We found the minibus driver again from whom, about two hours earlier, we’d bought two seats to a remote village about a four-hour drive from the city in which we had spent the night. Though we’ve lived here five years, on this trip we were tourists loud and proud, itching to see one of the tallest peaks in the country in the deep south of Kyrgyzstan along the Tajik boarder. Minibuses are one of the most common forms of transportation here, and most of them are ancient, in some cases nearly dilapidated, Mercedes Sprinters, 17-passenger vans with a sliding door on one side. The transaction had gone like this.
We’d walked down an aisle lined with taxis and minibuses on both sides. The aisle itself was full of vehicles and people. The giant parking lot of a place was located under a bridge that loomed several stories over our heads. Drivers were calling out the towns to which they were heading. When we heard one yell out “Sary Molgo,” we stopped and asked what time he was leaving.
“We’ll leave at 1:30 or 2:00,” the driver said.
“Is this the last minibus to go to Sary Molgo?” I asked.
“Yes. This is the last one.”
“How much?”
“Three hundred.”*
I turned to Laura. We agreed we should go ahead and reserve our spots now.
I pulled out a thousand** and out of habit and experience asked, “Do you have change?”
(The day before the taxi driver didn’t have change for a 200, so I had to go into a cafe to have them break my bill.)
The minibus driver pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and easily gave me 400 in change.
“Will you give us a ticket or receipt or anything like that?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’ll remember you.”
I was pretty sure he would.
“You won’t leave without us, right?” I asked, half joking, half serious.
“We won’t leave without you.”
I tried to size him up. He seemed as trustworthy as anyone.
“Can I get your phone number?” I said.
He nodded.
I pulled out my phone, he entered his phone number, and I gave him a call so that he’d have my phone number.
“OK, then,” I said, extending my hand. “Stay well” (the literal translation of the most common way to say goodbye).
He shook my hand. I don’t know if a handshake here is any kind of way to seal a deal and promise to fulfill your side of the bargain you just made. As I turned around and walked away, I certainly hoped so.
After that, we had found lunch, gone back to the Airbnb where we’d stayed, packed up, and made our way once more to our aisle of taxis and minibuses beneath the bridge. Sure enough, they hadn’t left us. I knew we’d found the right bus because of the cracks running through the windshield. The driver took our bag around back and shoved it in the space behind the back seats. We peaked inside the bus. The bridge overhead cast everything in shadow, and the inside wasn’t exactly inviting.
Like most minibuses, this one had two seats on one side and one on the other of a tight center aisle. The dark, clear plastic that coated the windows was mostly intact. Each seat was covered in a bright blue and white seat cover, but the concentrated smell belied the apparent cleanliness. On two seats towards the front, bags and two half-eaten ice cream cones served as reservation markers. We plopped our backpacks down on two empty seats behind the ice cream cone seats and decided to wait outside. A low table, one just high enough to slide your legs under if you’re sitting on the floor, rested up against the side of the minibus. We wondered out loud where they planned to put that. My guess was on top. We’d soon find out.
We learned that the half-eaten ice cream cones belonged to two little girls, and soon they were finishing them off. Passengers appeared with boxes and bags of all sizes and shapes, some of which were overstuffed and wrapped in packing tape. The driver put some in the back and then began looking for spots inside the minibus to cram things. When he turned on the engine, we decided to get inside and settle in. Laura took the window seat and rested her legs on the spare tire that was under the seat in front of her.
More passengers with more baggage and boxes got on the bus. One man put a carton of 30 eggs in the space over our heads. All the terrible outcomes of such a decision played out in high definition in my mind. When the spaces both beneath the seats and overhead had disappeared, that left the center aisle. And then came the table. They worked it in between the seats. I could only pray no emergency exit would be necessary.
Somehow the bus pulled out of its tight parking spot beneath the bridge at two minutes past two. Such punctuality deserved a round of applause. We barely slid past other parked vehicles and endless pedestrians and pulled out onto a main street.
We picked up several more people from off the street as we drove. That meant the two little girls in front of us lost their seats. The littler of the two sat in her mom’s lap. I helped pass the older one over the table occupying the middle aisle so she could squeeze into a spot in the very back row.
At one point we stopped on the side of the road. A teenage boy jumped out and ran up a path to a house on the hill beside the road. The driver chatted through the window with a man standing next to the road. Soon the boy reappeared carrying a large plastic bag. Once he and the bag were inside, we were off again. The next time we stopped, a woman slid the door open, placed something large and square and wrapped in a blanket inside the bus, and slid the door shut. There weren’t more than a few words exchanged between her and the driver. Apparently they’d already made arrangements.
