The Journey to Kyrgyzstan

Transcription of a talk by Jim and Josh Hoy

Note: This is a computer generated transcription and will contain occasional errors in words or spelling

[0:00] Good afternoon. I’m so glad to see you all here at Pioneer Bluffs on this lovely day. Let me see. I’m Nancy Modke. I’m the board president. If you happened to be here last week, you know that I introduced our new operations director. Not to fear because she’s not here. She’s a bridesmaid in her college roommate’s wedding. So she will be be back next week she wanted me to assure you that she will be here um so do come introduce yourself when you get a chance sammy’s joe’s just really been wonderful um i hope that you took the opportunity to have water and it’s tell me again kyrgyzstan i’m gonna massacre that all all afternoon apple cake downstairs thanks to tracy graham so that’s a that’s a specialty today Nice. We’re really glad to have that. And today we have Jim and Josh Hoy, one of my names. Jen’s an author and an instructor at Employee Estate. We have, my understanding, is a fourth, fifth, and sixth generation family members here. Josie’s here? Yes. Okay, okay. So, all right. Okay.

[1:19] So, we’re going to learn today what they learned about ranching in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. They went in 2017, and I’m going to let them tell you all about that, but they were following nomadic herdsmen. So, they did a lot of writing in a very different type of area and whatnot than we have here.

[1:49] I also want to, so they’ll introduce themselves, but I also am going to take this opportunity to say we have more coming this summer. Next Saturday afternoon at two, David Claussen will talk about Frederick Remington, who had quite a bit to do in the Flint Hills. On July 27th, we will celebrate the National Day of the Cowboy. And whoever decided that the National Day of the Cowboy Boy, I ought to be on a summer afternoon in July was nuts. So that’ll be late afternoon with ice cream and some good music, okay? That’ll start at 6.30. September 8th, we will have the Tallgrass Express 20th anniversary. And that’s a fundraiser for us, thanks to Annie and John Wilson. So come and enjoy the music then. And some food, some good food. Then in October, on the 12th, we’ll have our fall roundup. Alexa Dawson will share about Native Americans in the Flint Hills, and then the Weta Skirts will have music. So put those on your calendar. There is a whiteboard downstairs behind the bar where you can just take a picture. I’m sure that you all didn’t memorize all that while I was going through it. So help me welcome Jim and Josh Hoyt. Thank you.

[3:13] Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I wanted to say that July 27th is not a bad day for the Day of the Cowboy. Cowboys got to be out there if it’s 110 or 10 below. So, yeah, it’s all the same to them. Anyway, I want to give you a little background on Kyrgyzstan and then the reason that Josh and I went over there. The word Kyrgyzstan comes from the Turkic word Kyrgyz, which means 40. And the Persian suffix stan refers to land or land of. I think there are about seven countries that have what I call the stan countries. And those are, I thought I had them down here somewhere. I don’t remember. Oh, yeah. Okay.

[4:15] Forward here in a minute. Yeah. But you’ve got Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. And then the Kurdish people do not have their own country, but they’re often referred to as, where they live in the Middle Eastern area is often referred to as Kurdistan.

[4:52] I had always ever since I was an adult I think wanted to go to Afghanistan because they had an active and vital herding culture, nomadic culture and then Russia invades Afghanistan and the Russians move out and all else invades.

[5:21] The country so it’s not safe to go there and I always also wanted to go to Mongolia and, Josh and I talked about that quite a bit and I think it was an evening when back when the Flying W was still educating people about the Flint Hills they had We had a day of pasture burning in West there, and then it was over. We were sitting around talking stuff, and my wife Kathy and Josh’s wife Gwen said, you guys are always talking about going to Mongolia. Why don’t you just do it? So Josh did some looking and found that it was a lot cheaper and easier to get to Kyrgyzstan than it was to Mongolia. Mongolia is also a very large country, and Kyrgyzstan is manageable. And we covered most of that country in the 10 weeks or so that we were there.

[6:27] Anyway, Josh gets on the internet, starts looking up prices and all that, and we decide that we’re going to go to Kyrgyzstan. We don’t need anything except a passport. A lot of those countries, you have to have visas and all that sort of stuff. It was a complicated process. We already had passports. All we needed to do was show up, show them the passport, and we’re there. He also begins to look for a guide and finds this, I forget the name of the guy now, but he was a guide that took us around the country. He arranged for us to cover the first half of our trip. I don’t know how many miles was that, 30 miles or so, going horseback? Or the long ride? It was about 130 miles. 130? Oh, God.

