Cultural Experiences in Karakol: The Marshrutka Ride to Karakol

My trip to Karakol started off with a marshrutka ride. A friend of a local friend met me at the Western (new) bus terminal to help me to find, haggle with the driver of, and get safely on a marshrutka to Karakol. He found one for 150 som (about A$6) but after waiting for 20min without a sign that this marshrutka driver would get 7 other passengers before Christmas, he found me another one for 200som. I got to sit in the front, which was a bigger blessing than I'd thought, because there must have been about 15 people crammed in the back. Yes, everyone had a seat, but the seats were close together and cramped. This in combination with the darkened windows in the back of the marshrutka would have made my 6 hour trip a lot more arduous. I bet someone would have had bad b.o. too, and I would have had to put up with it for 6 hours and then get off smelling bad. This sounds so ridiculously minor, but in such close and stale quarters for a 6 hour trip along bumpy roads, it would have been awful.



Instead, I got to sit up the front and look out the front and the window. There were some nice sights but I couldn't help thinking that it would be a beautiful road later in spring or in summer or in autumn, when there was green grass and leaves on trees. The road was often lined with forlorn, leafless, haggard skeletons of trees, which would, I imagined, be delightful in any other season, perhaps even earlier in winter when they were snow-laden.





At one point, we stopped, the marshrutka driver got out, and the young boy who had been loaded into the front seat between me and the driver was entrusted with the task of keeping his foot on the brake pedal to prevent the marshrutka from rolling forward. He can't have been more than about 8 or 9 years old, but he carried out the task with equanimity.

The marshrutka driver, greedy for money, made sure that the marshrutka was absolutely full at all times by stopping frequently to pick up extra passengers, having dropped some off along the way to Karakol. This was frustrating and I discovered that one can understand grumbling in any language – the babushkas behind me were mumbling in a complaining tone, and though all I caught was the word 'express' (which is the same in Russian as in English), it couldn't have been clearer that they were voicing my internal discontent at the false advertising on the part of the driver and placard of this so-called express Bishkek-Karakol marshrutka.