A herd of horses. A bad river crossing. A tracking snow leopard. A thief and a smuggler. A summit push. A failure. Oh sweet and heartbreaking failure.
Kyrgyzstan, you taught me patience, you taught me kindness, you taught me how to deal with failure. That there’s a whole world out there. But I’m already forgetting…
We have no astounding story of human defiance to tell. We have no badge that makes us different. We are just four friends who played together for years in the mountains of New Zealand and longed for an adventure in a land we knew nothing about except for what we could find on Wikipedia. We quit our jobs and took all the pennies once destined for a deposit on a house and gambled it all on an adventure.
We landed in Osh and the nerves slipped away at the ease and friendliness of the people and we were off into unknown territory. Everything a bit more difficult with no common language between us and everyone in front of us.
A hired horseman and his two children to help get our stuff into the mountains. Meeting Jenishbek and his family, now this is what I came here for. All our gear loaded into a trailer full of horse shit and me and Maria with it. Chugging along a 4WD track (that’s generous description) to meet a seven year old with four horses in tow. All our worldly possessions haphazardly tied onto them we headed up the valley into the unknown.
Jet lag, lack of sleep, altitude and a snowline 1000m higher than expected. Three weeks of camping in this remote place in Kyrgyzstan desperate for some profound experience. Desperate to be changed. Life is difficult. I am exhausted and I haven’t even done anything yet. How hard even the simplest of tasks are. I wrote in my journal, ‘when I get back, I promise not to take it all for granted. How I crave the little luxuries of modern life; a shower, a bed, fresh fruit and vegetables. I will never complain again…’ Oh, how quick I am to forget, to fall back into the trappings of modern life, how naive I was to think I’d be changed. That everything would be different.
Our stashed gear is gone. Stolen. We’ve discovered that this is a known smugglers route. No one told us. Any hope of first ascents or even doing any mountaineering at all slowly flickers out. But who cares, we’re safe. Didn’t we always say it’s about the adventure, not the summit? Or is that just a thing failures say to comfort themselves?
The days pass. We leave this place that has been our home for three weeks. We see other humans again for the first time. Kindness bubbles, food is shared. We are welcomed into people’s homes. Human connection. Meeting people that live so differently from us, and yet there is always something to connect, stories to share, laughs to be had. There is still some magic left in the world.
Weeks have passed. Now we’re back into our normal lives. The memories are fading. The lessons learned, the newfound perspectives forgotten. That brilliant idea of quitting our jobs is not feeling so fun and freeing any more with rent to pay and a dwindling bank account. Weather front after weather front rolling in and offering little chance to escape to the mountains to remind ourselves of the good stuff.
But we’ve been here before, such are the lives of all those restless souls cursed with wanderlust. It’s worth it, right? To live a life of excitement and adventure?
Orla O'Muiri 