Once Were Warriors

A visit to the 2018 World Nomad Games in Kyrgyzstan is a surreal trip to a time and place where martial skills matter.

- Nick Goodyer

IT STARTS AS A LOW VIBRATION, BUILDING into a gentle tremor, then ground-shaking thunder. Earthquake? I roll up the thick felt door of the yurt and peer out into the dawn light. Horses, quite easily two or three hundred, are being herded down from their high mountain pasture to the valley below, driven by three riders, their shrill calls steering the herd so that it twists and turns like a flock of birds. They pass close by, barely giving me a glance, leaving a cloud of dust kicked up by a thousand hoofs.

Horses are everywhere – and everything – in Kyrgyzstan. They are ridden and used as beasts of burden. They are bartered, they are eaten and they are milked. Their dung is used as fuel. The country smells of horse, an earthy, powerful aroma riding the breeze that ripples the sea of grass. Man first learned to ride on vast, rugged steppes such as these, and still today the horse is the most effective way to traverse this magnificently verdant landscape.

Kyrgyzstan emerged blinking from the ruins of the USSR in 1991, one of the five ‘Stans’ of which many people remain barely aware – an area that travel writer Colin Thubron described as The Lost Heart of Asia. The country is an enigma, caught between big brother China to the east, the emerging giant of Kazakhstan to the north, and some-time fractious rivals Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to the south and east.