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In Kyrgyzstan a tourist village waits for visitors to return

December 29^th, 2020

Where others hadn’t ventured, Umar Tashbekov saw an opportunity. His village, Sary-Mogol, Kyrgyzstan, at an altitude of 3,600 metres, is located near Lenin’s Peak, a popular destination for tourists. If they were already hiking there, why not attract them to his village and generate income for the residents?

The village, with a population of 5,200, is a three-hour drive from the city of Osh, in the country’s southeast. Life here is not easy. The short summers and unfavourable growing conditions make it hard to grow much more than potatoes and barley. The main work is animal husbandry, with a large livestock market in town. Others find work as teachers or coal miners. Out of its small population, 500 people are estimated to have left for Russia and companies there are searching for more people to work in their factories.

In Kyrgyzstan a tourist village waits for visitors to return

An upside to the traditional life in the village, with grandparents, parents, children all living together, has been the slow spread of COVID-19. Because homes are already crowded, people mostly meet out in the street. That, and the overall government lockdowns, helped keep infection numbers low.

But the impact on livelihoods is deep. In the last decade, tourism has grown as a source of income for the population—almost everyone here is connected to the industry in some way. As the pandemic spread, the hit on tourism was felt across the country. Receipts from the export of tourism and travel, which represented almost six percent of GDP in 2018, have been forecast to almost disappear in 2020. Revenues are predicted to fall as much as 90 percent.

In 2019, more than 1,300 tourists passed through Sary-Mogol. This year, less than a dozen.

Umar opened the village’s first guesthouse and tourist office in 2007 and invited other villagers to work with him. His company, CBT, soon became an “incubator” for the industry – almost everyone working in tourism has at some point passed through its doors. Soon after, he also opened the village’s first yurt camp, where tourists can stay in one of the twelve traditional Kyrgyz lodgings. They enjoy the unique feel of the village—the old Soviet Uaz cars, the ancient Ulak Tartysh horse game, the markets selling traditional crafts.

Then Umar’s son Abdilla Tashbekov took over the business. He has been a guide for more than ten years. He built his own guesthouse and was in the process of building a new one. He’s always reading and researching on the internet, earning his reputation as the “studious” one. His vision has led to new ideas to develop the town’s industry and expand the family business. He and his father opened a bigger office, which now serves as a gathering place for guides, workers and tourists. He has organized ski training with other guides to move into more winter tourism activities.

In 2015, he started the village’s Horse and Yak games festival and fair. The entire village attends, either as participants or spectators. Tourists buy tickets, and the revenue goes to the villagers working in the festival – cooking and selling traditional foods, performing traditional music and dancing shows, managing the yurt camp and playing in the horse and yak games.

All of that momentum has been lost in the wake of the pandemic.

"The tourist season is dead,” Abdilla says. “We had to close the office, yurt camp and guest houses this year."

His wife works as a music teacher in the local school, and they and they and their two children are living off her income. “If tourism does not improve, I will have to go to Osh or some other place to look for work in construction,” he says. That might bring its own set of challenges, the construction sector may soon be another difficult area to find employment. A recent UNDP survey found that in addition to tourism, the most-affected sectors of the economy in Kyrgyzstan will be trade and consumer services and construction, each of which can expect contractions of 20 percent or more.

Umar’s other son Ali, is also involved in the family business. He began working at 13, before going to Osh to study logistics and welding. His training has come in handy during the pandemic. When the flow of visitors to the village stopped, he was able to find work as a mechanic in the local coal mine. But he loved working with tourists, meeting people from all over the world.

“It was a good time,” he reminisces. “Sometimes I didn’t have time to come home. After [guiding] one tour, I immediately went with other tourists back to the mountains.”

It was both a more interesting and healthy job, he says, being outside in nature all day. Now he worries about the dangerous health effects of the quarry gas he breathes in regularly. But as his wife worked in the kitchen of the family’s guesthouse, now closed, this is the only form of income they have. With his father recovering from a broken leg, a mother who has Parkinson’s disease, which involves expensive treatment, a one-year-old child and another on the way, the family’s resources are stretched to the limit.

As tourism grew in the village, many others got involved in the industry. Now, they are also feeling the current pressures.

Buunisa Termechikova expected a normal summer. The entrepreneur opened a guesthouse and is an expert at traditional crafts, especially the traditional Kyrgyz women’s hat. Built by her son in July, her new Ethnographic Museum highlights local products, cultural items and historical artifacts. In the absence of foreign visitors, she is using the space to conduct workshops on making local items and welcoming more villagers.

Despite the difficulties the village is facing, they still manage to find joy in their normal activities. They splay volleyball in the local gym and participate in the traditional horse games. The games are usually held as part of a celebration, like the completion of a new house or birth of a baby and can command big prizes in the form of money or livestock.

Maybe it’s this energy and spirit that makes the village attractive to those who visit. Two years ago, a Korean tourist and engineer had such a wonderful experience that he paid to upgrade the village’s water infrastructure. Before, the villagers had to carry water from the river, but now they have it in their homes—making both their lives and the stays of tourists better.

Everyone in Sary-Mogol looks forward to sharing their energy and spirit with visitors again.

Read more about COVID-19's impact on Central Asia and UNDP’s recommendations for recovery.

This story is part of our series Surviving a Pandemic: The visual impact of COVID-19 across Eurasia, captured by five young photographers in their home countries and territories. The narratives, chosen by them, do not cover UNDP projects but reflect the issues around which we are working.