At that point, we were truly on our way. We passed horses grazing on steep hillsides. Red dirt cliffs contrasted with bright green pastures. Round and portable houses called yurts dotted the hills on either side of the narrow two-lane road. We slowly made our way through a cow crossing, then a horse crossing, and then at least three separate sheep crossings. In fact, on two occasions, the shepherds weren’t exactly trying to get the sheep to cross the road but rather were herding them along the road since that was the easiest path for them to take to wherever they were going. Up, down, to the left, and to the right we tootled along.
At points the smell of over-used breaks offset the smell of so many concentrated bodies. The mother in front of us, the one with the little girl now fast asleep in her arms, had asked the driver to close the passenger side window. A draft across a baby’s kidneys could spell disaster after all. The driver’s half open window was our only ventilation. A little sweat never hurt anyone, the thinking goes, but moving air can kill you.
Mountains rose out of the arid ground on both sides of us like ancient sentinels and peered down on our tiny bus as we went. Houses, like opportunistic weeds, grew out of seemingly random crannies along the road and up into the hills. They were shepherds mostly I could only guess. It wasn’t like there were very many other options for work out here. Probably in many ways, life for these remote people continued on just as it had for hundreds of years.
Several hours in, we stopped next to a cluster of houses, and a teenaged girl got on with several bags, one of which was full of empty water bottles. A woman set a little girl not more than three years old inside the bus and slid the door shut behind them. The little girl did not like that and immediately began screaming for her mother. During the next few kilometers, several more people got on and off the bus. The screaming girl and the teenaged girl (I’m assuming she was the little girl’s big sister) got the seats right in front of Laura and me. The screams turned into generally softer crying, which rose and fell like waves. An older woman and a little boy sitting behind me had to maneuver the table legs to get down the aisle and off the bus. For several minutes I found myself uncomfortably close to the older woman’s rear end. She finally got through and off the bus. Eventually the crying girl resigned herself that Mom was gone and Sister was all she had and finally quieted herself in a seat staring out the window. A woman in front of me began working on a bag of peanuts, throwing the shells on the floor when she was done.
Up and up we went, and back and forth we drove on switchbacks. Here the mountains were dressed in snow, and at that altitude, they never change their clothes all year long. We made it through the pass at the top and began to work our way back down on the far side. More switchbacks. We then found ourselves on a vast plain, still 3,500 meters up mind you, between mountain ranges.
Closer to the end of the trip, nearly four hours in, we pulled up in front of a small store along the side of the road. So that’s where those 30 eggs were headed, along with small wooden crates of tomatoes, several fifteen-packs of liter-sized Orange Fantas and Cokes, and several other boxes and bags. This minibus was a regular modern camel, hauling supplies for this small store and however many local residents that depended on its inventory. Several teenaged boys sitting in the back helped unload the camel. By now the bus was much emptier, and the boys in back were able to rearrange the table so that you could actually get through the aisle. In a few minutes, we were driving again.
The teenaged girl and her little sister who had cried for her mom got off in a tiny village just off the main road. It was sprinkling by then, and due to the elevation, when they opened the door, genuinely cold air rushed in. Let’s just say it was not a little refreshing. Village women walked down the dirt road in coats and hats. Several houses had smoke rising from their chimneys, meaning they were still heating their homes. Between her sister and the bags she’d brought on the bus, the teenaged girl needed help collecting it all and getting off, help she quickly received, and she was gone. I wonder what and who exactly awaited them in such a remote place.
The woman and her two little girls who were working on the ice cream cones before we left were still on the minibus after we got off in the village where we’d be spending the night. I wonder if they were coming home or here visiting someone.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that it was an eventful trip.
But you know something that didn’t happen, not even once? Not a single person complained. No one got frustrated by all the extra stops. No one bemoaned the driver’s insistence on picking up another passenger. No one said there wasn’t any more room. No one cursed the shepherds and their sheep. No one gave the teenaged girl grief for her inconsolable little sister who missed her mama. No one got mad for having to help pull a box or bag from under a seat when someone reached his or her stop along the way. No one used any profanity as he or she tried to get past the table in the aisle. The teenaged boys in back didn’t whine or hide behind their phone screens when it was time to do some heavy lifting. People just did what they needed to do to make the trip a little bit better for us all. We were all in this together.
Truly we live in world that exists lightyears away from the one in the West we once called home. And that ain’t all bad.
*$4.30
**14.34