Would you drink fermented horse milk?

To my great disappointment, I was never (knowingly) fed qarta – a popular dish of boiled and pan-fried horse anus served without sauce or spices. I did, however, get to try the next best thing – kymyz, mares’ milk fermented in a goatskin. It was the second day of a horse trek in Kyrgyzstan and it had begun to hail. Not exactly golf ball-sized, but close enough to the golf ball sweets you bite into to find bubble gum. The horses coped, perhaps because getting pelted with hail is a fair trade for not being on a Kyrgyz menu. We stopped under a tree and our guide’s blank stares gave no indication of whether the weather was normal or not. The following two hailstorms suggested it was. By the time we reached our yurt camp for the night, my rain jacket was a sodden testament to the fact that ‘water-resistant’ does not equal ‘waterproof’ and my jeans were soaked.

The aching waddle to the yurt felt like a victory lap. Inside was a low table piled with bread, thick cream, jam and strange approximations of British chocolates (Milky Way wrappers with a Twix-like filling). Our nomadic farmer hosts giggled at how quickly we took up the steaming cups of tea and they readily re-filled them. There’s a reason why every Kyrgyz person over a certain age has a mouth like Aladdin’s cave, the gold teeth are a sure sign of their love for sugary foods. Even the tea involved large crystals of brown sugar, to be broken off and stirred in. 

When we had stuffed ourselves and felt somewhat human again, our hosts excitedly brought out a wooden bowl of a slightly bubbly milk-like liquid, its surface peppered with little dark dots. The farmer’s wife flashed the toothy grin that tends to accompany trying a strange local foodstuff, poured us each a bowl and awaited our reaction. Finally, kymyz. It tasted fizzy and slightly sour but tolerable enough to show off by putting my thumbs up and gesturing for a refill, much to our hosts’ delight.

I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that sometimes the strange foodstuff proffered isn’t actually consumed by the locals and that the giggling and joking that usually follows can be translated as ‘does he really think we eat this? God he’s gullible’. Indeed, I was very ready for the Kyrgyz presenters of Punk’d to come in and mock the half-wit tourist and his assumptions. Yet kymyz is hugely popular – strange as it’s slightly alcoholic in a country that is 90 per cent Muslim (yet many Kyrgyz will recommend and champion their favourite Kyrgyz brandy).

After some greasy plov (a hearty but omnipresent rice dish – seemingly on the menu every night in Central Asia), we joined two old men outside who were waiting for a mare to be milked. One of the mare’s hind legs was promptly placed into a sling and the milk squirted into a metal bucket. Warm and slightly sweet, it bore no resemblance to the kymyz but was also readily gulped down by the old men, for whom the milk was supposed to have regenerative effects. At this point, it was only eight o’clock but felt like far later. The only light remaining came from a small LED lantern hanging by our hosts’ trailer. We had been offered the chance to sleep in the warmer trailer instead of the yurt but my companions and I chose to be buried five blankets deep, piled on one by one by the farmer’s wife. I thought that going to bed as soon as the sun disappeared would wear on my night-owl tendencies but I was exhausted enough to surrender to the ancestral circadian rhythm. There is after all little reason as a farmer to keep yourself up artificially – if it’s good enough for your livestock, it’s good enough for you.

Shortly after striking camp the next morning, we found ourselves faced with a side quest – a shepherd asking for help in corralling an errant horse. The motions of a pincer movement needed no translation, directing the horse into the range of the shepherd’s lasso. Somehow – no thanks to our support – the shepherd managed to secure his horse and the cynic in me again began to wonder if this was a planned part of each trek, engineered for tourists. Yet the cynicism was unwarranted. Visitors are a way to make a little extra money to spend on fuel or supplies, not the main income stream. The shepherd really did need assistance (our guide actually helped) and our appearance was incidental. In our three weeks in Kyrgyzstan, we met fewer than ten Europeans (and one American). People ask me why I’d decided to head to the so-called ‘stans’. This was it. It is perhaps one of the last frontiers left on earth.