[7:25] If I don’t know what to start a movie with yeah, we’ll spend a lot of time horseback riding over the countryside and in the last half we’ll do an SUV with this guy the only other driver who’s Russian, Kyrgyzstan I think was the last of those Russian, countries to pull away and really didn’t they got along with the Russians pretty well as opposed to some of the others but anyway our driver was Russian, our dad was Kyrgyz and they took us around the country in that, SUV and it was a lot of interesting got to see some horse races, Buzkashi, March and all those other things we’ll get to all of that but so I was not able to go with, Afghanistan and still would like to if that country ever straightens out but I wouldn’t feel safe there and besides which I think, I’m probably past going to these foreign countries and doing a lot of activities but it was a good trip and we really learned a lot and I’ll let Josh take over from here, okay yeah I’m wearing ones but.

[8:54] Um, yeah, so I obviously got very lucky in picking my parents. So having a dad who wanted to do something like this, but, um, he mentioned it’s easier to get to Kyrgyzstan is one of the reasons we went there. But also the Kyrgyz have the oldest horse culture in the world. And we’d been to Argentina and other places with horse cultures to, to see that. And so that really intrigued me. and the Kyrgyz claim, and Greg, can you go ahead and start advancing? So the graphic on the left there is a hieroglyph. That’s kind of the national symbol. And it’s a hieroglyph of somebody horseback, or they certainly look horseback and they look to be carrying a flag. The flag is an addition, but the hieroglyph of somebody horseback is 14,000 years old. Now, the Kyrgyz claim that they’ve been riding horses for 14,000 years. Most scientists don’t think that’s true, I guess. But the Kyrgyz claim heritage to the 14,000 years. And it was where the horse was originally domesticated and where horse culture comes from. That’s right. The Scythian culture that, you know, spread horseback riding across the world was born in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

[10:15] Yeah. And the guy, both those statues is named Manus, M-A-N-U-S, or Manus, I don’t know how it’s pronounced. He’s sort of the man that put Kyrgyzstan together. Kyrgyzstan means the furry, and that’s because he united 40 tribes or 40 families to form the country. Right. It was, I think he lived in the 8th or 9th century, and they wrote an epic about him. It’s the world’s longest epic poem. Half a million plus lines long, and it used to be recited by people who were specialized in it. A couple of women, mostly men, and they would recite this poem. Now think of that. You’ve got a million, a half a million plus lines to remember and recite, and they do it. Yeah, it was really cool. We got to hear the recitation, a part of it, later in our trip. They didn’t begin putting it in print until the 19th century, and I don’t think they would have the whole darn thing in there yet.

[11:34] But it is the world’s longest epic poem, and it was strictly oral out of the way homers used to be it’s 20 times longer than the illuin the odyssey put together so it’s really quite a and manis was epic himself he um the national hedgerow that’s his they have statues of him everywhere um the kirghis have a little bit of a insecurity about the mongols because gingus khan is so famous but gingus khan’s mother was kirghis And she came from Kyrgyzstan and the Kyrgyz were some of the first people to ally with Genghis when he united the tribes of the, uh, this would be about 450 years after Manus, but Manus united the 40 tribes of Kyrgyzstan. And he famously, his horse was injured when he was crossing some mountains. And so he just picked his horse up and carried it over the mountain pass and then got it. So it was. Is the handprint. And then, yeah, the next. We’ll see that. So, you know, supposedly his actual handprint carved in rock. And you can see that’s my hand. I have fairly big hands and he was a big dude, but. I mean, yeah, he was really something, but he was, and the epic poem, the first book is about him. Second is about his son. The third was about his grandson, but it’s over more than a half lines long. Go ahead. Um, next one, please.

[13:02] So we left the, we, at the Capitol, we saw some museums and stuff and we, we headed out to meet our, with our guide. We headed out to meet our horsemen that were going to take us on this big epic ride through the country.

[13:17] Kyrgyzstan is really high. It’s up in the mountains. It’s these high mountain lakes. The Kyrgyz have a lot of sayings about themselves. One is you aren’t Kyrgyz if you don’t ride. You aren’t Kyrgyz if you don’t know your seventh great grandfather. father and um the only thing the world wants from kyrgyzstan is water because they have all this they have glaciers and water and it drains into all their neighbors and um one of the reasons kyrgyzstan is still pretty intact they still have their intact horse culture and nomadic culture is because even when the soviet union was you know had taken over kyrgyzstan um it was too poor So they, Russia called Kyrgyzstan its meat locker. So it raised mutton and beef and horse and exported to Russia and exported water. And that was it. And so, you know, a lot of other Central Asian countries got really displaced and disrupted by the Soviet Union and later other countries because they had things to extract. But Kyrgyzstan didn’t. the water left on its own and is pretty easy to export sheep and cattle so kyrgyzstan stayed kyrgyzstan a lot more than most countries did and when i was carrying his horse over the mountain.

