Issyk-Kul

Issyk-Kul is a sea at sixteen hundred metres: a hundred and eighty kilometres long, six hundred and sixty-eight deep, faintly salt, ringed by two ranges of the Tian Shan whose snow never leaves, and warm enough — the name means the hot lake — that it has never once frozen. The north shore was the Soviet Union's Riviera and keeps its sanatoriums, its beaches and, on a field of boulders above Cholpon-Ata, three thousand years of petroglyphs of ibex and hunters. The east end has Karakol, a Russian frontier town with a wooden Orthodox church and a wooden Dungan mosque built like a Chinese temple without a nail. The south shore is the wild one: red rocks called the Seven Bulls, a canyon called Fairy Tale, a gorge with waterfalls at Barskoon, and a village where men still hunt with eagles.

The traveller comes from Bishkek, four hours over the pass, and sleeps first on the north shore for a swim and the petroglyphs at Cholpon-Ata; goes on to Karakol for the mosque, the church, the Dungan noodles and the Sunday animal market; drives the south shore slowly — Jeti-Ögüz for the red rocks and the yurt camps up the valley, Barskoon for the gorge, Skazka for the canyon at sunset, Bokonbayevo for the eagle hunters, if a demonstration can be arranged honestly; sleeps in a yurt on the shore, and swims at dawn in water that is warmer than the air; and, with legs and days, walks up any gorge from Karakol into the Tian Shan, where the glaciers begin.

The Guide's honesty: Issyk-Kul is Kyrgyzstan's summer and the north shore in August is a Central Asian beach holiday — loud, cheap, sunburnt and cheerful — while the south shore is the country's quiet: choose knowingly, or take both; the water is cold outside July and August and the sun at altitude burns in any month; the eagle-hunting demonstrations range from real to staged — go with a community tourism office, and pay the hunter, not the middleman; the roads are decent and the marshrutkas are the buses; the yurts are the way to sleep and the toilets are outside; and the lake's warmth is a fact of geology, not of the season — bring a jacket for the evenings anyway.