most of the day | 11 nights | from $3,120 per person
Eleven Nights In The High Pastures: A Kyrgyzstan Vacation Package
Eleven nights in the high pastures with a driver and a guide. This Kyrgyzstan vacation package books about six hours of your day and leaves the rest of the hours alone.
What most of the day means here
Most of the day is booked on this Kyrgyzstan vacation package, and the figure is about six hours. A driver, a high clearance vehicle, and one guide who speaks Kyrgyz, Russian and English. Eleven nights, roughly 1,400 km of driving, four of those nights in high pasture camps where the nearest paved road is two hours away. The gaps are not generosity, they are arithmetic: a pass can take ninety minutes or four hours depending on what the meltwater did overnight. When a day runs long, the next one is trimmed rather than stacked on top.
- Hours already spoken for
- About six hours in company on an average day. On the six driving days it runs closer to eight; on the pasture days it drops to about four.
- The earliest you must be somewhere
- 7:15 am, on three mornings out of eleven: the two long pass crossings and the day the horses are brought in. Every other start is 9:00 or later.
- The longest stretch that is yours
- Thirty hours in the second pasture camp, from lunch on day six to breakfast on day eight. Nothing is planned inside it, and the guide stays at camp rather than driving anyone anywhere.
- Who chooses where you eat
- The guide picks the road and the stops, because most of the route is unsigned and the surface decides the timing. You pick every dinner in the towns; in the camps one family cooks and there is no menu.
- What happens if you skip a day
- Tell the guide the night before and stay at camp or in town while the vehicle goes out. Nothing comes back in money: the driver, the rooms and the horses are already paid for that day.
- Who this shape of day does not suit
- Anyone who wants to set their own pace or rewrite the day at breakfast. Also anyone who cannot sit four to five hours in a vehicle on washboard road, and anyone who needs a private bathroom every night, since four of the eleven have a shared outhouse forty steps from the door.
The last row costs this company bookings and stays on the page anyway. A shape of day that does not suit you is far cheaper to find out about here than on the third morning.
What the six hours cover
- Eleven nights of beds: five in family guesthouses, four in pasture camps with felt walls and a wood stove, two in a town hotel with hot water
- Vehicle and driver for all eleven days, fuel included, plus one spare day of vehicle time held back for weather
- One guide for the whole eleven days, not a new person in each valley, which is the single thing that makes the rough sections readable
- All breakfasts, nine dinners, and packed lunches on the six driving days
- Two horse days in the pastures with a local horseman, on animals sized for riders under 100 kg
- Pasture and park entry across the three valleys on the route, currently 1,800 som in total
- Transfer at the airport in both directions, at any hour of the night
Hours and costs you carry yourself
- Getting to the country. Flights from the US run about $900 to $1,450 round trip in season, and we do not book them
- Lunches on the five non-driving days, usually 300 to 700 som each
- Drinks of any kind, including bottled water beyond the two liters a day carried in the vehicle
- Tips for the driver, the guide and the horsemen. About $180 per person over eleven days is normal, and nobody will ask you for it
- Travel insurance and any entry paperwork. We arrange neither, and the first of those should be settled before you fly
- A sleeping bag rated to minus 5C for the camp nights, rented in town for about $25
What it costs
from $3,120 per person
- Covering
- 11 nights, a guided run through high pastures with real gaps left in it.
- Assuming
- Two people to a room, unless the six rows above say otherwise for your case.
- Pushed up by
- The month, the grade of room, how late you leave it, and how many of the hours you want somebody else to hold.
- Fixed when
- An operator puts it in writing with its own name on it. Until then it marks the bottom of a range that genuinely happened.
You settle with the operator, through whatever system they run. This site gathers nothing and no card ever arrives at this company.
The ten weeks that work
The season runs from about June 15 to September 5. Before that the high passes still hold snow and the camps are not up. After it, the families take the animals down and the felt comes off the frames inside a week, so the camps stop existing rather than closing.
July and the first three weeks of August are the steady part. Nights in the pastures sit near 4C, days reach the mid twenties, and the rivers have dropped enough that the fords are dull instead of interesting.
Two stretches I would talk somebody out of. The first ten days of June: the rivers are at melt height and two of the three valleys cannot be reached, so you would pay full price for a shorter loop. And anything after September 5, when a cold night at 3,000 m in a guesthouse is simply a different trip from the one described here.
Decisions left until confirmation
Four things get settled once your dates are held. Which two of the three pasture valleys you sleep in, since the third is a day visit either way. Whether the two horse days sit back to back or split across the week. The direction of the loop, because clockwise puts the worst 60 km on day three while you are still fresh for it. And single occupancy, which adds $610 and is the only supplement on the page.