An Ode to Kyrgyzstan

🇰🇬 An Ode to Kyrgyzstan Goodbye, Kyrgyzstan — you wild, untamed soul of a land.

Four months of riding, hiking, sweating, bleeding, freezing, and laughing my way through you, and I still don’t have the language big enough to hold what you gave me. Some places I visit. Others crawl under my skin and never leave. You did the second.

The first thing you hit me with wasn’t your beauty — though you wear it like a weapon. It was your silence. A deep, ancient stillness that sinks into bone and thought. Snow-capped peaks ripping through cloud. Valleys so green they look soft until you walk them and feel how much grit they hide. Air thick with horse sweat, wood smoke, and something rare and forgotten — freedom.

I rode Tengri, my steel beast, a 230cc Kayo dirtbike that never complained, through tracks that barely deserved to be called roads. They were more like scars cut into the earth by time and hooves and stubborn survival. Every bend punched another “holy shit” out of my chest. Cows, goats, and sheep blocked the way like they owned it — because they did. Bells rang through thin mountain air while kids in dusty clothes waved, their laughter riding the wind as naturally as the birds.

Your people were like your peaks — cold at first, guarded, shaped by hard weather and harder lives. But once you cracked them open, they were all heart. Kumis poured, bread was broken, stories were shared with hands that had known work and loss and endurance. Nomads still moving with the seasons, still listening to the land, still understanding what most of the modern world has forgotten.

Then there were the wanderers. Strangers who became family over broken bikes, cheap beers, and conversations that went too deep too fast — about fear, purpose, love, and why some of us can’t live small. The Ak-Su Traverse carved itself into me. Days of climbing, swearing, and standing on ridgelines so sharp they made you feel like the sky could cut you. I stood on Mount Utycheel, lungs burning, legs shaking, laughing and crying because I’d earned that view with every ounce of stubbornness I own. It wasn’t peace up there. It was power.

And Lenin Peak. Advance Camp. No gear. Just storms tearing through the night, tents flapping like frightened hearts, thunder shaking the glacier beneath me, hail hammering the ground. I lay there grinning like a lunatic, thinking: this is living. Not safe. Not easy. Real.

Kyrgyzstan didn’t hand me comfort. It gave me dust in my hair, scars on my legs, friends for life, and the reminder that a woman doesn’t need permission to take up space in wild places.

You broke me open. You stitched me back together with wind, stone, and sky. So here’s to the land of horses and high passes. To endless horizons and unfiltered truth. To a place that left its dirt under my skin and its spirit in my blood.

Until next time. Goodbye, Kyrgyzstan.

-Irene Baksheev

Instagram: @lights_camera.adventure