Goat polo
Very cool 5 days living like Kyrgyz shepherds.
We opened up the roof seats of the truck and whilst ducking power lines got very cold driving the truck off-road for 4 hours into the middle of nowhere, next to the Song Kul lake where we found our homes for the next few days – yurts sleeping 5 people with just a couple of blankets for beds.
Whilst in the yurts we did a number of activities such as hikes, making jam and cream and riding about on horses, which was a first for me. My horse did very little other than eat all day, apparently because I wasn’t kicking it hard enough in the ribs, but that tended to make me feel a bit guilty, so I let the horse dawdle along at it’s own pace.
The first night we realised our yurt had seen better days and we could see the lightning and feel the rain dripping through the holes in the top.
The second night the temperature got down to -10C, which was chilly, especially as the door of the yurt fell off…but in the morning the ground was covered in a thick layer of snow which made the lake and mountain look amazing.
At this point 4 Germans rode up and asked if they could have the sleeping blankets we were using as they were expecting a hotel and were cold. Having just survived a night at -10 everyone was very attached to their 2 blankets and didn’t really want to hand one over. Turned out they all had sleeping bags anyway and were just being greedy.
After the sun came up and quickly melted the snows we were treated to a game of Goat Polo, where a goat is beheaded and the carcass used at the ball in a game between two teams of two (or randomly four?) and has to be wrestled from the opposing team and placed on a mat to score.
Towards the end of the game a shepherd turned up and was quoted as asking “Excuse me, has anyone seen my goat?”
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