteers, being fed by the current volunteers a kurut, which is like a super salty yogurt ball, running out the door and on buses to our orientation hotel in the capital, and so on and so forth. It was all a blur, with a full day ahead to begin our Peace Corps journey.
As we drove in to the hotel, out from behind the smog we suddenly saw the snow-covered peaks that rise tens of thousands of feet just to the south of Bishkek. I knew it then that this is where I’m meant to be at this moment.