Eight days in Kyrgyzstan: an alpine lake that never freezes, with snow above it in August

Bishkek arranges itself around one enormous concrete square, and that is where to start. Ala-Too Square was Lenin Square until 1991, has been the site of two revolutions and a great many protests since, and now carries a statue of Manas, the hero of the Kyrgyz national epic, on a horse. There is a changing of the guard at the flagpole every hour, performed with tremendous seriousness by two very young soldiers.

On the north side is the State Historical Museum, which reopened in 2021 after years of closure and is much better than it needs to be. The lower floors run from Scythian gold and Bronze Age petroglyphs through the Kokand khanate to the Russian conquest. The top floor is the reason people talk about it: a suite of Soviet bronze ceiling reliefs from the 1980s, never removed, in which the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride out over the world and one of them is unmistakably Ronald Reagan. Nothing else in Central Asia has kept anything like it.

In the evening walk east through the parks. The streets here have water channels running along them and poplars planted for shade, which is why a city on a hot plain feels green, and the mountains close the end of every north to south street.

Go to Osh Bazaar first, which is in Bishkek and named after the southern city rather than located in it. It is the main food market: sacks of dried apricots and walnuts, spices, Korean-style pickled salads left over from the Soviet deportation of Koreans to Central Asia, sheep heads, and a whole aisle of felt hats. It is also where to buy anything you need for the next week, because prices double once you leave the capital.

A short walk away stands the Russian Orthodox cathedral, blue and white with gold domes, quietly busy and still under a long restoration of the cupola frescoes. Kyrgyzstan is majority Muslim and has a substantial Russian minority, and the two sit side by side without much friction. Cover your head if you are a woman going in.

In the afternoon go out to Dor Doi, which is a different order of thing. It is a market assembled from shipping containers stacked two high, thousands of them, running for a couple of kilometres on the northern edge of the city, and it is one of the largest re-export hubs in Central Asia, taking Chinese goods and pushing them onward into Kazakhstan and Russia. Nobody would call it beautiful. It is one of the most interesting hours in Bishkek and it explains most of the country's economy.

The drive east is one of the good ones. The road climbs out of the Chuy valley, drops to the lake at Balykchy, and then runs 180 km along the northern shore with the water on one side and the Kungey range on the other, and the Terskey range visible across the lake with snow on it in any month. Issyk-Kul is 1,600 metres up, six hundred and something deep, and salty enough that it has never been known to freeze, which is what its name refers to.

Break the drive at Cholpon-Ata, roughly halfway, at the open-air petroglyph field. It is a couple of square kilometres of glacial boulders on the slope above the town, scattered where the ice left them, and several hundred of them carry carvings of ibex, hunters, snow leopards and hunting dogs cut over some two thousand years from the Bronze Age onwards. Many are faint and some are recent vandalism; the site is unfenced, unlabelled and eerie, with the lake below and the peaks behind.

Get to Karakol in the late afternoon. It is a small, low, wooden town at the end of the lake and it takes about ten minutes to understand, which after six hours in a car is exactly what you want.

Karakol's centre is small enough to do on foot in a morning, and it holds two buildings that have no business being within five minutes of each other. The Holy Trinity church is a Russian Orthodox cathedral built entirely of wood, put up in the 1890s after an earthquake destroyed the stone original, painted green and cream with five domes and a wooden bell tower. It served as a Soviet sports hall and a dance club before being returned to the church, and it is still full of icons and old women.

Five minutes away is the Dungan mosque, which looks like a Buddhist temple. The Dungans are Chinese Muslims who fled into the Russian empire after the failed rebellions of the 1870s, and when they built this between 1907 and 1910 they brought a Beijing architect and his craftsmen, who put it up in the Chinese manner without a single nail: upswept eaves, a carved and painted frieze of pomegranates, peaches and grapes, and a colour scheme with no relation to any mosque west of here.

Finish at the regional museum, which occupies a pretty pre-revolutionary cottage in the middle of town and covers the garrison, the survey expeditions into the Tien Shan, the Dungan migration and local natural history. It takes forty minutes and it is the context for everything else in the town.

If your day here falls on a Sunday, be at the animal market by seven. It sits a couple of kilometres north of the centre and it is one of the largest in Central Asia: sheep, goats, cattle and horses brought in from the whole eastern end of the country, sold by handshake and haggling, with a food row along one side and no concession at all to anybody watching. It is over by ten.

Then drive north-west along the shore to the Przhevalsky memorial. Nikolai Przhevalsky was the Russian officer and explorer who made four great expeditions into Mongolia, Tibet and the Chinese interior, described the wild horse that carries his name, and died here of typhus in 1888 at the age of forty nine, on the point of setting out for Lhasa. He asked to be buried above the lake. There is a museum, a park, and an enormous bronze eagle over the grave looking out at the water.

In the afternoon go west to Jeti-Oguz, whose name means seven bulls: a wall of red sandstone bluffs, split into vertical slabs, standing above a valley of spruce and a slightly decayed Soviet sanatorium. Ten minutes further up the valley is the Broken Heart rock and the start of a walk into the meadows behind, where there are usually horses and, in summer, yurts selling kymyz.

There is no way to fly out of Karakol, so today is the reverse of the drive in plus an hour in the air. Go back along the shore to Bishkek, six hours, and take the afternoon or evening flight south to Osh, which takes fifty minutes and crosses the entire Tien Shan. Sit on the right and watch: the range is unbroken white the whole way and the descent into the Fergana valley is abrupt.

The alternative, for anybody with two spare days and a strong back, is the road: Bishkek to Osh by car over the Too-Ashuu and Ala-Bel passes, both above 3,000 metres, through the Suusamyr valley where the summer pastures are. It is one of the great drives in Asia and it is ten to twelve hours in one go, or two days with a night in a yurt.

Arrive in Osh in the evening and do nothing more than walk. The heat, the Uzbek faces, the poplars and the smell of bread are a different country from the one you left this morning, and the ridge of Sulaiman-Too is lit up in the middle of the city.

Sulaiman-Too is a limestone ridge with five peaks that rises straight out of the middle of Osh, and people have been walking up it to pray for something like three thousand years. It became Kyrgyzstan's first World Heritage Site in 2009, listed not for a building but for the continuity of the practice: petroglyphs, cave shrines, worn hollows in the rock that women slide down for fertility, and paths polished by feet. There is a museum built into a cave in the flank of the hill, entered through a modernist concrete arch, with archaeology and ethnography inside. On the top stands a small white mosque said to have been built by Babur in 1510, before he went south and founded the Mughal empire; the original was destroyed and this is a 1990s rebuild. Go early, take water, and allow half a morning.

At the foot of the north side is the mausoleum of Asaf ibn Burkhiy, a domed tomb attributed to a vizier of King Solomon, whose name in Arabic is Sulaiman and who gives the mountain its name. The building is much later than the legend, plain, and still visited by pilgrims.

A few streets away is the Rabat Abdul Khan mosque, said to be the oldest in the city and dated to the sixteenth century. Non-Muslim visitors are usually not admitted inside, and the courtyard and the exterior are worth ten minutes anyway. Finish in the bazaar along the Ak-Buura river, which has been the market here for a very long time and runs for the better part of a kilometre.

The regional fine art museum is a twenty minute stop and a good last one: Soviet realist canvases of tractors and cotton pickers alongside Kyrgyz painters working after independence, in a building nobody else will be in. It is a small, cheap, slightly melancholy place and it rounds off the week better than another mosque would.

Osh airport is fifteen minutes from the centre and has flights to Bishkek all day and a handful of international routes, including Istanbul, so it is possible to fly out of the country from here rather than backtracking.