Kyrgyzstan and the Jailoo : Four Rides in the Mountains of Heaven

In 2013 Sue Bathurst went to Kyrgyzstan to ride a horse in the jailoo - the nomads’ mountain pastures. She fell in love with the country, sometimes described as the most beautiful country in the world, and with its people. In this book she not only describes Kyrgyzstan, as it was and is, but tells of four of these horse rides in the Tien Shan and Talas Mountains, travelled with English and Kyrgyz friends.

During those rides they covered 500 miles by horse; crossed 20 passes, most between 9,000 feet and 13,000 feet; negotiated precipitous gorges and boulder strewn rivers of cascading snowmelt. In 2017 they rode for over 150 miles down the no-go zone, once the frontier between the USSR and China, and still the Kyrgyz/Chinese border. Everywhere they were welcomed by the shepherds and their families.

This is not only about a beautiful country, illustrated with over 200 colour photographs, 4 graphs and a colour map. It is about traversing challengingly tricky terrain, far from the possibility of helicopter rescue, and seeing, along the way, how the smallest country in Central Asia is rebuilding itself after 115 years of Russian rule.