Journey 03 · Kyrgyzstan
Grass and Horses
Kyrgyzstan in July
Published 16 Jan 2026 · Travelled 4–24 Jul 2025
- 8 moments
- 21 days
- 730 km
- Summer
- Kyrgyzstan
- 35mm · f/8 · 1/500
- 42.2170° N, 75.7500° E
- Frame 08 of roll two, Portra
- Near Kochkor
- 10:20
- 21°C, clear, hot by ten
Every road out of Kochkor is shared with animals and everybody has agreed about this. The cows have right of way, the man on the horse behind them has right of way, and the driver of my shared taxi simply stopped, turned the engine off, and rolled a cigarette. It took eleven minutes.
- 35mm · f/11 · 1/500
- 41.8400° N, 75.1300° E
- Frame 21 of roll four, Portra
- Song-Köl
- 17:30
- 14°C, clear, wind off the lake
There is no tree in any direction and the light does not behave the way it does anywhere else I have shot — it stays hard from nine until eight and then goes in about four minutes. The yurts come up in June and go down in September and in between this valley has more horses in it than people.
- 35mm · f/5.6 · 1/250
- 41.8450° N, 75.1400° E
- Frames 12 and 14 of roll five, Portra
- 35mm · f/5.6 · 1/250
- 41.8450° N, 75.1400° E
- Frames 12 and 14 of roll five, Portra
- Song-Köl
- 18:10
- 13°C, wind, clear
I shot the wide one because that is what you do, and then I walked round the back and found this, and this is the picture. Somebody's children's clothes pegged to a line strung off a yurt at three thousand metres, drying in an hour in that wind. A boy came out to see what I was doing and then decided it was boring.
04 · What twenty dollars gets you
- 35mm · f/2.8 · 1/250
- 41.9500° N, 74.9000° E
- Frame 02 of roll nine, Tri-X
- Kyzart valley
- 08:15
- 9°C, fog lifting
Children here ride the way children elsewhere use a bicycle — carelessly, at speed, with one hand. He came out of the fog at a canter, stopped dead about six metres from me because he wanted to look at the camera, and held perfectly still for exactly as long as it took me to focus, and then went.
- 35mm · f/4 · 1/125
- 42.4900° N, 78.3900° E
- Frame 27 of roll thirteen, Portra
- Karakol bazaar
- 09:05
- 17°C, rain overnight, wet ground
They bake it against the inside wall of the oven and it comes off in flat discs the size of a dinner plate, and there is a specific ten minutes in the morning when there is more of it than anybody has yet bought. They wheel it through the crowd on a cart and people take it out of the cart as it goes past.
- 35mm · f/8 · 1/500
- 42.5600° N, 78.9500° E
- Frame 06 of roll fifteen, Portra
- Above Jyrgalan
- 15:40
- 16°C, cloud building
Two hours up from the village and the whole hillside is moving. There is no fence anywhere in this country that I saw and the animals are still where their owner expects them to be, which I do not understand and did not get a satisfactory explanation for.
- Tosor, Issyk-Köl
- 16:50
- 24°C, hot, hazy
- Last frame
The lake is 180 km long, sits at sixteen hundred metres, and does not freeze, which is what the name means. From the south shore there is a sand track that runs down to water that is the wrong colour for a country with no coast. I had four frames left and swam instead of using three of them.
- 35mm · f/11 · 1/500
- 42.1300° N, 77.4900° E
- Frame 33 of roll seventeen, Portra
The route
8 stops
Journey completed
Twenty-one days, eight stories
- Distance walked
- 96 km
- Frames exposed
- 612
- Rolls exposed
- 17
- Nights in a yurt
- 6
- Words of Kyrgyz learnt
- about 20
- Of which useful
- 4
- Favourite moment
- The washing line at Song-Köl, which told me more than the mountains did
- Best food
- Bread straight off the wall of the oven at the Karakol bazaar, too hot to hold
