Ask a Kyrgyz cab driver what the most pressing issue in his country might be, and he won’t bring up constitutional amendments. Nor will he start on the level of religious freedoms, or the lack of objective journalism. Easy to overlook, yet so depressingly obvious, the answer is always one and the same - poverty. This weekend, we let the big city lights blink for the political analysts, and instead take a trip to a part of this country that holds the national record in Altitude, Temperature and Economy. Naryn region is Kyrgyzstan’s highest, coldest…and poorest.

Few people are more welcoming towards strangers than the Central Asians. A wonderful way to make new acquaintances here is by travelling in long-distance taxis, which means showing up at the market early in the morning, when drivers yell out their intended destinations and passengers scurry for the best deals. After a round of good-hearted haggling, you get one of the four seats in the car - and off you go. That is, as soon as the three other seats are filled up. Sometimes that process can take as long as the trip itself. Today, however, I’m in luck – the car is full in thirty minutes, and we get out of the market and head East, towards the regions bordering China.

Our first stop - the town of Kochkor, the high-altitude economic pits of Kyrgyzstan.

WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY, KURMANBEK?

…and so we hope you will enjoy the next song, which is by Dima Bilan! Tickets are still available for his Bishkek performance next Friday – ‘I know that the impossible is possible!’

The radio is playing Russian, Turkish and Kyrgyz pop music, a joyful female voice announcing the tunes. My travel companions are all Kyrgyz, but as diverse as they come. The driver’s story is sadly typical. A former teacher of chemistry, he left his 40$ a month university post for the more lucrative position of cab driver in order to take care of his family. Beside him in the passenger seat is an old man. Every so often he makes the driver stop the car to help him pour another glass of vodka from a bottle he keeps in a plastic bag. He is lame on one side of his body, and downs the liquor in large gulps with his one good hand. In the back, a quiet, young man with a five year old boy on his lap is in the middle seat, and next to him sits a pretty woman in her late 30s. The little boy babbles happily away in Kyrgyz, while the woman seems miles away, staring absent-mindedly out at the passing Bishkek suburbs.

We cross the city limits and get into the countryside. The houses turn markedly poorer.

Kyrgyzstan is a poor country to begin with, but our destination Naryn is worse off than all its other regions. Around 37% of the population live under conditions that the UN classifiy as “extreme poverty”, meaning that people are scraping by on less than 2,5$ a day. As one of only three countries outside Africa, Kyrgyzstan has been offered to join the IMF and World Bank’s program for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) to try to deal with the enormous burden of debt that the country is suffering under. During ousted president Akayev’s period, 1,8 billion dollars were taken up in foreign loans, yet the population wonders what could possibly have happened to all that money. A quick glance at the country’s infrastructure will tell you it certainly hasn’t been spent for the common good. Part mismanagement, part corruption, according to Kyrgyzstan’s Minister of Finance – yet the fact remains that the country is up to its ears in IOUs. The idea of joining the HIPC program, however, has been hugely unpopular with the general population. Many consider it a matter of pride not to let others dictate how Kyrgyzstan should run its affairs, even if the latest statistics have them written off as one of the world’s countries least likely to survive on its own.

The driver and the old man in the front are discussing their common economic hardships, while the young man beside me listens in. Pretty soon I’m asked for my own opinion on the wretched state of affairs, but conversation quickly turns to the topic of my unfamiliar accent instead. When I admit I’m from Norway, the men start the usual listing of what they associate with that country. Skiers, ocean, oil, fish - and perhaps not quite on target, really huge turtles. Only the thoughtful woman in the back doesn’t care to join in. But as strange coincidences would have it, it’s not because the topic doesn’t interest her. I suddenly notice she has turned in her seat, and is in fact staring at me. She leans over, behind the young man between us.

- Are you really from Norway? she asks in a low voice, so the others won’t hear. I nod. She then tells the driver to pull over, and politely asks the young man and his son to change seats with her.

For the next three hours, while crossing the vast and dreamlike Kyrgyz highlands, she quietly tells me her story.

A DRIVE DOWN MEMORY LANE

- Eleven years ago, a Norwegian man came here. He was building houses for poor people. I think maybe he was a millionaire. We became friends. One day, he asked me how to write ‘I love you’ in Kyrgyz. I showed him. The next day, he had written the words in big letters and placed it in front of my house. I introduced him to my parents, and to my sister. They said he looked like a Russian, but the fact was that he didn’t even drink or smoke. He asked me to marry him, and come with him to Norway. He showed me pictures. It was beautiful. I thought for a long time, but finally, I said no. You should have seen how tall he was! I was just scared. And so I told him no. He asked again, many times. And in the end, he left. I never saw him again. Now I think about that, and I feel so stupid.