[14:38] Mongols have pony-sized horses they’re full size in kyrgyzstan so he did not carry a pony over he carried a full-size horse they’re called horses of the blood or blood horses and it’s where all the seed stock for china and mongolia and the rest of central asia got there the very best horses came from the kyrgyz the kind of the heartland there in kyrgyzstan and kazakhstan and um the blood horses are named that because they actually sweat blood when they get overheated and stuff it’s just a genetic trait that lets them just have a little more stamina because they They can sweat blood to cool down if they need to, if they once, when they’re really exerting themselves, but they’re very nice horses, very impressive horses.

[15:26] And next one. So we, uh, we traveled through the Eastern half of Kyrgyzstan. I’m sorry, the Western half of Kyrgyzstan. And, um, we got to a national park and we met our horsemen and, um, the horsemen were, uh, uh, former nomadic, uh, shepherds who had started up a business much like Gwen and Josie and I did with our flying W ranch, uh, taking tour. Riding and so we met them at the uh actorek national park and um saddled up and headed out and how many horses do they have we had uh 14 horses with us that we traveled with yeah and you can go ahead and roll through a few of these slides but um this is the where we started out there were a lot of little homesteads with milk cows and donkeys and things like that and then as we got further away we found it got wilder and wilder but here’s a nice example of horses uh, the little sorrow horse is the one i rode most of the time and this was our the head horseman um chair mashes a horse was a they call sport horses uh big like thoroughbred type horses, and that was a harvest of berries there and these are just examples of other horses the horse on the right is the horse my dad rode most of the time and um they’re tough little boogers.

[16:55] And the saddles, if you notice, the saddles were just horrendous. The Kiryus are very poor. Those saddles, they’re serpent head saddles. And I have an example on a horse outside that when we get done, I’ll try to get Josie to ride him over here and everybody can look at the serpent head saddle.

[17:12] But it’s a very fine example of a serpent head saddle made out of apricot wood and leather and well-handcrafted brass pointments on it. But these saddles were made out of rebar leftover from the soviet era and pallet wood from from shipping pallets and i mean they were pretty uncomfortable weren’t they dad and the kirgis are are built quite differently than us their their calves are about that long and their thighs are about that long so they’re everything set up for for somebody built and they’re excellent riders but it was i had to adjust my stirrups quite a bit just to not be in terrible pain now the old man who owned the horses i think he had a grandson with him yeah and a son yeah and then a couple of other people helping out we we were traveling like victorian english lords kind of we had a whole troop of horsemen taking care of our horses and setting up camp and we had a cook book cooking and an interpreter and all that it was i could get used to that so yeah it was pretty easy it took a while for me to get used to when we got where we were going in the evening to sit down and just write in my journal and read a book and not worry about setting up camp or cooking is yeah yeah we slept on a kind of a pup tent yeah except one night i forget what caused the problem but is that picture there uh it’s coming let’s talk about that when the picture comes up um So this.

[18:39] You see the scenery here, this is the mountains that we were riding into, and this is a heavily altered landscape.

[18:46] Of course, it’s been occupied and grazed for millennia, but it…

[18:55] This is all onions. The Soviets came in, the sheep, when the Soviets came in, they stopped the nomadic herding. They told all the nomads that they had to live in towns and they had certain places that they could run livestock on. And of course that just devastated the environment. So it got overgrazed just horribly. The grass died out. Everything just really fell apart because the system was you took your animals, you grazed up into the mountains in the summer and down into the valleys in the winter and you moved your animals all year round and all of a sudden the animals were locked down the people were locked down and it really didn’t work well so the soviets thought the only thing wrong was that the sheep were eating everything so they planted onions because onions were the one thing that sheep wouldn’t eat and of course they still ate everything else but the onions took over so there are thousands and thousands of acres of onions growing there and most of the sheep have adapted to eating them somewhat now so but yeah but it It smelled strongly of onion in that area. But, and they also did, the Soviets also did things like killed all the native fish out of lakes and brought in, you know, foreign fish and things like that, that were really disruptive.

