Picnic!

About forty minutes after leaving Cholpon-Ata we stopped for a picnic. What the name of the place was I have no idea; it may not even have had a name, but from the map it can't have been very far from the village of Ananyevo. We pulled off the road to the left and within a few hundred yards found a bucolic elevated spot in the shade of some trees where we could eat our lunch and have a short wander around. Just below us an ice-cold stream of snow-melt meandered through a wide valley, and tough Kyrgyz sheep tried to gain a modicum of sustenance from the scrubby grass. Sheep are the most important element of the Kyrgyz nomad economy, and it is said that not a single part goes to waste. The tradtional Kyrgyz diet largely involves mutton in multifarious manifestations, and Kyrgyz are not too choosy over the part of the sheep that they eat. This small flock was my only opportunity to observe them close to, and I was struck by their variety of size and colour - very unlike the identical cloned-looking sheep that I am used to seeing in an English field.

After this pleasant hour we set off again. We were now well over half-way along the north shore of Issyk-Kul, and were heading for Pristan Przhevalsk on the eastern margins.