Kyrgyzstan is usually marketed as a summer destination, the time of year when you can climb mountains or ride horses up to yurt camps in the summer pastures. Well, that’s all completely true, but what they fail to mention is that Kyrgyzstan actually is a fantastic place to come for an affordable winter vacation as well.
Now, my story today isn’t going to appeal to the Aspen Jet Set, but it does appeal to my populist belief and love for things that are so cheap that you can’t say no.
A few weeks back, a bunch of my friends here and I decided that we wanted to go investigate the “ski base” near Osh up in the Chiyrchyk pass (the same place that hosted the Horse Games Festival I went to in 2015). So, as one does, we chartered a marshrutka, went grocery shopping for supplies, and hauled ourselves up to the “ski base,” which is actually four shipping containers merged to form a “lodge,” a few awnings and trailers, a lot of topchans, and the world’s most DIY rope tow ever.
It sounds sketchy, sure, but when admission is 20 som, and tube rental is 300 som for the day, then the value proposition changes considerably. I should also add that the tubes don’t go down some silly straight bunny slope – they go down the ski run. The whole ski run. In other words, it’s WAY more fun to tube than to ski. Every run is different. There’s the excitement of wondering if you’ll slam into another tuber on the way down. It’s the BEST.
We got there just in time to take out the last tubes that were available for rent, and then we climbed our way to the top of the run. You can hold on to the rope tow (which is actually a steel cable) to pull yourself along, but you have to walk, since for some reason they don’t allow you to slide along in your tube on the rope tow. But, that’s a good thing from a fitness perspective since the pass is over 3000m!
We got together and formed massive rafts of up to 10 tubes as we sailed down the hill and off jumps, occasionally losing people who weren’t holding on tight enough, sometimes breaking apart and moving in different formations. Every run was a new adventure, shaped only by chaos theory and the forces of gravity, frictions, and terror.
The other best part of tubing in Kyrgyzstan? We brought groceries, and when we got to the pass, our driver helped us find a lady to cook us several kilograms of plov. So, after tearing up the slopes, we arrived back at the parking lot to a delicious and insanely cheap lunch.
After our adventure in the mountains, it was back to Osh, where we all went to a private bathhouse for my first banya. The banya will get its own blog in due course, but basically we all did the traditional Russian bathing ritual of sitting in a sauna until you can’t stand it, then going and standing in an ice cold shower for as long as you can stand it, then drinking some vodka and going back into the sauna to literally rinse and repeat. It was amazing and I felt so purified when we dried off and finally went home after sunset.
If you love winter sports, then you can’t go wrong in Kyrgyzstan; there’s many ski bases, including the famous Karakol Ski Resort, not to mention millions of miles of fresh untouched powder and the cheapest heli-skiing anywhere in the world. And when tubing costs $2 per day instead of $10 per run? It might actually be time for you to look to a new destination for your winter adventure travel.