Kyrgyzstan to China is also accessible from Irkeshtam Pass to Torugart Pass of Kashgar of Xinjiang,China.

Pass of Taldyk: The Great Silky Road today and tomorrow, Andrei Kudryashov (Osh)

The road between the town of Osh and the Pass of Taldyk is anything but a modern highway. It is a country road that climbs the mountains and plunges into gorges, winding its way among sheer cliffs. In any case, this transport artery connects the densely populated Ferghana Valley with the nearly empty Alai Valley, the ancient road to Kashgar and China.

History of the Great Silky Road begins in 128 B.C. when Chinese diplomat Xian Tsyan made his trip through the region to Daivan. Tsyan failed in his mission that ended in a thwarted military invasion. Ever since, however, trade caravans have been taking this road via Alai, keeping respectful distance from the northern steppes roamed by ferocious nomadic tribes. That was how ancient Europe discovered Chinese silks and tea.

The Russian Empire absorbed Central Asia in the 19th century. Encouraging trade with China, it established a system of fortifications to protect caravans. A fortification for the Russian garrison was built on the bank of the mountainous Gulcha River on the way from Osh to Kashgar in 1892. Vendors from Kokand, Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara were issued Russian passports and offered protection.

The ancient caravan path to Irkeshtam was broadened the following year. The Russian outPort on the border with China had stood there since 1885. Cotton, iron, sugar, tobacco, and matches were ferried from Ferghana to China. Tea, silk, porcelain, and leather were imported from China, just like a millennium ago. The Alai Valley, an endless pasture in the mountains, provided meat for all of Turkestan. (In fact, that was when the Alai meat bazaar was established in Tashkent.)

Bent on taking over the Pamirs and finding a way to India that would bypass Afghanistan, the empire also built a road from Alai to Badakhshan. Cataclysms of the 20th century, however, changed political map of the region.

These days, China is particularly interested in the Alai Valley as a part of the Great Silky Road that in the next century may connect countries of the Asian-Pacific region with Europe and Middle East. China, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan signed an accord to build a regional highway there in the middle of the 1990's. Its Uzbek part was completed by 2000 (a highway and two tunnels on the passes of Kamchik and Rezak connecting the Tashkent region with the Ferghana Valley). Road signs "Andijan - Osh - Kashgar" may be seen in the center of Tashkent nowadays. China brought modern infrastructures right to the very border with Kyrgyzstan. The cut between Osh and Irkeshtam is the only part of the road that has to be built yet. It is planned for 2008 with financial help from the China and the Asian Bank of Development.

The road through the picturesque mountains is therefore difficult to negotiate for the time being. Repair shops are infrequent and gas stations completely unheard-of (gas is sold by the locals in plastic bottles for mineral water). There are some roadside diners and even a camping (rather a camp of yurtas) for tourists. This correspondent never made it that far. Our Opel's tyres did not stand a chance on the sharp rocks.

In the meantime, trucks with trailers heavily loaded with cheap consumer goods and commodities from China travel the road from Irkeshtam day and night, on their way to bazaars and marketplaces in Osh and Qorasuv. Not even the customs can stop this flood of commodities that meet the demands of the not particularly choosy citizens of Uzbekistan.

Osh second-hand dealers and drivers forget about rest making these endless and fairly hazardous runs. The Pass of Taldyk (3,615 meters above the sea level of almost 1,000 meters higher than Kamchik) is regarded as a particularly difficult part. It is covered with snow between October and June. Temperatures drop below zero even on summer nights. Drivers say, however, that traffic across the pass never stops, winter or not. Every now and then they themselves are compelled to clear the road off the snow drifts. They sometimes spend months on end in the Alai kishlaks before the weather clears enough to try and get back on the road. In short, little changed here since their distant ancestors negotiated caravan paths of the Great Silky Road.

The road between Osh and Irkeshtam in the meantime may lose the status of an international transport corridor to another strategic route. The government of China is resolved to build a railroad from Kashgar to Uzbekistan via Kyrgyzstan. At first, the idea was to have this railroad built across the Alai Valley by all involved parties including the European Union and Azerbaijan. Uzbekistan insists on this particular route via Irkeshtam and Osh to Andijan. Kyrgyzstan in the meantime prefers the railroad built via the Naryn region to Jalalabad. Considerably more expensive, this railroad will connect the northern and the southern parts of Kyrgyzstan and revive economy of the central Tien Shan. Some Kyrgyz political scientists point out that a railroad across the Alai Valley to Osh and Andijan will promote the interests of Uzbekistan alone and make it the regional leader indeed. The southern part of Kyrgyzstan all but severed from the northern will find resistance to the "Uzbek aspirations" backed by Russia and China even more difficult in this case. Even if construction of the railroad is really initiated sometime over the next decades, it is unlikely to leave the road between Osh and Kashgar empty of traffic.

Talking to this correspondent, many of the locals praise President Islam Karimov's authoritarian policy as "strong and reasonable" or as "the only thing that will maintain order here in the region". The Kyrgyzes sympathize with President Vladimir Putin even more. Aware of the economic benefits of the increase of China's influence with the region, they are nevertheless apprehensive of it. Kyrgyz Moslems openly admit that they view the Chinese as godless atheists ruled by a Communist government. On the other hand, Kyrgyzes fear that the opening of transport routes will bring to the thinly-populated Kyrgyzstan crowds of Chinese immigrants who will certainly challenge the locals in absolutely all spheres of life.

Economic and geopolitical considerations notwithstanding, the Alai Valley is certainly an attraction as long as one is prepared to forsake certain conveniences for a chance to see nature of Asia as it was millennia ago. In fact, its vicious beauty can be seen without so much as even approaching the famous peaks over 7,000 meters high that take their toll of climbers every year.

Some frightening wonders occur on the road between Osh and Taldyk. Multicolored rocks and cliffs of accurate geometric forms comprise the compositions that define imagination. Monumental canyons plunging into the rivers fed by glaciers, lucid mires, crooks, the Tashkura Plateau the locals bring their sheep to graze on... And the impossible town of Gulcha with its minarets against the backdrop of carmine peaks, as though a mirage of the ages gone long ago.

This road where every turn offers the promise of something never previously glimpsed permits the traveller to grasp the meaning of the ancient Sufi phrase, "Whatever inside us that compels us to keep looking for something and waiting for something is exactly what all of us are looking and waiting for."

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