The woman is close to tears while relating this story from years before. I feel bad for her.

- I wish I could talk to him again. Just to explain. But what words could I use to tell him that he has been in my thoughts ever since then? You need great words for that. Eleven years is a long time. I’m 36 now. But I know I made a mistake. How different my life would have been if I had just married him.

I try suggesting that Norway might not have been what she expected it to be. That maybe her decision was right, that perhaps the man would have turned out to be different than she had hoped.

She shakes her head and answers coldly.

- It was a mistake.

Maybe you have to be from a place like Kochkor to truly understand. Many Westerners would raise their powdered noses at the thought of marrying for economic reasons, swearing that’s something they would never do, no matter how poor they were. But then, they didn’t grow up in Kochkor. There is a big difference between marrying into wealth and marrying out of poverty. One has much, and craves more. The other has nothing, but wants a little. Trying to change the odds for happiness handed to you by fate and global politics is the only thing you can do, if you believe you are given but one chance at life.

The woman still remembers the man’s full name. She even knows his date of birth. She writes it down on a piece of paper and hands it to me. It really is a Norwegian name. She asks me if I could try to find him for her. I say I will try, and put the note in my pocket as we roll down the main street in her small home town. I don’t have the heart to tell her the name is so common there must be hundreds of Norwegians called just that.

We say goodbye on the dusty street outside Kochkor market.

TREMBLING EARTH

The local café is bustling with lively conversation as shepherds and farmers in muddy clothes gather over traditional Central Asian dishes like shorpo and laghman. It is the busiest place in town, and I’m just barely able to find a seat in a far corner, order tea and something to eat. Five rough-looking bearded men in conservative Muslim dress are seated at the table next to mine. They look somewhat out of place here. The locals are dressed differently, casually, like most Central Asians. Remembering a recent news report, it dawns on me who the men might be, and just how they might have ended up here.

As if Kochkor didn’t already have enough problems for one little town, a few weeks before it became the epicentre of an earthquake that reached 5,4 on Richter’s scale. The trembles that merely made the cutlery clatter in my Bishkek apartment brought considerable damage to the ramshackle homes here. Along with the damages from the Batken earthquake two months before, estimates said 800,000$ were needed to repair the damages. While Kyrgyzstan’s parliamentarians announced they would all donate one day’s salary to help those affected, the illegal Islamic movement Hizb-ut-Tahrir made a curious announcement of their own. Outlawed in a Supreme Court decision in 2003, their press release said the organization was sending a construction team to Kochkor to repair houses for free. Apparently, parliamentarians and Islamists alike know that nothing makes people more impressionable than grinding poverty.

As I discreetly watch the men eat, I wonder if they could be that very group of Hizb-ut-Tahrir members sent here to repair houses. They seem have that same secretive air about them as members of the organization I already met with in their ideological southern stronghold, Osh. Then, I become aware that they are observing me too. In fact, the entire café is. If anyone is out of place in Kochkor, it’s me.

I turn to look at my hot soup instead.

MORNING HAS BROKEN

It’s 7 AM when I emerge bleary-eyed from a cold, cold night at the Kochkor Hotel. At 60 Soms ($1,55) a night it might be a bargain, but not even sleeping fully dressed in a thick winter coat and covered in blankets has kept the frost from getting into my bones. Finding there is no running water, a visit to the rank outhouse is the only morning toilette to be had. I feel tired and a bit out of place as I half-consciously join another group of travelling Kyrgyz for the dramatic ascent across the 3100-meter Dolon Pass, hardly making note of the three elderly women chatting merrily away in the back. But I wake up with a start as another coincidence strikes. The driver turns on the radio to a voice speaking softly in Russian. For a moment, I think I might be on hidden camera.

…and that of his contemporaries. One of the great masters of his time, an entire nation mourned his death on September 4th 1907. Dear listeners, we give you Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s ‘Morning Mood’.

I suppress a smile as the driver starts quietly humming and turns the volume up. All five listen in silence as the awesome peaks loom higher still above us, and the snake-like road takes us further into the mountains. Eventually the altitude turns the soothing melody from the radio into a hissed garble.

Here, three thousand meters above sea level, any thought of economic trouble in the valleys below seems impossibly far away. Although they know every inch of this pass, the women in the back stop talking, as if taking a break from real life. The scenery turns unearthly, at least to the eyes of a city boy. There are no people, no society, no politics – and no economy. Only the steady hum of the car’s engine.

We climb higher and higher through this silent otherworldliness until we reach the high-water mark, and begin our steep descent back into reality.

EASY RIDER

On a hillside outside the town of Naryn lies a cemetery. Only, it’s not quite a regular cemetery - it’s rather a small village, clutching the mountainsides. The graves are small houses, divided neatly by narrow streets. Many of them are beautifully decorated. Looking out over the poor living conditions in the town itself, one might wonder where the logic lies buried. Poverty in life, extravagance in death.

