Naryn Part 1 – Hotel of Horrors

Four of us had wanted to visit Naryn for weeks but kept postponing the trip. Whenever our teachers learned of the plans, including one teacher who grew up there, the only reaction was “why would you want to go there – there’s nothing there and it’s terribly boring”. After a long weekend spent investigating the sites, their estimation was proved entirely correct.


Great Lada pic - our taxi had to stop for a few liters of oil (which they sell in old Sprite bottles) at this auto shop.

Scenery on the way there:

The guy who organized the trip told me we were staying in a hotel; however, I neglected to read about the hotel in the guidebook until we were almost there. It states that you will be greeted with “dilapidated rooms and a stinky toilet”. Another helpful guidebook says “avoid this hotel at all costs”. For one of the first times ever, a guidebook was actually correct about something. I ended up bunking in a room with the married couple – they were going to go for the “lux” room until we saw that it was exactly the same room as the others, only with a completely broken toilet and 3 times the cost.

Here’s a picture of the lovely hotel and adjacent restaurant: (note due to all the windows in the restaurant being broken, we assume that it is only open during the summers - free air conditioning and such.)

To our good fortune, there was also a boxing team staying in the rooms directly across from ours. Here’s where the prostitutes enter the story of course. The first night our friend was awoken to the sounds of a “business transaction”, and the next morning he heard what sounded like the men beating the crap out of the poor girl. Now we debated talking to management – however : 1) the managers hated us after we tried to haggle the room price down; and 2) these things just kinda happen a lot here. Not a good idea to go around telling not nice Kyrgyz men what they should or should not do with their prostitute.

The second night we had a prostitute accidently come to our room. When we asked through the door who it was, she said “manager” - so we opened up thinking we’d done something else to make our hosts upset. Nope, instead some short, squat, disheveled prostitute was there – and her friend was hilariously signaling in the background that she’d gone to the wrong side of the hall. Well, it ain’t the Ritz.

After we settled into the hotel we took a long walk down the main street of the town and saw the mosque which was funded by Saudi Arabia. We then met up with one of our teachers, who invited us to her parents’ house to celebrate Kyrman Ait. We were too late for any goat slaughtering, but we saw some on the ride to Naryn. We saw one family taking apart a horse – must have been a big family. Our teacher provided us with lots of yummy donut sticks (borsok) with homemade jam and manti (steamed dumplings filled with meat and onions).

Being a Muslim holiday, there was no chance of finding drinks in town so we turned in early the first day. I wore lots of clothes to bed and slept with a t-shirt over my pillow because I was horrified at the thought of my skin touching the sheets. I had to pick off quite a few darks hairs from the sheets. ::shudder::

And some pics of me - for some reason i always get strange eyes when I try to do the long arm pics: