I had a strange experience a few months ago. I am currently posted in Kyrgyzstan and in May-June I took a few weeks off to just explore the backcountry and get into some of those far away mountain ranges to the south and east of Bishkek and the Lake Isu Kul region. We loaded up our 4Runner with our dog, an SO 8 man tipi, stove, vehicle recovery gear, etc. and headed south and east down towards the Chinese and Tajik borders.
We went to Tash Rabat, an old stone fortress that was used by traveling caravans for protection in the 1400s on the Silk Road, in May there were no tourists there, so we had the place to ourselves except a herd of yaks and the elderly woman that lives next to the ruins in a little house. Against the snowy peaks it looked like something out of the Lord of the Rings movies. We tried to drive over the Fergana range on some old Soviet dirt roads to Jalabad but finally reached a river that was icy and too swift to ford. We also went to the big mountain country south and east of Enilchek, a Soviet mining ghost town at the base of the glaciers and several 7000-meter peaks.
On one trip we headed down to a lake called Kol Su down on the Chinese border. It is in the frontier zone, so you need to get a permit from the Kyryz border patrol to go past their last outpost and into the unpatrolled region. The lake is about 45 miles south of the Kyrgyz border patrol station. There are no towns for at least 40-miles on the Chinese side so the KG southeast border is a 300+ mile long belt of wild unpopulated country with no roads, towns, or settlements except for some nomadic families that winter in the valleys and run their stock in the mountain pastures during the spring and summer.
We were about 20 miles south of the border patrol check point and it was getting dark and raining fairly hard. I found a rocky bench to drive off of the dirt road and we parked the truck about 100 yards off the side of the road. Since we were just going to continue driving the next day i didn't want to set up camp in the rain to just break it down again, so we slept in the 4Runner. About midnight my dog started snarling at something, waking my wife up who then woke me up. Copper is a Redbone Coonhound who does not like strange men (he loves women and children) and is a good watch dog. When he alerts to something, there is something out there. I turned the ignition and lights on and standing about 20 yards in front of me was a man wearing a blanket and some type of hood. The rain was coming sideways but the person just stood there staring at us. I lowered the window and called out to him in Russian to ask what he wanted of if needed help but he didn't respond, he just stared at us. I watched him for about 30 seconds and then put the truck in drive and drove off. I had just woken up and to see some hooded figure staring at us when i knew there were no settlements around kind of unnerved me. We drove for another 30 min and then parked again figuring he would never cach up to us if he was on foot.
The weird thing was that no one in that country travels on foot. Everyone we came across outside of some valleys was on horseback. So why the person on foot approached in the darkness without calling out or anything is beyond me. Maybe he was going to see if we were OK. The people of that region are generally very reserved but friendly. We helped pull out a few stuck vehicles during our travels and one night we got 2 feet of wet snow dumped overnight (bent the pole of the SO 8 man tipi which SO replaced, great customer service!) when we were camping up around 11,500. After we got unstuck a few times, we got to a lower elevation and found a family with yaks living in some valley in a yurt and a wood shack. We asked if we could wait the storm out and set up camp a little ways from their homestead. They insisted we come in and eat with their family during the storm. I offered a sizable amount of money several times to pay for the food each time, but they refused the money each time since hospitality is an important part of the Kyrgyz nomadic culture. So all of the people we met during those 4 weeks were very hospitable. But waking up to see a figure looking at us in the darkness where there was no village within 40 miles and any cowboys would have been tucked away in their yurts during that storm was pretty unnerving.