[20:07] But, and just keep rolling, Greg. There are more onions. This, this ride we were on, these are some glaciers we came on. So on this ride, we were never under 10,000 feet and we crossed a couple mountain passes that were over 14,000 feet. I mean, Colorado brags about his 12,000 foot mountains. Yeah. And there were 10,000, there were 14,000. Right there, our guide and interpreter there is waving. That’s a little over 14,000 feet that he’s sitting at as a mocked. He was our guide. He’d been an interpreter at army bases in Afghanistan for years. So he spoke perfect English and was a wonderful resource on education. Because he was the, his seventh great-grandfather had been the last king of Kyrgyzstan before the Russians deposed him and took over the country, so. How old was that old guy that owned all the horses? So that was one of the interesting things about our trip was everywhere we went, my dad was the oldest person there by far. Yeah, later 70s. And the senior horseman, Chermash, was in his 50s, which I’m 54 now, right, Gwen? I think.

[21:23] And he was in his late 50s at the time, and he was just crushed to find out that my dad was 78. Yeah. He was used to being the senior person in the room, but the Kyrgyz used to be very long lived people, but they, um, when China pretty much took over after the Soviet union, they pretty much own all the livestock. And so they, the Kyrgyz diet changed from almost exclusively dairy and meat to being almost all processed cookies and candy and stuff. And they’ve, they’ve gone from living into their nineties regularly to living into their 60s and having diabetes and all the other problems of civilization but um and so that’s an ibex skull there that’s the rigging on a saddle the ibex are the national animal they uh when we look at my saddle out there i have a quart made out of ibex corn it’s a mountain sheep right yes it’s a mountain mountain sheep not a goat and they uh we found a lot of skulls because in the winter they They die in avalanches a lot. They, of course, are really nimble, and they live up high in the mountains.

[22:32] We never saw a live ibex. We never saw a live ibex. Do they have wolves? They have wolves. We didn’t see any wild animals. No, we saw very little wildlife. It’s a pretty devastated environment, post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. A lot of it was wooded and forested. They clear cut all the forests and, um, it’s a heavily altered landscape, but, but they’re adapting. And now that they’ve brought the, once the Soviets gave up on stopping the, the, uh, migrations, uh, the grass is coming back. They’re moving their, their animals up and down the mountains again, and in the valleys like they used to, and the grass is really coming back and their, their economies pretty strong as far as livestock goes. I’m rolling so here’s an example of Yurt on the right and.

[23:26] As we rode through this, this ride through this giant, kind of the center of Kyrgyzstan, we saw at the time we figured up, we had to have seen just, we kind of tried to keep count because we’re ranchers. So we tried to keep count of how many cattle we saw and horses we saw and sheep and goats we saw. We gave up because we saw well over a million sheep and goats, well over 500,000 cattle and well over probably that many horses.

[23:56] Least and nothing more than that it was just lots and lots of livestock all of them taken care of by by nomadic families this is an example you see all those are all sheep and goats there that you see behind the yurt and at night they bring the sheep and goats in to a very tight pen and that’s partly uh it concentrates their manure which they then harvest and sell as cooking fuel for people But it also protects them because they have snow leopards, they have wolves, they have golden jackals, and they have wild eagles that would put them as a sheep. And so these families, the little kids on donkeys would take the sheep and goats up the mountains every day. Before daylight, they’d take them out. The adults would take the cattle out and send them more on the lower slopes of the mountains. And the horses, they would stake the mares out and turn all the colts and studs and unbred mares loose to graze down, graze wherever they wanted pretty much. And then they milk the mares. And that’s one of the main foods of the nomads is mares milk and curdled mares milk, which is a slightly alcoholic fermented milk, milk like a yogurt, and then cheese that they make from it.

[25:22] But um they uh seldom butcher animals they did several times for us because it was you know an occasion but most of them don’t own many of the animals so they don’t eat eat much uh meat anymore because they just don’t own it and the kirgis have a very strong honor system honor culture where they have stories about families starving to death looking after animals that belong to somebody else, but their honor wouldn’t allow them to, you know, butcher the animals they were looking after because to sit, you know, for food or sustenance, um, but, um, those may be apocryphal, but they have the stories.

[26:02] We saw thousands and thousands and thousands of cattle, sheep and goats, horses, and in that whole distance we rode, never saw a fence. Yeah. They did little pens near the yurt where they’d put, pin them up. Like that there. Yeah. Little building pens at night, but no fences, no two-track roads. We didn’t see a vehicle. We didn’t see a man-made light. We rode toward the end. there was a a car in a vehicle and a man-made light and it was shocking after five days of not seeing anything like that the other thing we didn’t see there were no buildings it was all all yurts the other thing we didn’t see during that time were were uh jet trails in the sky because it’s a no-fly zone for because of afghanistan and so there are no airplanes in the sky at night or during the day either and that was shockingly different than we were used to it was it was wonderful to see how many of those can you see a day here thousands yeah.

