Song Kul reminds me of a Microsoft wallpaper. Its grasslands rise from the water’s edge across rolling hills and up to mountains, with the fields broken only by the occasional yurt, cow, or horse. Tucked away in a high mountain basin, there is no electricity or cell coverage within two hours by car. It’s about as peaceful a place as I’ve ever managed to find outside of Alaska.

Song Kul is a summer retreat for many of the semi-nomadic people of Kyrgyzstan. While it has a thriving tourism industry, most of the yurts around the lake belong to ordinary Kyrgyz people who, every summer, bring their herds and flocks from towns and villages to the lake to graze and to relax in the clean crisp cool mountain air. When it is over 100 degrees in Osh during the day, it can be as cool as 40 degrees at night at Song Kul. Even though less than 100km away, people are sweating bullets in Bishkek, in Song Kul, it is necessary to wear sweaters, vests, and fur-lined boots. It’s a contrast in so many ways to many places in Kyrgyzstan, and yet it manages to remain so distinctively Kyrgyz in a most beautiful way.

Getting to Song Kul, as you might imagine, is something of an adventure. 4 roads go to Song Kul; one from the south from Naryn over a pass (going over passes is a big thing here), two go east to the Kochkor-Naryn highway, also over passes, and one goes over a pass to the east down into a long narrow valley past a coal mine and finally out to a city called Chaek in the far Northwest corner of Naryn. It was by this last, least-traveled route that we made our approach to Song-Kul. And when I say least-traveled, I really mean least-traveled; in 60km, over the course of nearly 3 hours, we were passed by exactly one truck and one marshrutka, and we saw one human in the one store along the way, which carried a basket of kurut, cigarettes, and about 10 liter-sized bottles of Coca-Cola.

But before even reaching Chaek, we had to travel from Chui, through a narrow winding canyon alongside the Suusamyr river, to an isolated town called Kyzyl-Oi. On our way out of Kyzyl-Oi, we saw two Caucasian people walking towards us on the road carrying hiking backpacks. I rolled down my window, and greeted them, and it turned out that they were from Paris, so we chatted for a few minutes in French before continuing along the road. We were enroute at least another hour before we made it out of the end of the narrow canyon, at which point we joined a larger road that was to take us to Chaek.

From Chaek, we followed that little dirt track (I should mention that every single road in this post is neither gravel nor paved) out to a “village” (a circle of single-wide trailers with nary a soul in sight) called Karakeche (as a coal mining town, it makes sense that the name includes “kara,” which means “black”).

Song Kul is only about 30km from Karakeche, but the road had to climb several thousand feet over a pass to get there, which included fording a few streams and some very large potholes. When a marshrutka passed us in the opposite direction, I could scarcely believe he was attempting to drive the way we had just come (and then I remembered that we had managed it in a 2WD Toyota compact hatchback). In all it took about 2-3 hours to get over that pass, along the side of the lake, and finally out to the lake’s ring road. This, of course, was slowed down by a rest stop.

We pulled over to the side of the road near a yurt and honked. Then honked again. A man came outside, and my host yelled to ask if he had any tea. The man quickly invited us up to the yurts and introduced himself and his family to us. They had two yurts and a tent of the sort you might see at an Army base, with two teenage boys and a grandchild or three. I didn’t quite catch the exact family make up. We shared tea and kymyz (the fermented mare’s milk for which Kyrgyzstan is famous) with them, and they invited me to ride their horse, which made me very happy that I had brought my special Peace Corps helmet with me in the car (we are required to wear a specific helmet when we ride on horses).

After our break of tea and bread, we continued onwards to the shore, where we did a similar thing and stopped by a group of yurts. My host asked them if they had space to sleep, and they said yes, and after agreeing on a price, we parked the car and walked down to the shore to admire the view.

It took us two full days of travel to get there, but boy was it worth it.

Keep reading in Part 3: The Road to Issyk-Kul, or revisit Part 1: Driving North!

Check out the full gallery of photos from my trip here!