Life's an adventure expedition

ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
Back in 2012, my wife and I moved to Kyrgyzstan, so this thread may be a little different. With Bishkek as home base we are exploring our new home region. Much of what we do has an expedition feel to it, but they are more like short trips that make up a possibly life long expedition.

The first part of this thread will be catchup, starting with our round the US trip in the spring and summer of 2012 followed by some of the various expeditions in Kyrgyzstan. Once I'm caught up I'll start adding expeditions as we make them (I now own a jeep tourist business here, so we make trips regularly).

In April 2012 we sold my business and on May 15 2012 we sold our house in Michigan (we were temporary Michigan residents, I'm a South Carolina native and my wife is a North Carolina native). Since we didn't have to be in Bishkek for work until July 25, we took off on a 1985 Honda Shadow VT500C that I had built the previous winter just for this trip. We made it back into Michigan just in time to leave for K-stan. We hit 23 states and covered over 9000 miles (15,000 km) in that time. Of the 8 weeks we spent 5 on the road and the other three chilling with close friends and family. Some highlights of the trip are below:
Starting in Detroit:
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Chicago:
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Northern Iowa:
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The bike, my wife named it Abram, somewhere in eastern South Dakota. I bought it with a bit over 6000 miles on it in the early summer of 2011 for $700. Learned to ride, rebuilt it into it's blacked out, semi-ratbike form for about $500, and sold it when we left the country in 2012 with over 20,000 miles on it for $900:
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My wife, she's a trooper to put up with my crazy ideas!
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ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
US Motorcycle Trip--South Dakota

Trip Continued:

Somewhere in day 3, almost to the badlands. Ended up riding through the badlands at about 10-11 pm coming from the south (we tried to stay off of the interstates, so ended up taking the long way around by accident a lot of times).
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Recovering from three days straight of hard riding:
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My wife snapping pictures of bison over my shoulder:
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This bison decided we represented a territorial infringement and should be flattened. My wife snapped the picture while I cranked the throttle and dumped the clutch.
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The badlands, possibly one of the best places to ride a motorcycle in the whole world...that is if you just like to cruise:
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Test driving a local rancher's Unimog!
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ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
US Motorcycle Trip--Wyoming and Utah

We crossed Wyoming quickly, just stopping for the night in Riverton, WY where I had worked on a wheat harvest crew as a teenager.
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There wasn't much else in Wyoming. We did hit cross winds in south pass that were way in excess of 60mph...blew us clean off the road. Not a fun experience.

Flaming gorge which spans the Wyoming/Utah border.
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Random old cabin somewhere in Utah
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Ghost town near Moab, UT:
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Got to run now...I'll pick it up next time I can in Moab, UT.
 

ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
Sorry for the delays y'all...it's been a really crazy couple of weeks. I'll get back to posting soon I hope (maybe even this afternoon). On the business side I recently posted a story of how my wife and I ended up in Kyrgzstan and it includes a few picks of the country (more elsewhere on the website). Check it out if you want and I'll try and get to writing more story soon.

My recent story, "Why Kyrgyzstan"
 

ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
Picking up in Moab, UT.

We rolled into Moab after a blistering sandstorm and alternating between freezing and roasting all day. I love coming into Moab from the North, it's really an awesome feeling as you ride toward a red rock cliff then the road just snakes between a narrow space in the rocks for a while before dropping down into Moab. If there is one place I always tell people around the world to visit if they love the outdoors it's Moab. Sure, some parts are a bit touristy, but you've got access to great off-roading :smiley_drive:, Some of the least crowded national parks (Canyonlands is almost on the scale of the grand canyon, but is listed as the quietest national park in the USA); Arches is just iconic, and there's good food at the Moab Brewery when you're done for the day.

The road north of Moab...coming down toward the cliffs.
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Entering Arches National Park
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Arches NP
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Arches NP
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Arches NP: Landscape Arch
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One of my personal fascinations, petroglyphs. I know archaeologists and other brainiacs love to talk about the deeper meanings behind them, but I'm partial to the theory that they are just from a bunch of drunk teenagers and represent the stone-age version of graffiti. Nonetheless I find them fascinating.
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One of the canyons in Canyonlands NP
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If I recall correctly, these were called the Finger Gorges
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Some kind strangers agreed to take our picture for us:
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So after spending the morning in Arches, the afternoon in Canyonlands, we went back to Arches for the evening to watch the sunset. We found this fortress looking pile of arches and climbed up to sit:
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And after the sunset:
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ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
The next day we had to leave because it was getting close to memorial day and all the hotels were booked up. We didn't really plan very far ahead on this trip, and we don't regret it. We would get up and decide where to go for that day. We had a couple of basic time frame stops around the country, but that was it. So we headed out of our very friendly hotel (I think it was called "Adventure Inn") and left toward southern Utah. We stayed the night somewhere near Bryce canyon (maybe the town was called Paradise? but honestly I'm not sure). The weather was turning colder, and the next day we headed for Bryce Canyon.