[27:04] Another example of night pens and the sheep on the hills and uh as we got deeper into the mountains we saw more and more native vegetation um it was somewhat jarring because the soviets had had introduced a lot of North American vegetation and they considered things like big bluestem and lead plant and some of the plants that we really value here as invasive species there and undesirable.

[27:29] But like serratia lespedeza, which is just absolute hell on earth here in the Flint Hills, is one of the most desired species they have there because it stays palatable. It doesn’t get woody like it does here and everything there gobbles it up. They have trouble keeping serratia growing there so and they try to get rid of big blue stem yeah but it got prettier and prettier and the deeper into the mountains we got the less impact the soviets had had um there’s good examples there’s the saddle that i rode most of the time uh it was uncomfortable and it was soviet era so it was probably from the 1970s made out of rebar and pallets and uh they but they worked i mean i by the time i got done i made my own straps and adjusted my stirrups and made them fit a lot better so and here’s an example of the horses just gorgeous high quality horses beautiful horses um most of these horses that were running wild were getting milked and then the uh the offspring spring were getting sold and and they uh the kirgis owned a lot of their own horses and so we ate a lot of horse meat a lot of donkey meat um delicious but um they didn’t eat much mutton or beef.

[28:52] And, uh, here’s, uh, I think this is the year that we, when we, uh, um, our journey one day was really windy and we’d been trying to put the tent up for about an hour. And some, uh, nomads about five miles away had been watching with great mirth and, uh, came over and offered to let us stay in the yurt with them. So we got to stay in the yurt. and that was amazing and what a real yurt with real yeah cookies people and not yeah and the yurts are set up the half of it is for the man and half of it’s for the woman walking the door to the right is the woman’s part the the man’s part has the hearth for heating and the they have they all have uh cupboards big quilt cupboards that they keep all their linens and stuff in And then the woman’s part has the kitchen and the beds. And, um, then there’s everybody sits in the middle in a circle kind of great, wonderful hospitality. And yeah, that was one of the high points getting to say in a still in one of the rooms. Yes. And moving and interacting with real, uh, nomads that are still hurting animals for hundreds of miles through wild country. It was, it was amazing.

[30:14] And that’s just a lot of typical scenery. And those dogs, those are hunting dogs. They use them to try to keep the jackals and wolves and snow leopards at bay. Very well-behaved dogs, very big and hardy. They need to be.

[30:34] And yeah, just keep rolling, Greg. We took a lot more pictures than this even, but you can see it’s very scenic. We kept saying we should have had Mark come with us just so he could photograph the whole thing.

[30:55] This is azamat our interpreter talking to our hosts at the yurts that was the mare’s milk that we were drinking there surprisingly good that is the junior horseman the grandson of churmash churmash is on the right his son abek on the left and uh jennebeck is the one sleeping on that horse there that had her tents and stuff and he would sleep on that horse uh lawler he yeah he enjoyed himself quite a bit so let’s keep rolling that uh that peak back there in that last slide um is uh uh oh no worries yeah the big peak there is called uh uh contingray and it’s the highest peak in kyrgyzstan it’s used to be mount linen but they changed it to contigray which uh is uh they’re the kyrgyz word for god for the mountain of god or king god yeah um that’s about the extent i did see dung beetles dung beetles are my favorite animal in the world and i did get to see dung beetles in kyrgyzstan i’m really glad for that. And that was about the only wildlife we saw. We saw some marmots and a kangaroo rat. That’s our cook cooking in the yurt that night.

[32:20] And that was the one vehicle we saw back there that, um, the whole time. That was the first time we’d seen a vehicle in five days. Yeah. The whole time. Yeah. The only one we saw. Only one we saw in that whole time. Yeah. Yeah. I’m accepting the citizens. Until we came to this and, um, we rode through there at the end of our big ride, we came to a super highway and this is just two lanes of it. There’s another two lanes, but the Chinese are building the belt road and belt system. And this is the portion that’s going through kyrgyzstan and it’s they’re building it’s pretty much empty there’s almost no traffic because it’s not connected to anything yet but they’re building segments at a time and they’re building the easier segments first and then going through the mountain passes but they’re getting ready they’re connecting beijing to istanbul is the goal i think part of that those roads were on the old silk road yes so the the road the belt system that the chinese building is basically just the old silk road and at this point we were on the silk road for most of the rest of our journey and uh not in the mountains but once we got out in the countryside and from here go ahead and roll greg um oh and there’s uh some people we met on the way.

