Today we went to Ala Archa National Park, which is only about an hour outside of Bishkek, so there were lots of tourists there.  It’s in the mountains, so some people were backpacking up to the glaciers, but not us.  We stuck to the very nice asphalt trail. Unfortunately, I did not spot any snow leopards. The sign with pictures of all of the different wildlife in the park included snow leopard, so I was very hopefual to spot a few despite missing that one key item necessary for snow leopards, which is snow. I’d have also been happy with a Siberian Ibex or a Himalayan Marmot or a Pika.  But nothing! Not even a Red Squirrel.  At least the mountains were beautiful and the river was noisy. Got some good photos, too. That’s the second most important part after snow leopards–photos for the Instagram. 

We spent a little less than two hours at the park because that’s all the time you need to walk on the paved trail. Then we headed back to town for lunch. Coincidentally, it was another branch of the same restaurant we ate at yesterday in the mall and also where we had the smorgasbord of dessert during our food tour. So, we ate at the same restaurant 3 days in a row. The restaurant is actually an Uzbek restaurant.

We  also walked around for a brief city tour, and we saw a couple of statues that we hadn’t seen yet, so that was exciting. Then, we wandered around the Kyrgyzstan History Museum. It’s pretty nice with all of the artifacts you would expect to see in a history museum. The thing that was the most fascinating was a wooden horse saddle from like the 8th century. That thing did not look comfortable at all.

We were just exhausted by the end of the day, and still full from lunch, so we just grabbed a tasty yogurt from the grocery store for dinner. That about sums up our day.

Love,

thetwinsontour