Here's a great shot of us rockin' down the Chui River about 90 minutes east of Bishkek back in early September. Tuya and I went with several colleagues of mine from the American University. We set off in our 'marschrutka,' a rickety and over-stuffed Volkswagon Vanagon owned by the Silk Road Water Center, a Bishkek-based expedition company. We bounced down the road toward Issyk Kul and veered off to the left across the Chui River to follow the Chong Kemin tributary. This gets us into gorgeous country after sputtering for ninety minutes through an unsettling stretch of road. While it's one of the best stretches of what could pass for highway in Kyrgyzstan,it is still an obstacle course of suspension crushing potholes and bumps, nevermind the family-packed Ladas swerving from lane to lane at 30mph as you try to pass. Thank god I was facing backwards in the van; i could just look at the concerned look on my friends in the back seat instead. All the while we passed by former collective farms and strange, isolated casino resorts with names like 'Gavaii' (Russian translation of Hawaii), complete with giant fake palm trees in the parking lot and Ethiopian waiters (another story sometime...). The journey was soothed by the views of the always stunning spine of the Ala-Too Range running parallel to us on the south side. But as we chugged on up through the windy canyons carved out by the Chui and Chong Kemin rivers, I'm taken back to southern Idaho, eastern Oregon, eastern Washington. Dry scrubby foothills shrink the sky as we drive deeper into the canyon. The merciless churning white of the rapids beside the road gave us a glimpse of our near future, and it gave my pulse a little boost; it had been a while since I'd surrendered to the whims of a river like that. The comfortable dry heat certainly made me feel at home, and certainly made things toasty as we tried on our stinky wet suits on the side of the road. Wet suits? We don't need no stinkin' wet suits, it's summer! Such was the sentiment of a few in our crew, but apparently the glacier-fed Chong Kemin river doesn't care what season it is, it will stop your heart in five minutes any time of year. My confidence in our guide crew's professionalism grew when they insisted we all wear the wetsuits AND the helmets (thought they were still optional in this part of the world), but that quickly faded when our guide forgot to bring the neoprine booties. After five minutes of spewing red-blooded curses in Russian at his crew, the lead man jumped back in the van and screamed back to the supply pick-up point 20 minutes toward Bishkek. Oh, and that sure looked like a lot of duct tape on the bottom of that raft.... maybe we should have gone for a nice safe hike instead... Well, soon enough we found ourselves firmly straddling the sides of the raft and sliding toward a frothy oblivion. Though it was Tuya's first time white-water rafting, she gamely took the plunge, and a few sets of rapids later she was paddling like a pro. While we rarely confronted anything topping a class 3.5 rapid, and had only one mass bailout in a hole involving one of the guides and the UW professors George and his wife Diane (how they both kept their glasses on astounded us), I was really impressed with the consistent action we faced for the entire two plus hour ride. The river drops elevation very fast, which must make it a brute in the late spring and early summer. Still glowing in the wake of the high thrills per hour ratio of the whole experience, I promised myself to return in the late spring to see how the Chui can really rage. Though we saw no kayakers, it's apparently one of the nicest runs in the former Soviet Union and a training ground for some of the top paddlers in the region. Several other rivers in Kyrgyzstan are supposed to dwarf the Chui in freakiness as well, so come on out all you whitewater addicts, paddle-heaven in Central Asia awaits... though we may need our own car next time. Just 10 minutes from Bishkek on the return drive, our poor, overworked van died.
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