Originally posted on medium.com
For a small landlocked country in Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan is surprisingly visually rich and beautiful. Its tall snow-covered mountains reach to the sky, standing majestically amidst undulating landscapes. Its hills are home to gently wavering grasslands inhabited by semi-nomadic shepherds. These grasslands are dotted with yurts, the mobile homes of shepherds where a traveller encounters the generous hospitality of every proud Kyrgyz. Graceful Central Asian horses canter in these heavenly gardens, adding a sense of spiritual upliftment to the entire landscape.
Surreal images of Kyrgyzstan
Join me on a photography tour to Kyrgyzstan. It’s an enthralling experience with incredible photography opportunities!
For a visitor with a camera, every corner of Kyrgyzstan is an extravagantly picturesque affair. Here is a collection of every reason that makes Kyrgyzstan a photographer’s delight.
Originally posted in medium.com
Kyrgyzstan is a nation defined by its natural beauty. Joyously unspoilt mountainscapes, stark craggy ridges and rolling jailoos (summer pastures) are brought to life by semi-nomadic, yurt-dwelling shepherds— Lonely Planet Central Asia
An Eagle-Hunter in Kyrgyzstan
I was always fascinated about remote and unknown regions of Central Asia’s highlands. Even when there is not so much a thing called ‘unknown’ in today’s world of air travel and internet, the mountainous regions far north of the Himalayas seemed to be away from everywhere. The region always sounded exotic, with its fables of Silk-Route and of marching armies of Chengiz Khan and Timur Leng. Their nomadic settlements in the mountains and fascinating eagle-hunters on their Central-Asian horses were stuff that made for exotic stories.
For many years now, I have had a wish to meet and photograph the falconers of Central Asia. The falconers, also called Eagle Hunters, train eagles to hunt small animals and are usually found in Mongolia, Kazakhstan and neighbouring countries. I was in Kyrgyzstan last September, where I had an opportunity to spend a few hours speaking to and photographing an Eagle Hunter.
The eagles–a golden eagle in this case–are usually picked up from the nest at an early age. A falconer keeps them for about twenty years and subsequently releases them in the wild. This is a practice that perhaps helped perpetuate their population in the wild during the times when eagle hunting was a common practice across Central Asia.