Osh, Jalal-Abad and around

Arriving late in Osh meant we had to find a place to sleep in a badly lit, unknown town. We fished out our Lonely Planet from our backpacks and asked a taxi driver to drive us to some of the hotels in town. Most of them turned out to be fully booked, so we ended up in an extremely overpriced Soviet style hotel: there was no hot water, no electricity after midnight, we got locked out the first night (we managed to break in though) and nobody cleaned our room, perhaps not even before we took it.

Osh was a nice city, however: quite small for the country's second biggest town, but with an interesting bazaar, where we found some nice handicrafts (slippers and two hats). As there aren't really overly interesting "sights" in the city, we basically walked around a bit in the bazaar, the park and through the charming, tree-lined avenues.

The population is very diverse, with a majority of Uzbeks, a large Kyrgyz minority and quite a lot of Russians and other ethnicities.

The next day, we headed for Jalal-Abad, the third biggest city in Kyrgyzstan, but with only about 75000 inhabitants very laid back and relaxed. Through the Community Based Tourism association, we found a delightful homestay with a local family. A very clean room in a charming house with a shadowy courtyard, and with hot water!

Here, we took it easy, just looking around the bazaar, which is nice enough but not as big nor as interesting as Osh' or Kashgars bazaars. We also headed to a local rundown sanatorium and healing water spring the next day. The sanatorium was closed and the spring water was disgustingly warm and salty - not a true success in all.
On Saturday, we headed to Arslanbob, a farmers village in the nearby mountains, famous for its walnut forests. We had a walk near the river up to a waterfall which we never reached. Hanna saved some strange bugs from drowning and Floris made a small dam - both not very successful at that by the way.

We intended to leave on Sunday morning, and opted for a shared minibus (marshrutka) to Bishkek. The driver told us we would leave as soon as there were 3 or 4 more passengers, but even after having 6 extra we hadn't left yet. As it was running late already, and with a long drive ahead (10 to 15 hours), we got upset with the driver for the disinformation and left the car.

So, if all goes well, we leave for Bishkek on Monday 01.09.