Kyrgyzstan
Forget the detailed itinerary – a 12-day trip that included the vertiginous 2,446-metre Kotorma pass on horseback – the packing list alone ran to a dizzying several pages. Sleeping bag, sleeping bag liner, three pairs of jodhpurs, chaps, riding boots, waterproof riding coat…
I hadn’t seen anything like it since I went to prep school aged ten as the first girl at Ashdown House. My mother took me from Brussels to Harrods uniform department with an extensive list. I left with a St Trinian’s trousseau of navy kilts and Aertex shirts, tuck box and trunk.
As D-Day approached last week, I managed to source most items for the riding safari. If I had any spare time I’d take everything out, check it against the list and repack it into my father’s green Samsonite expedition bag, which he’d taken to China when he was following in the footsteps of Marco Polo for the second time a few years ago.
I also borrowed his binos to examine the majestic scenery, and flora and fauna, of the Tien Shan. I wanted to see the scops owl that had kept Owen Paterson awake when he did this same trip last year with Charles Moore of this parish.
True freedom, I told myself, wearing the same clothes I’d worn on the plane, was to travel lightly
In the end I had so much stuff that I split it up (this is boring but important for the tale of two bags that follows). Mountain Warehouse soft black rubberised sausage for boots, chaps, riding hat and rainproof jacket, and the squishy Samsonite for everything else, of which there was plenty.
As I checked in at Terminal 2, Turkish Airlines insisted the smaller black bag from Mountain Warehouse had to go through the oversize bag lane because it had straps, while the Samsonite bag went off on the usual conveyer. I remember feeling a twinge of anxiety that my two babies were being separated.
In Istanbul – the luggage, I remind you, was checked through all the way to Bishkek – I noticed all Turkish Airlines boarding passes in my Apple wallet had disappeared.
This wouldn’t have mattered so much but there was no wifi to download them again and my leader, the traveller and entrepreneur Alexandra Tolstoy, had kept warning me: ‘You have to really run to make the connection, and the airport is huge, go straight to the gate or you’ll miss the flight.’ She told me of all the times people had missed the connection and snarled up the whole itinerary. The rest of the group had already arrived 24 hours before me.
Mindful of this, I pelted to an open ticket desk and threw my passport across the counter. ‘I’m on the next flight to Bishkek,’ I said to the man, ‘I need a boarding pass, please!’
His first reaction was to glance at his watch. ‘The eight o’clock?’ he said. ‘The last flight to Bishkek?’ He looked dubious.
‘Yes,’ I gasped as he handed me a boarding pass.
‘You have 15 minutes.’
I ran for about a mile through the airport in about ten minutes. Not exactly a marathon in under two hours but very much a personal best for me. The flight was boarding when I reached B23 and I was tasting my own blood.
At 4.30 a.m. we landed in Bishkek.
Well, Mountain Warehouse turned up but the Samsonite didn’t make it to Central Asia, which meant I only had the clothes I stood up in for an Instagrammable bucket list etc riding safari where, rather than a glorious May spring in a Stan, a succession of violent storms was about to hit.
I considered my plight. By 7 a.m. I was supposed to be meeting the Tolstoy group and driving for 11 straight hours into the mountains. At 6 a.m. I gave up on the bag and left Bishkek airport – having reported its disappearance to lost and found – and got into a taxi to the group hotel.
After a quick local breakfast of roast cauliflower and dried sheep’s milk balls, we all climbed into the minivan to Kizel Kel.
I had no washbag, no underwear, no toothbrush, no pyjamas, no sleeping bag, no Glaze and Gordon jodhpurs, no Glaze and Gordon gilets or deerskin gloves… I was dependent on the kindness of strangers and all my expensive and time-consuming efforts to make sure I didn’t let the side down on my chestnut stallion had been in vain.
Over the last few days I’ve accepted the following with heartfelt cries of gratitude.
William Astor had not only packed two magnums of vintage rioja and cigars, he also supplied me with a Swype moist towelette (‘No Shower, No Problem’).
Davina Powell lent me some Virgin Atlantic pyjamas.
Alexandra Tolstoy, the most stylish woman alive (she purveys her own range of wares on her Dacha website), gave me a pair of brown lacy Stripe & Stare pants.
This was Saturday and here’s the thing. By Tuesday morning I had adjusted (it’s now Wednesday as I write).
It goes to show you can get used to anything. In fact, I was going around saying ‘It’s amazing how little you actually need,’ as the sapling-slim yummy mummies of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire on the safari somehow emerged from tents at 8 a.m. refulgent in crisp pressed linen blouses, sand-coloured jodhpurs and gleaming leather chaps, blonde hair smoothly in chignons as if they were about to hunt with the Heythrop.
I even tried to work up some thesis in private about excess baggage and how we accumulate stuff to prove we’re alive and how the urge to get more stuff is a hiding to nothing. True freedom, I told myself as I crouched in my tent in the same clothes I’d worn on the plane, apart from Alexandra’s pants, was to travel lightly through airports as through life… you get the drift.
Then, on Tuesday lunchtime, Vassilii, the ponytailed Russian camp commander, galloped up alongside me just as we were skirting the rushing pale-green Kara-Suu river, boiling with snow melt.
We were now a 12-hour drive away and a flash flood had washed away the road. I had a choice
‘Is this your bag?’ he asked, and he held up his phone.
It was. My father’s green bag. It had been located and had arrived in Bishkek.
We were now a 12-hour drive away and a flash flood had washed away the road. I had a choice: did I pay to have it driven by taxi to the camp or did I reunite with it back in Bishkek at the Asia Mountains HQ at the end of the trip? The traveller’s dilemma.
There were eight days to go. Given we were striking camp every day, it was actually a mercy not to have to fill my small tent with two bags of damp clothing and muddy boots.
I made my decision. As the sun sank over the mountains yesterday, I saw a white van nudging past the herd of cows coming home to be milked across the river. It turned into the camp. It was the taxi from Bishkek.
When the taxi driver bore the Samsonite into the camp in exchange for all my dollars, everyone cheered, mainly because I wouldn’t bore on about it any longer.
As I write on Day Five in my tent at 5.30 a.m. before we head up the mountain, I think the moral is this. You can’t take it with you but it’s nice to have it along for the ride, especially if your only change of clothes is some borrowed flight pyjamas.
And go hand luggage only, unless you are of course bringing your own fine wines and Cuban cigars on safari in a bespoke travel case, in which case it has to go into the hold.
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