Just beneath this peculiar village of the dead lies a simple house. You might miss it at first, the tombs are so much like real homes it blends in among them. But like ghosts, a man and a small boy emerge from the building, alive and well. They walk towards me.

- Salaam aleikum!

The man greets me heartily as he approaches. We shake hands. I explain that I saw the cemetery from town, and decided to take a walk up here for a closer look. The man introduces himself as Mirzabek, and tells me he lives here with his wife and their two children.

- People told me I shouldn’t build my house here by the cemetery. They say it’s wrong. I told them, if you got money, go ahead and build where you want. I don’t have any money. So this is where I will build.

He speaks in a pleasant, unhurried manner, taking his time, reflecting on his own words in a way that city people perhaps have no time for. His manner of speaking seems almost to belong to a different era, far removed from my own.

- A lot of people went to Russia, and never returned. They just take off, saying they are going to come back rich. Of course, they never do. I will tell you a story. An old man lives down the road here, his son was always planning to go to Russia, even if his father said he shouldn’t. Eventually, he left. And then, after a few years, we got the message that the boy had died, in Moscow. When he got the sad news the father just said, let him be buried there! He wouldn’t listen to me! And now see what happened! He chose Moscow, so let him be buried in Moscow. Yes. That’s what he said.

He thinks for a moment.

- Maybe people don’t come back because they’re embarrassed. They don’t make it, then they start drinking, maybe. And then they just stay there, and you never see them again. I don’t know. Myself, I’ve never been anywhere.

Mirzabek’s son is smiling shyly, listening to our conversation. I ask him what his name is, but he doesn’t understand. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, Naryn region is almost exclusively inhabited by Kyrgyz, and children grow up not knowing Russian. The boy giggles at my strange questions and hides behind his father. Mirzabek tusles his hair, then turns to me again.

- I want to ask you something. Once, a man from Germany came through here. On a motorcycle. It had broken down, and I helped him fix it. This man said that in Germany, even the villages don’t have roads like ours. He said he’d never seen such a terrible place in his life. He said he was happy he was leaving, and that God forbid anyone else should have to live like us.

He looks at me, and I dread the question I know is coming.

- Is that true?

I think of this smug German coming through Naryn on a shiny motorcycle on his way to China, leaving his stupid comments for Mirzabek to ponder. The radio was probably playing Wagner when he rolled into town.

- Well, you know, they have really nice roads in Germany.

Mirzabek smiles briefly, but we both know my answer isn’t very convincing.

- I guess so. But still, that’s what he said, that German. Yup. That’s what he said.

He goes quiet, and warms his hands in the sleeves of his jacket while looking out over the town below us. The sun is setting behind the mountains, giving off a warm, orange glow that shimmers over the rooftops. Mirzabek nods his head at no one in particular, and sighs.

- I don’t know. You have to live. You have to build your house. That’s the way it is. That’s the way life is.

PULL IN YOUR BELTS

Not even the cows have gotten up for breakfast at the heaps of garbage outside Naryn apartment blocks when I start the five hour drive back to Bishkek. It’s still dark outside, and I can barely make out the driver’s face. He yawns and switches on the heat in the car when he hears my teeth clattering. Then he turns on the morning news.

…became known that Parliament has voted not to join the controversial HIPC program. Finance Minister Akylbek Japarov, who originally was in favour of joining the program comments : “This was the only unique opportunity for us to write off all debts. None of the HIPC conditions jeopardize our integrity with external control and do not affect our national pride. Yet, I am with the team. We will have to pull in our belts.”

I look out at the contours of shacks passing in the freezing darkness. As the announcer goes on to report other events around the world, I wonder if the lawmakers in Bishkek know how impossible it will be for anyone here to pull in their belts, or even to find a tighter notch.

Then, the voice on the radio again catches my attention.

…and now for other news. A group of men belonging to the illegal Islamic movement Hizb-ut-Tahrir have been arrested in the town of Kochkor. The men arrived a few days ago to help repair houses that were damaged in the January earthquake. Security services refuse to give further comments.

As we climb back up towards the Dolon Pass, the radio again turns into garble, and the driver turns it off. Out of habit, I reach for the safety belt, and the driver expectedly tells me to leave it.

- No need for belts. We’ll get there all right. Don’t worry.

He has that same fatalistic optimism so prevalent among his countrymen, who might worry about the fate of their country, but who all seem convinced they’ll get there all right, tight belts or not. Kyrgyzstan will even get there beltless. So I leave it, close my eyes and settle in for the long ride back to the comforts of the capital, to the drowsy sound of the engine.