You'll never believe all of this.

Mike, Evan, and I made it safely to Osh.

We took a cab from home to Osh Bazaar (in Bishkek), the best place to get a cab for a long-distance journey. There were Kyrgyz men left and right trying to get us to go with them to Osh. The first driver we agreed on a price with (1300 som per person) then told us once we sat in the car that we either would have to wait for a 4th person to come and fill the car, or if we wanted the car for the 3 of us, we'd have to pay 1300 som for the extra seat. So we got out and tried a new driver. This time he agreed for the 3 of us, the whole car, 4000 som. BUT as soon as we set off, he said he had to stop at home to pick up his son, who would come to Osh with us! We obviously didn't want that, so we got out. We found someone finally who agreed on 4000 som ($100) for the car, no children or extra people. Bartering for a cab is great Russian practice, and our driver was super friendly and nice and talkative and I got to practice a lot of Russian with him.

We got out of Bishkek pretty quickly up into the mountains. It was snowy and the roads were pretty slippery. According to Lonely Planet, the highest pass we reached was 3580 meters or something like that. Our driver was really skilled at snow driving and manuevering down the mountain turns. At points it was snowing heavily, other times it eased up. We were driving in the mountains for hours and hours, and there were beautiful views everywhere we looked, assuming we could see through the snowfall. Our back seat windows were darkly tinted, so I had to look out the front windshield to see much. Darkness fell quite early, and going was slow anyways because of the bad roads. We stopped for some good food along the way, but mostly drove straight through. We called and arranged for sleeping at Osh Guest House, a Soviet block apartment building turned into a backpackers' dorm. Driving got really dangerous around 20:30, where there was lots of fog on the mountain roads and white-out snow falling, like the PC screensaver with the stars coming at you. I was getting stressed out for the driver just remembering what it's like to drive in weather like that. There were times we were just guessing where the road was and hoping a car would come in the opposite direction to light our way. Sometime in the middle of all of this, there was a bad car accident in the middle of the road. We stopped and our driver got out to see if he could help. He ended up telling us that we had to take 2 bodies with us in our car. There were other Kyrgyz men at the crash site, and it took quite a few of them to carry one old woman and dump her in the trunk of our station wagon, and the same amount of men to take another woman and put her in the back seat with Mike and me. Mike was in the middle, so he was propping her up and checking her pulse every time the driver asked him to. There was no pulse the whole time, and no movement or sound from the old woman in the trunk, either. One of the cars in the accident was horrible damaged; it looked like it had been a head-on collision. There was an old Kyrgyz man sitting in the passenger seat of the other car where the old women had come from, and he was conscious and talking, but didn't look too well. We drove for about an hour, with Mike constantly situating and re-situating the old woman, who was passed out/dead and slumped over onto him. We finally got down the mountain and into the village/town of Ozgun, where we drove around looking for the hospital.
Finding a hospital in this village was like finding a needle in a haystack. Our driver stopped every few minutes to ask directions from some of the many people who were out wandering the streets at midnight on a Saturday. We found some buildings, but people kept sending us to other buildings. Finally we arrived at a place where men in white doctor coats came out to the car. They brought out a stretcher and sort of dumped the woman from the trunk onto the stretcher and carried her inside. Then there was lots of wandering around, smoking cigarettes, writing down our license plate number, and then finally someone came out to get the woman leaning on Mike. The doctor asked how long she hadn't been breathing, and we tried to explain that we didn't think she'd been breathing the whole time she'd been in the car with us.
So they unceremoniously pulled her out of the car and plopped her down onto a stretcher, and then accidentally shut her foot in the door as they were closing it again. Evan, Mike, and I just sat in the car for about 30 minutes, waiting to see what was going to happen. We wanted to call the guesthouse and tell them we were going to be late, but weren't sure if we were going to arrive at all that night or if we were just going to overnight somewhere in Ozgun. We actually had no idea how far we were from Osh at all. So we just waited. At one point a nurse came out of the hospital and dumped a big pail of blood into the snow next to our car. I will say here and now that I will NEVER allow myself to be admitted to a Kyrgyz hospital- I'd rather give myself surgery, or just die. It seemd ridiculous and disorganized and people were smoking the patient rooms.

Finally our driver came out and we set off again. Both of the women had died, either before they got into the car with us, or sometime along the journey. There was no sound or movement out of either of them the whole time, so at least it didn't feel like they were dying in our presence. It was still not a good thing to experience. I'd never seen dead people before, except at open-casket funerals, which is a bit different. I'm having so many new experiences in Kyrgyzstan!

Our driver talked to the guesthouse staff, and they met us in Osh when we finally arrived around 1:30 am and took us to the apartment. It ended up being about a 14 hour trip (usual time is about 8 or 9 hours). But the taxi driver was fun to talk to, funny, and a really good driver, so I was sad to see him go. What an experience to share! I wish I had gotten his phone number so that he could be my next long-distance journey taxi driver also. I'll just have to go back to Osh Bazaar and search for him.

Today Evan, Mike, and I have just wandered around Osh. There's not much to see here, but we went to the bazaar, which is said to be one of the best in Central Asia, and climbed Souleyman Mountain, which is very sacred to Muslims because it's said that Mohammed prayed there. It was a beautiful sunny day, Osh is covered in a pretty blanket of white snow, and we had great cheap Uyghur food for lunch. We're going to eat at "California Cafe" for dinner, and then head back to the guesthouse.

Tomorrow morning we're setting off to Tashkent by taxi! Hopefully that journey will be less surreal and snowy, and there will be no dead people involved.