[33:37] And so we got to a uh the caravan sarai which is a um was an old fortified trading post on the silk road and um this is where we got off our horses unfortunately and got in minivans four-wheel drive russian minivans and um went to the caravanserai uh it was built uh long before gingus but gingus fortified them all and made them uh much more safe and held until the the ottoman empire fell most of those caravanserais were intact and and functional until about then but um here’s a yak and sheep and this.

[34:24] We drove through a large part of the country. You can see just gorgeous, pretty rough roads. That was pretty typical right there. A lot of winding and stuff because it’s rough country. Was that headed up to a lake or something? Yeah, that’s where we rode around a lake. And there’s a winding road. This is on a shorter ride there. Just keep rolling on through this, Greg. And we came to the ancient Silk Road town of Nairn, which is a really old city. Not much left of the city except for Soviet block style housing and stuff. But they have a huge animal market there. And so you can keep rolling through these.

[35:07] You can see the horses and cattle and sheep. You see the sheep with the huge fat deposits on their tail. They really like mutton fat. Um they even rub mutton fat on almost everything that you really don’t want them to rub mutton fat on then hand it to you to eat as a special treat but um yeah that was really an experience in that market day yeah because i always never had like trailers that would be hooked onto a semi or something that were filled with all kinds of livestock and yeah it was a true yeah Yeah, it was like a general store or something. Yeah, it was a real bazaar. Yeah. But the. And, excuse me, one other thing. Somebody had, I don’t know, eight or ten horses for sale. And he, there was a kind of elevator running to the south end of this market. And I thought, running back and forth there, getting people’s attention. Yeah, yeah. Yep. It was a lot like a horse sale here.

[36:10] Um, and so our next stop, we, uh, got to see, we got to visit with a, uh, uh, eagle hunter and he was a professional eagle hunter. His family had been eagle hunters for at least seven generations. And it was fast. They use eagles. They, they catch eagles or hatch eagles and use them to defend their sheep. The eagle hunters will hire out to go, uh, hunt golden jackals or juvenile wolves. Wolves um in areas to keep them from bothering sheep um they have two ways of getting eagles they climb the mountains and get a fledgling eagle out of the nest and take it home and raise it or they climb the mountains and they get an egg out of the nest and hatch it and raise it if the egg eagles only get to be about 12 pounds and they never get really big and they are not very good hunters but fledgling eagles will get to be over 20 pounds sometimes 18 to 22 i think they said.

[37:13] And um are very good hunters but they only will stay with the person for a few years and then they’ll release them and they’ll become wild eagles this guy had two eagles yeah they use We used female golden eagles for hunting. Yeah. And we each got to hold on our wrist an eagle, I’ll tell you, 15, 16 pounds. I don’t know how long that last, just hadn’t heard that. That’s a big bird. Yeah. And he hunted rabbits just to demonstrate for us because it wasn’t the season for anything else. We got a rabbit with him. Yeah, he brought a rabbit and released it. He turned it loose and the eagle swooped down. And he also had hunting dogs, Corsoy hunting dogs. Yeah. And, um. That was, that was a really interesting highlight of him. Seeing those eagles and holding an eagle on your wrist. Yeah. And imagining them, uh, catching a juvenile wolf or a golden jackal. Yeah. Impressive. Yeah.

[38:16] But, um, our, our next, we got really lucky and we went, the next place we went to Karakol, which is another ancient city on the Silk Road and it’s on the Chinese border. And so it’s right across from the part of China where the Uyghurs are, which the Uyghurs are a Muslim population in China that are getting.

[38:38] Yeah, the Chinese concentration camps for them, re-education camps for them. So the Uyghurs in Kyrgyzstan seem very Chinese to the Kyrgyz, but are considered absolute foreigners in China, where most of their homeland is. But we have a very intact Uyghur culture in Kyrgyzstan still. A guy had set up a dinner that night with another woman. Yeah, the home of a Uyghur family and had traditional Uyghur cooking and all. It was amazing. Very fun. But in Karakorl, we then were going to go stay at a agritourism, basically a guest ranch. We called it the Kyrgyz Flying W because of our guest ranch here. And when we got there, beautiful place and lots of agri. That’s a picture on the left. and um excuse me it’s on the edge of the pamir gorge so that’s the pamir gorge and this is a big table land and the pamir gorge is the eroded area that runs all the way from the pamir mountains are on either side and it runs into china really fertile really beautiful place.

[39:58] And, um, that on the right is a picture of Oscar and he is a, uh, warlord. I, we didn’t know that at the time, but he owns the, the agritourism place.