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Bryce Canyon is filled with these strange formations called "Hoodoos"
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But with temperatures in the 20s (a bit below zero for you Celsius people), we were pretty tired of looking at national parks and decided to pull the plug and head for where my brother was camping in Nevada. We had planned to ride through Zion, but decided it just wasn't worth it. My brother was stationed at Nellis AFB at the time and was camping with some friends somewhere north of Pioche, NV. We couldn't find anywhere to stay in Pioche, so we went straight to their campsite, cold, tired, and ready to spend some time with family.
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The bike and it's riders had already survived far more than anyone predicted we would.
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Playing cards at the campsite:
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My brother's daily driver:
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Finally some quality campfire time:
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And the obligatory target practice in the local mountains:
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ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
After a few days of camping, we finally headed back into civilization and Vegas (if Vegas can really be called civilized territory). After 40 miles across the Mohave by dirt, we hit pavement and stopped to air up my tires from my brother's built in compressor.
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As you can imagine based on the size of my brother's jeep, he doesn't like doing highway, so he went most of the rest of the way back to Vegas through some really rough roads that just weren't worth trying on a 27 year old cruiser.

Vegas...well, since I really don't care to gamble or drink, there isn't much there that's of interest. The city does look beautiful at night, however, in the daytime it looks like a cheap carnival.
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We spent a week there hanging out with my brother and making use of his garage to catch up on all the little things that we needed to fix. Other than a broken bracket on the exhaust that I fixed with some of that steel putty and a hose clamp, not much had gone completely wrong. That said, whenever the bike got hot, one cylinder would start cutting out, we traced it down to issues with 27 year old electronic ignition parts. We tried fabricating some new coils and wires out of car parts, but couldn't get things really working right. Finally we found the main culprit, the transistor that controlled one cylinder was overheating and failing.
Note the scorched part on the top left of the board.
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It took two tries, but we did get the transistor replaced, but in the process we blew the new coils, so rather than try another experimental repair, we went back to the old coils which worked well enough now that the control board was fixed.
Original transistors: Note scorch on the top right:
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New transistors:
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Box taped back up and ready to go under the seat.
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So repairs done (except for the leaking intake manifold boot that we would discover much later) we finally got on our way again and headed toward the grand canyon.
 

ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
So first day out from Vegas on Route 66 and the grab rails under the passenger seat snapped due to the pressure from our undoubtedly overloaded luggage rack. We managed to limp into town carefully while making sure nothing was rubbing out tires. We stopped at the local fuel station and asked if he could weld it, he said he didn't know how to weld, so I asked if he had a welder I could use, nope...no luck. But he said there was a guy down a ways if you went to the next dirt road, then turned at a stop sign, then turned where the gravel started, or something like that. We found four guys sitting around a large shop drinking a couple beers and just waiting for something to happen. He had us fixed in short order and back on the way. His repair held until Ohio on the last day of the trip, so we figure that was pretty good, it lasted longer than my original weld did. He had this sweet '48 pan head just sitting there that I couldn't help but drool over a bit.
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We road back into town, caught some food at the Road Kill Cafe (the only place we got mild food poisoning from on the trip incidentally), then road the rest of the way to Williams, Arizona.
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From Williams we spent a day at the Grand Canyon, you know, you kinda just have to. But really, we liked Canyonlands a lot better, there were just too many people at the Grand Canyon.
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The lookout tower is pretty cool.
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Williams was also a nice place. We stayed in a 1940s motel.
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After Williams we headed for Durango, CO to see Mesa Verde National Park (my favorite park). Along the way we happened on Sunset Crater with its 900 year old lava flows.
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There were also some nearby ruins of an ancient settlement
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Buying jewelry at a roadside stand.
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Durango was another lovely town. Mesa Verde NP was also awesome. Just like petroglyphs, I love old ruins. Anything that lets me image ancient civilizations as they actually were, I love it.
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Pardon an anthropological digression for a minute. When we were touring some of the cliff dwellings, one of our guides was very knowledgeable and had personally studied much of the history having degrees in the subject. She was telling us the ancient legends associated with their worship. Supposedly the world has been destroyed 4 or 5 times depending on whose set of legends you listen to. Each time their people were brought through the destruction being pulled through a hole in the ground. Therefore they worshiped in these pits with holes in the ground.
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After hearing this story, a little over a year later we were sitting in a yurt in the mountains of the At-Bashi region of Kyrgyzstan listening to Batma Edje tell Kyrgyz legends. One of which was that the world had been destroyed 5 times, each time the Kyrgyz were brought through by the maker, with Muslim influence they stated that during Noah's flood they were so high in the mountains that the water never reached them. However, the rhythm and style of the story were identical, even if a few details varied. It's certainly not proof, but in addition to the definite physical similarities as well as the similar styles of dress with the pre-soviet Kyrgyz, it definitely lends credence to the idea that they split some time before Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait.
 

ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
From Durango we blasted south heading for the Mexican border. After being cold for most of the trip from Michigan all the way until we road into Vegas, and even a little in Colorado, we were now getting scorched ever day. The day we left the campsite in Nevada it was in the 40s, and it was about 103 in Vegas. By the time we were heading across NM it was in the 90s and Texas reached 110.

Old Town Albuquerque
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Then Roswell, NM
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And the best sticker that I think we got for the gas tank the whole trip: "Resistance if futile"
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Texas was a scorcher.
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After months of riding through a lot of desert, after Del Rio, we finally made it to the coast at Corpos Christi. From Corpus Christi we stayed on the barrier Islands as much as there was highway through them taking ferries from one island to the next. We stopped in Galveston and then headed to Thibidoux.
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After a while we finally crossed into the land of Bayous
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In our pics there are lots of pics of swamp along the rode as my wife tried to get pics of gators. The best she ever got was this one. If you look right in the center, you can see a pair of eyes sticking up from the water.
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Amazingly, other than one day coming through a mountain pass in northern Utah for about 10 minutes, we didn't get any rain until about 5 minutes after passing the Louisiana border. We spent a night in Thibidoux for one reason, this song:
Amos Moses

If you're ever in Thibidoux, check out Sweet Tooth Ice Cream Shop...The proprietor is a young guy just trying to make a go of it. He's very friendly and we were impressed by a young man who's making his own way.
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After Thibidoux we road through New Orleans on our way north to Alabama to see a friend. Until I moved to Bishkek, New Orleans was the worst place I think I ever road a motorcycle, the craziest drivers, hardest roads to follow, and the worst condition "pavement."
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When we made it to my old college friends house in Alabama and a mutual college friend drove up from Florida to hang out. Now, we all might have a bit of a redneck streak, so out came the potato guns and the gator skins.
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Lots of good barbecue was consumed. If you're ever in Decatur, you have to try a Barbecue stuffed baked potato at Big Bob Gibson's Barbecue...it's probably the best barbecue I've ever had, and I grew up in South Carolina, so I should know.

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Fried fresh caught fish from my friends grandfather's farm pond. It doesn't get much more deep south.
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With a stopover in Atlanta to see my wife's brother and sister-in-law, we headed north to the northwest corner of South Carolina to see my parents, where I grew up on the edge of the Appalachians (undoubtedly the origin of my redneck streak).
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ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
Then on to North Carolina to my wife's dad's place and one of her sisters. That of course meant lots of giving rides to all my nieces.
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An awesome North Carolina farm sunset
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Then the stop at an Arab friend's wedding
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The last night of the road trip was spent in Williamson, WV, home to the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
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Finally in Ohio, our overloaded luggage rack broke again, and I had to ratchet strap it into place, but we made it. Our last day was a scorching 103 in Ohio. But finally after over 9000 miles, we rolled into Hamtramck, to be greeted by the urban grunge of the place that had been our home for the last 6 years.
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This is the map of our trip. The red outline roughly follows the trip described above. The blue line is a test trip we made in April to see a friend in Poughkeepsie, NY.
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ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
The bike at the end of the trip. Managed to sell it for $900, which considering the over 15,000 miles I put on it in just a little over a year, it was really pretty good.

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ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
A few days after getting back to Michigan, we packed our bags, and headed to the airport for the last time. We had sold everything: house, business, cars, motorcycle, everything. All we owned in the world fit in 4 checked bags and 2 carry-ons.
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We flew Detroit to New York, spent the night with friends, then flew New York-Moscow-Bishkek.

I won't bore you with the details of settling in, but will start posting the stories of each trip as I have time.

First a few pics from around Bishkek.

A friend's KTM which immediately gave the the urge to get a bike, especially after he let me take it for a spin.
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One of the main bazaars in Bishkek
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The car parts bazaar called "Kudai Bergen"
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ryanh1006

Kyrgyzstan Expat
First adventure...Issyk Kul and yurt camp

After a couple weeks the school we were teaching offered at us the chance to visit Issyk Kul and a yurt camp nearby on their dime. Free travel is never something we turn down, so off we went.

Bar Bulak, Issyk Kul Region
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Issyk Kul might never freeze in the winter due to it's salt content, but that doesn't mean that it's warm!
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Riding up to the yurt camp after spending a night in a house by Issyk Kul we started to see the first of what I now know are standard Islamic cemeteries in this region.
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The yurt camp. This one is used by some shepherds, but stays built year round, so not a proper Kyrgyz nomadic camp, but still a real yurt.
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Inside a Kyrgyz yurt
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The next day we trekked to a lake high above the camp...it was pretty much the trek of death, straight up the mountains. I'm not the best at trekking, and even the mountain climbers in our group had issues.
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Our guide
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More pics of the area and the hike
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Chilling back at the yurt (one of the other members of our group)
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The outhouse there has one of the best views in the world.
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