A Moon-Lit Night in a Kyrgyz Yurt

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I just got back from a winter expedition to Lake Song Kul, which is at an elevation of 3,016 meters in central Kygyzstan, to visit icefishermen living without electricity in yurts that are accessible only by horseback.

The pass we crossed was above 3,300 meters and blanketed in deep snow that made the going slow indeed. It was minus 30 Celsius when I went outside in the morning, and the only water in the yurt had frozen solid during the night.

The 30-kilometer ride up and over the mountain pass was a trip in and of itself. My guide Kenjibek, who owns the old Sovkhoz we passed and recently sired his seventh child at the age of 53, plied me with vodka every hour or so. If it is true that horses can smell if a rider has been drinking, my white mare was very forgiving.

When we arrived at the barren lake around sunset, the wind began to pick up as the stars came out. Two yurts we passed along the shore were unoccupied, and I began to think that it might have been a mistake to travel up with a man who had not made the trip in many weeks.

But slowly, surely, a speck of brown in the distance took shape against the stark white background as our tired horses crunched through the crusty snow. Smoke billowed out of an iron pipe, but I soon found out that much more stayed inside the dwelling.

On the ride up, Kenjibek had called the men who live in the shabby yurts the "last heroes." Their lifestyle is certainly not for the faint of heart, and one night with them was almost more than I could take.

The yurts were a far cry from the well-insulated structures in Mongolia's capital, which neat professionals can be seen leaving every morning.

Instead, moonlight was visible from within Kenjibek nephew's yurt, as the group stoked a fire with scrap wood, smoked unfiltered cigarettes and lit an open dish of kerosene to illuminate their plain macaroni dinner.

Our host reminded me of the old Bolshevik descriptions of a drunken kulak as he yelled angrily at his subordinates most of the night. I can still smell his breath, infused with the spirit alcohol Kenjibek brought him from town.

In the morning, we went out onto the ice and watched a fisherman wearing a worn-out suit jacket and ski-mask, smoking and resembling a misplaced Zapatista guerrilla, haul in 100-meter-long set nets that had soaked under the ice for two days. Two empty nets broke the surface before a single whitefish appeared, which Kenjibek tossed in a saddlebag for the long journey home.

Ethan Wilensky-Lanford is a freelance journalist in Central Asia.