The Land of Manas or 500,000 lines to tell a story - Part I
We moved out from the buzzing city on an early summer day. The heat picked up and without the A/C blowing hard into your face your sticky skin would make squeaking sounds on the leather seats. Embarrassing with a stranger in the car. I knew him a bit from some business meeting in Almaty. As many of those acquaintances you make on the way, someone says to know someone and that is the perfect match for your business needs. He is short and energetic. An eloquent and well mannered English spoken Nomad. His dark eyes have seen the world and the sub-cultures who confused him. It made him return to his homeland at the end - Kyrgyzstan. You see him arguing with his world and the other. Ours. Mine. Yours. And yet, he is not sure in which one he would want to be in.
It felt like countless hours sitting in a spacious Toyota where you need a ladder to get in. But then we found common grounds in our conversations quickly. Politically difficult topics. Hard facts and arguments on behaviours when religion washes out the sense of reality from cultures. When believes turn into disbelieve. When prejudice indoctrinates us since we where children and yet it made us unwilling to retire because it would deprive us from the world we wanted to see.
Steppe flew by, wild horses and archaic burial places, with arty monuments and stone carvings. The light would turn the road into pastel coloured lines where cars ran towards us in fierce speed and little control. Roads are meandering through glacier carved landscape and while your right side would show the red sandy hills your eyes to the left would find yourself in limestone covered, steep looming slopes. Wild waters cut their way through bluff formations, with nomads having their grazing herds watching from far distance from their horse backs.
When we arrived on the magic heights of Issyk Kul we were friends. Though, can you be a friend to a Nomad? A moving soul, following the greenest grass, the flow of rivers, hiding in confusion as if a thunderstorm startling a flock of birds. Annoyed from icy winds and blinded by the warming sun.
I asked myself who would I be, if grown up in such a breathtaking wide open mountain region. How to get used to this space! What to do with that freedom - when not free..