Cars and trucks of Kyrgyzstan

Do you live in Germany or Switzerland? Have you ever wondered where your old car ended up when in no longer passed the safety standards? When I turned in my beloved 1984 Volkswagen Golf the car dealer said two things: “Sorry, I can’t give you a reduction on your new car, but I will not make you pay for the old car, you are lucky” and “We’ll ship it to the East, probably Romania”.

Well, it could as well have been that my Golf was shipped even further, all the way over to Kyrgyzstan! What a change from China, where we saw only new cars and brands included many unknown ones from China itself, South Korea, or an occasional Toyota Hilux. Here in Kyrgyzstan we see old to very old cars, the former category made up by Volkswagen, Audi and BMW while the latter category included unknown Russian brands or of course Ladas.

The entire national overland-bus fleet seems to be made up by old Mercedes 14-seater minibuses, which are of course filled up with lot more people than there are seats. The origins of minibuses, small lorrys and also large trucks are unmistakably Switzerland, Germany and Sweden. This we quickly derived from the old advertisement-stickers which were never removed from the sides of the cars and windows. We see slogans like “Liebe Gruesse – Ihr Blumen Giesse”, or “Fenster-Scheiben-Tueren”, quite amusing for us of course. In Karakol we visited the local car market, situated right across the livestock market. There one can not only buy old cars, but also old to antique car parts. Every town in Kyrgyzstan in fact seems to have a small market for buying old European cars. 

With the proximity to China selling cheap new cars we were quite surprised to see so many European cars and yet so little Chinese ones. A Russian lad running the sauna-spa near Karakol explained this phenomenon in his own words. Apparently the new Chinese cars are not good, because the “klapper-klapper … boom-boom big problem”. So you start having a small problem which eventually develops into a big problem. Russian cars are much better. “Russian cars is always problem. But small problem. No big problem”. There you go, reason enough to go for the Lada 1600.

While pottering along the country roads we saw many vintage cars and tractors which almost belong into a museum rather than on the road and I was always looking out for that car holder with wet feet getting out of a Mars-red Golf with sunflower stickers in excitement to have a reunion with my beloved water leaking old car.