I just came back from Chong-Kemin. On the way to the town our driver stubbornly refused to hear our suggestion on the itinerary, just to get lost in the middle of nowhere.
When we finally got to convince him that we were very close to leaving the country rather than reaching the Community Based Tourism we were looking for, he noticed we were running out of
fuel. We had to drive 25 minutes back to find a petrol pump.
It took us 5 hours to settle in our Yurta, that was 150 km far away from Bishkek.
On the way back we decided to take a collective taxi, here known as marshrutka. We paid only 100 som (around 2 dollars) against the 1450 soms we had to pay to the taxi driver.
Unfortunately there's only one marshrutka per day heading to Bishkek, and number of passengers quickly reached 42 units, out of 12 seats.
The first half of our trip was something in between the last level of Tetris and a concert of Madonna.
Anyway after the first "big" town half of the people got off, so we seated somehow (three people on 2 places seat each row).
On the other hand, the trip was much faster: it took us only 3 hours to reach Bishkek, bus stops included: our (collective) driver was apparently very sure about his experience on the itinerary, and drove always keeping 65 km/hr as average speed on tortuous scruffy dirt tracks...
it's good to be alive.
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