To Bishkek!

 The next day we woke up and paid for our room. After we talked to the guest house people about arranging for a car to Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan's capital). They called back and said a car would be there in 30-40 minutes, so Mike and I walked over to pick up some food as Omar and Andy sat with the bags in the apartment complex courtyard and played music with a few kids as the start of the audience sitting on a bench across from them.We picked up some food to go, and again everyone we ran into as the day before was so kind and polite and went out of their way to help us communicate and make us feel welcome. We came back with food and saw that the crowd had grown significantly. There were children dancing happily, and some adults standing around, smiling, including the owner of the apartment we stayed in, who was smiling by the door of the building as Andy and Mike played. I sang a little and we wrapped up with the kids playing around with the instruments a bit. A Pakistani and an Indian medical student who were roommates had come by and joined the crowd while Mike and I were purchasing food. I talked to both and they were very friendly, inviting us to come eat with them and telling us lots of invaluable information about the area. We would have loved to join them, but were just about to leave the city. Perhaps we will see them on the way back. I've met so many nice peopel travelling like this, and getting email addresses etc along the way.Our car arrived and we loaded up, then drove off. Along the way we took out our nan and kabobs to get some food in us, as beautiful mountains streamed past. Things were looking good. The car was fast, the road was good and the scenery, as usual, beautiful. After a while, the car started to stutter. We kept making stops at the side of the road, eating with some British travelers, getting to know our driver through our limited communication, listening to tapes. Several times we stopped and just walked around until the car got settled down a bit, until we reached an autoshop run by children on the side of the road. We stayed there for many hours as they went to get some clean gasoline, then drained the contaminated gasoline and refilled it. We played music and made friends with the kids who worked there. The river water there was very clean and good. By now it was night and we were far behind in getting to Bishkek. It seemed at this point that we weren't destined to have much luck with transport on this trip. Still, we were very grateful that it was much better than the horrible ride from the border into Osh, so everyone was patient and in good spirits. It was dark by the time we got back on the road. We passed more rock, and went through a very long tunnel, as we all tried in vain to sleep. Suddenly I heard a loud crash and a 7-8 inch piece of concrete fell next to my foot in the back seat. Andy told the driver to keep going, and we got out of there quick. At first I thought a rock had dropped from above, but noticed that we were surrounded by trees. We drove a ways from where the rock had smashed through the windshield then stopped to assess the situation. It turned out that Andy opened his eyes, just in time to see a 20 or so year old man throw the rock into the windshield from the side of the road. He barely moved out of the way and the rock scraped his hand and the side of his head. All of us were covered in fragments of the windshield. We checked Andy out. It was dark everywhere. The driver called another car and decided he wanted to go back. Andy had said to keep going at the time because we had no idea if there were more people waiting in the dark or if this guy had some other kind of weapons. The driver drove back to find this guy with us in tow. As we reached there, another man had already grabbed a kid who seemed to fit the description. There really wasn't anyone else out at that time, so it seemed likely that he was the culprit. He even had the same color red shirt that Andy had seen, but he could not be absolutely certain and we could not accuse someone not knowing for certain. So we let the kid go and the two men (our driver and the other car driver who had turned up to help) communicated to us in gestures that they thought we should have jumped out of the car and beat the guy down. Sound logic in a pitch dark place, where we don't speak the language and the law can't be trusted any more than the bandits who roam about at night. We drove on down the street, not quite understanding what they were all saying. At a row of roadside stalls in the dark, our driver picked up some tape to cover up the gaping hole in the windshield that Andy had been covering up with a cloth propped up by his feet to try and keep sand like glass from getting into our eyes. Meanwhile a brawl was taking place a few stalls down from us and a bunch of cars pulled up around us. Our driver didn't seem worried, but we all felt we needed to be cautious. I found some odd things in the car, so we all tossed them out at the next spot we stopped at as our driver taped up the windshield unaware of us.From there the ride was tense and silent in the dark.