[40:10] And when we got there, we, it was beautiful. We were really enjoying it, but he met, uh, came and met us and talked to us a bit through our interpreter, very hospital, very hospital and insisted on taking us on a tour of his holdings. And so we spent two days touring his holdings. And everything i mean it was really impressive um they uh you know he imports farm machinery from germany to do the farming raises mainly barley um but also he imports uh angus cattle from montana horses from texas and kentucky and um had just i mean amazing livestock and and sheep they don’t have to import sheep because they as he said they have the best sheep in the world and they did they had gorgeous sheep with lots of big fat deposits so they but being a warlord is a good deal he um i actually when we got there i was um we had wi-fi for the first time on the trip and we were just kind of curious about him i looked him up and it immediately came up his name came up as minor warlord of the pamir gorge and he’s on restriction he can’t travel in Europe or the U S and stuff, but, but you’d never know it. He was the former secretary of agriculture. Uh-huh.

[41:29] He’s in the middle. So, yeah. But, yeah, he’s the former Secretary of Agriculture and Commerce for the former government of Kyrgyzstan that had been deposed. And as his parting gift, he gifted himself the Pamir Gorge, basically. So, it’s good to be king. I think they had the first free election just after he left. They had the first free elections.

[41:53] We credited ourselves with bringing democracy to Kyrgyzstan. Um and here so while there we had a wonderful time and wonderful food all that but um they invited us to go to the hippodrome and uh his son abec uh was performed was competing in the races and cook brew which is the national game and i’ll explain that in a bit and so while there we got to play with eagles again they have an eagle tournament there during the the horse games the national horse games where all the eagle hunters from around the country come and they they have competitions of hunting rabbits and stuff but they also for the finale of the eagle festival they all release their older uh fledgling birds at once and whoever’s birds come back win prizes but most of the birds that’s when they typically release them and they go back they disperse and go back into the wild and and hunt on their own and some of them will come back to their to their hunters later years later but usually they don’t but um that’s that’s reina kinch the oscars uh.

[43:08] Kirgy’s flying w and this is where we heard some traditional musicians that also recited the mannus poem parts of the mannus poem to it yeah just not all half million acres lines but few And that’s one of their sport horses. That’s a crossbreed between Kyrgyz blood and Kentucky thoroughbreds.

[43:30] That’s Oscar on the left, and that’s Abeck on the right. That’s another national sport is wrestling on horseback, grappling on horseback. It takes a lot of skill. Then they have a bride chase, bride race, which is a Kyrgyz tradition where a bride, if she has more than one suitor, can claim the right to race them. Them and if she beats them she can court or whip the one the suitor she doesn’t like away and then pick her suitor that she wants to marry so it’s it’s not actually very it’s more of a uh play at this point but still and then on back one more slide i’m sorry greg on the right is cock brew that’s the national game and you may know it as kashi that’s what they call it in afghanistan i I think it was in one of the… It’s all over them. It’s in Kyrgyzstan. All the stones and Kazakhstan.

[44:28] It’s the national or international sport. But the Kyrgyz say it started in Kyrgyzstan. Yeah. It’s played now with a headless, legless goat. They have a goat. Or calf. Or calf, but usually a goat. Um and they their their shaman ritually slices its throat gets it sews it shut and cuts its legs and head off and then you have to on horseback reach down and pick up this 40 50 pound goat, and you your team is anywhere from four to, 500 people and the opposing team the same and you try to carry it into the goal of the opposing team it’s very violent very dangerous they have ambulances and the military there to keep people from actually fighting yeah but um the one we saw it was uh teams of what were there about eight or ten about eight or ten yeah yeah and they had from different regions yeah carry this body yeah of When seeing north, we were watching horse races, and we noticed on the north end of this area to these was a goat tied up. Next time we saw the goat, he was out ahead with the guts. And they were carrying him. I forget, did they just throw him out there and the two teams have to fight? Yeah.

[45:53] But these were teams with only eight or ten people on the side. Yeah. And the real ones, they started years ago by hundreds of people on the side. Basically, warfare. Yeah. And it was one blooded animal, calf or goat, and hundreds of people fighting for it. I mean, it was brutal. But the original Cote d’Ivoire was started by shepherds. And they if they saw a juvenile wolf in their sheep the young young kids would run and grab it by the scruff of the neck and carry it to their neighbor’s yurt and throw it through the door as just as a prank and then that would escalate and they’d go back and forth so that’s how it started and um it’s still fun but dangerous yeah it was really i’d run about there for years i was I was really delighted. Yeah. We actually got to watch it and the military did break it up while we were there watching. So, and that was, those are just examples of Oscar’s cattle and horses that he’s and sheep. Yeah. And that’s it that was our trip to kyrgyzstan but we learned a lot, thank you.

