A dacha in the woods

This dacha by Saray Chelek lake (roughly https://goo.gl/maps/1DRp7) was once reserved for important members of the Kyrgyz Communist Party.



The lake itself is really quite pretty, and a short walk up into the hills around it gets you to many smaller but equally attractive lakes:

The Toktogul Dam

In the pub on Thursday, some dismay was expressed that I had posted pictures from upstream and from downstream of this dam but had unaccountably not shown the dam itself.



This is the second dam (the one at https://goo.gl/maps/CLZOE if you like scrolling around Google Maps); there is a bigger dam at https://goo.gl/maps/qRzya but it is three kilometres from the road over a 4000-foot-high ridge, and besides it is considered a strategic facility of Kyrgyzstan and visitors are not encouraged.

The second dam has a convenient car park and viewpoint just overlooking it, and this rather splendid statue (I think in concrete painted sort-of-brass-colour) of САТЫКЕЙ БААТЫР, about whom all the information I can find on the Internet is in Kyrgyz, a language with a vague resemblance to Turkish but written in Cyrillic script further to deter casual readers.