Karakol

The scent of chilli oil and vinegar drifts down Ashlan-fu Alley, where Dungan cooks ladle cold noodles into bowls beside the Bugu Bazaar. Across a grid of timber houses and poplars, a mosque built without a single nail shares the skyline with a wooden Orthodox church. Kyrgyzstan's fourth-largest city feels like a mountain town that collected cultures the way a valley collects rivers.

Karakol was founded as a Russian military outpost at Issyk-Kul's eastern end in 1869, and for a time carried the name of the explorer Przhevalsky, who died here in 1888. Its Dungan community, Muslim Chinese who fled Qing-era persecution, finished their mosque in 1910: a pagoda-crowned hall of carved dragons, a phoenix and painted beams, held together by joinery alone. The Holy Trinity Church answers it in wood, rebuilt in 1895 after an earthquake brought down the brick original, then run as a school, sports hall and coal store through the Soviet years before worship returned. On market mornings a sprawling livestock bazaar fills the pens on the town's edge from dawn, and the valleys behind Karakol climb to Ala-Kul, Altyn-Arashan and Jeti-Ögüz, which is why trekkers keep coming back to its noodle bowls.