[47:13] And i guess it’s okay if we do questions anybody, on the beach i’ll repeat it.

[47:26] Yeah so the question is um oh there you go the question was since the the kyrgyz don’t own the the sheep and the cattle and stuff who owns them most some is chinese or is russian owned but most are chinese owned interests the chinese investors own big herds of animals and then farm them out to the different shepherds that take care of them and uh the question was what how what our route was to get there uh we went through istanbul that was the easiest way you can go through moscow but it was easier to we you have to have permits and stuff for that istanbul we could just with a passport nope yeah my dad said the istanbul airport is very pleasant place to be so, do they practice islam so that is another kyrgyz saying that they are just islamic enough that their neighbors leave them alone that there are mosques everywhere that are but nobody in them um they they are animists they uh their traditional religion so do do they sell their livestock back then goes back to china or russia most of it’s exported to china or russia yeah And in the cities, they consume beef there and stuff.

[48:55] Oh, gosh. Yeah, about 6 million. Yeah, and most of that’s concentrated in three cities. But 6 million people in something the size of Nebraska. I regret it in the first place. Just look at me. I’m taking the microphone around.

[49:23] Aside from meat, what was the rest of the food like? Like what kind of spices do they use? Good question. Yeah. The food was wonderful. I mean, I unfortunately got sick on the plane ride over and I got food poisoning the first night we were there from the hotel food. And so the first couple of days on our journey, I was basically rolling around on the ground in piles of donkey poop and moaning.

[49:53] It was pretty miserable, but I got over that pretty quick. And the, uh, food we had, our cook was a Russian, uh, cook and, um, they, they had actually butchered a lamb for us instead of a U, which was nice to have mutton or lamb instead of mutton. But we really did a lot of mutton as well. Uh, but a lot of horse and donkey sausage, a lot of that gets made into sausage. That was delicious. We had stew made out of horse a couple of times. Lots of dill, lots of cucumbers and the best watermelon and cantaloupe. Watermelon and cantaloupe are from that area. And the watermelon cantaloupe, I’ve never tasted as good of watermelon and cantaloupe. It was delicious. Then plums and apples and all kinds of stuff. What did the horse milk cheese taste like? Um it tasted like yogurt that had kind of gone off with a little bit of vodka in it so that was one other part of the trip um everywhere we went partly because of my dad’s seniority people would offer us vodka and my dad refused most of it so i had to drink it for guest rights and it was the most vodka i’ve drunk in my entire life and i did not enjoy it so it was like turpentine.

[51:18] And dad didn’t eat the cheese or the mare’s milk either but you did try the the kumas the the fermented mare’s milk yeah yeah um the the urban populations have very good literacy good education the rural population is less so but um uh there’s the big concern of the rural people Like the nomadic herders is, um, they have a lot of German tourists and, uh, Scandinavian tourists that come through on motorcycles. And when they, when they’re done on their tour, they leave the dirt bikes there for the kids. And so a lot of the kids leave and go to the city with dirt bikes instead of staying and enjoying the nomadic lifestyle. So their, their population is dwindling and becoming more urban. So that’s, uh, but there’s, they have a strong culture, so they they’re surviving.

[52:16] How lord are you to receive sir the question was how are you received as americans uh very friendly i mean you could have walked through anywhere in the country of kyrgyzstan with hundred dollar bills hanging out your back pocket and you wouldn’t have been robbed i mean it was very safe very friendly um uh very positive towards americans the royal lord especially actually, because he deals, you know, he buys things from America, but, um, like our interpreter had been an, uh, interpreter for the army in Afghanistan. A lot of people had, had been contract workers in Afghanistan. So they had very positive, you know, they’d raise their standard of living, having some income and stuff. So, and there’s a military, a U S military base, one of the only ones in the area in kyrgyzstan so that’s their oh boy um conversion rate for money oh we didn’t have to spend any money what about horses yeah there’s no place to spend cash but, no they didn’t do that but um i think it was obols right i think it’s obols and i think it was like 24 obols to a dollar at the time but, things were relatively inexpensive for us the dollar was strong and.

[53:45] Anything else all right well thank you all for coming appreciate it.

[54:02] I want to thank you, too, for coming. Do come back next week if you can. Look at our website and see what’s going on. Lots of times we have you all because you’re so friendly. Take your chairs and put them up. But because we have an activity next week, don’t do that. Go downstairs, grab some water, have an apple cake, visit a little bit more. Feel free to tour the grounds. and again, thank you so much for being here. Yeah.