A day of well earned rest. I spent today sleeping in (10 hrs sleep!), mindlessly scrolling (2-3 hrs), and route planning at a cafe in town (Lighthouse; reasonably recommended).

today’s parking spot: lighthouse coffee

a bee gets acquainted with the coffee accompaniments

suburban Karakol (outside Lighthouse)

Most of my time was spent trying to find out a route from Karakol to Osh which:

1. Was paved all (most) of the way (I really don’t want to play around with mud after yesterday)
2. Avoided Bishkek (just not a fan of the city)

adventure vibes

I had a few hiccups on ChatGPT, where it would very confidently give me routing instructions, and then when the points were plotted on a map they did not make much sense at all…

ChatGPT’s confusing route suggestions

Ultimately I spent a bunch of time on Yandex Maps (which I think despite the routing issue yesterday, is still the best solution for this region), and helpfully a user had uploaded dashcam footage of the entire route!

Scrubbing through Yandex Maps

So about 15 mins scrubbing through at 8x speed later, I’ve decided to do the following:

Final planned route from Karakol to Osh

Date	From	To	Distance (km)	Duration (hrs)
6 Oct	Karakol	Balykchy	218	5.0
7 Oct	Balykchy	Cholpon-Ata	80	2.0
8 Oct	Cholpon-Ata	Kök-Oy	271	4.0
9 Oct	Kök-Oy	Toktogul	226	4.5
10 Oct	Toktogul	Osh	375	5.0

This route:

• follows the Southern side of Issiy-kul lake, which is supposed to be less developed and more fun to explore (but still has paved roads)
• then goes up towards the main resort town in the north, Cholpon-Ata (I am interested in seeing how developed it is / how developed tourism infrastructure is at Issiy-kul lake)
• Then goes via Kök-Oy (avoiding Bishkek), travelling through the Tien Shan mountain range, to join the M41 to Osh (the previous route I took).

Altitude profile showing the mountain passes

It looks like each of these stops has guest houses available for staying at, altitudes do not go too high (which would mean ice/snow potentially on the road), and do not have any dirt roads. It also is a novel route which is nice, so I can see more of Kyrgyzstan.

There is still a bit of flex in the timetable:

• I can stop before Balykchy and stay at a yurt camp along the way if I want to spend more time exploring the southern side
• I can push on past Kök-Oy to Suusamir (extra 2 hrs)
• I can push on past Toktogul to Kara-kul (extra 1.5 hrs)

Tomorrow; Balykchy!

Some stats:

• 11.3L Fuel added
• 1 unique interaction
• 18g coffee consumed
• 4 KMs travelled