42. The Wrong Pants

How I survived a 12-day riding safari without luggage

Now I am back in the saddle here after travelling for what seems like ages, it is time to regale my precious subscribers with the story of how I ended up wearing the adventuress and equestrienne Alexandra Tolstoy’s pants for three days in Kyrgyzstan (a trip that you will be reading about in The Times and Sunday Times in the fullness of time).

Where to begin? Well, several weeks before we left for Central Asia.

Forget the detailed itinerary - a 12 day itinerary that included the vertiginous 2,446m Kotorma pass on horseback that made me weak to contemplate- the packing list alone Tolstoy sent me for her trek ran to a dizzying several pages.

Sleeping bag, sleeping bag liner, three pairs jodhpurs , chaps, riding boots, waterproof riding coat…head torch!

I hadn’t seen anything like it since I went to prep school aged 10 as the first girl at Ashdown House, Forest Row, East Grinstead, Sussex. My mother took me from Brussels to Harrods’ uniform department with a list as long as your arm. I left with a St Trinian’s trousseau of navy kilts and Aertex shirts, tuck box and trunk.

I managed to source most items for the riding safari and as D-Day approached at the beginning of this month if I had any spare time I’d take everything out, check it against the list and repack into my father’s Samsonite expedition bag he’d taken to China when he was following in the footsteps of Marco Polo for the second time, a few years ago.

As it happens he has a brand new book out - his 29th I think - about re-tracking his 1961 journey as an undergraduate on BSA bikes, written with his irrepressible verve and dash, and it’s called In the Footsteps of Marco Polo*. Anyway, I spent longer packing these two bags or so it felt like than I did revising for Finals.

I also borrowed his binos to examine the majestic scenery and flora and fauna of the Tien Shan, and the scops owl that had kept (former MP) Owen Paterson awake when he did this once in a lifetime trip last year with Thatcher’s biographer, Charles Moore.

In the end I had so much stuff that I split it up (this is boring but important for the tale of two bags that follows, and here’s a picture of me saying goodbye to my stallion Koko on the last day, as it’s nicer than one of my bags lying on a muddy riverbank).

Mountain Warehouse soft black rubberised sausage for boots, chaps, riding hat and rainproof jacket, and the squishy Samsonite for everything else, of which there was plenty.

As I checked in at Terminal 2, Turkish Airlines insisted the smaller black bag had to go through oversize bag lane as it had straps. Hold onto that detail. I remember feeling a twinge of anxiety that my two children were being separated. At least one I suspected would be orphaned between here and the steppes.

In Istanbul - the luggage, I remind you, was checked through all the way to Bishkek - I noticed all Turkish Airlines boarding passes in my Apple wallet had disappeared. Gone. This happened to the Wire actor Dominic West too, at this exact same point, when he did this trip, I was told later. I stared at my phone in disbelief. What? Why?

This wouldn’t have mattered so much but there was no Wi-Fi to download them again - not that I could log on to - and my leader, the traveller and entrepreneur Alexandra Tolstoy, had kept warning me, “Don’t hang around in Istanbul airport, this is super important!! You have really run to make the connection, and the airport is huuuge, go straight to the gate, or you’ll miss the flight!” She told me all the times people including her son had missed the connection and had to buy expensive new flights the next day, and snarled up the whole itinerary (the others had arrived in Bishkek 24 hours before me).

Mindful of this I pelted to an open Turkish Airlines desk and threw my passport across the counter. “I’m on the next flight to Bishkek,” I said to the man, who was chatting comfortably to a colleague.“I need a boarding pass please!”

His first reaction was to glance at his watch in disbelief.

“The eight o’clock?” he said, “The last flight to Bishkek?”

“Yes,” I gasped as he handed me a boarding pass. “You have 15 minutes before takeoff.”

This sounded like mission impossible. I ran for about a mile through the airport in about ten minutes. Not exactly a marathon in under two hours but very much a personal best for me. The flight was closing when reached Gate B23 and I was tasting my own blood.

When on board I glanced at the screen in front of me. The flight information was up. I glanced at it. It said the Turkish airlines flight I was on would be landing at 0937 am in New Brunswick, Canada, in more than 13 hours time. Not in six or so hours in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

This was not the information I was expecting, but on the other hand, Turkish Airlines had sent me a notification the previous day saying my flight was leaving on May 1st when I was flying on May 2nd. Turkish Airlines had also deleted remotely all my boarding passes. And now Turkish Airlines had checked me into a flight to Canada. I thought it was worth at least checking I wasn’t on a flight to the Arctic Circle.

I twisted in my seat and asked the German woman behind me whether we were on a flight to Kyrgyzstan. “Ja,” she said. “Is mistake. Bishkek.” I settled back and at 0430 am we landed at Manas Airport.

Well, Mountain Warehouse turned up but the Samsonite didn’t make it back to Central Asia, which meant I only had the clothes I stood up in for an Instagrammable bucket list etc riding safari where, rather than a glorious May spring in a Stan, a succession of violent storms were about to hit. I had packed for 12 days on the road. Admittedly the conditions that obtained were not as hairy as when my father tracked Marco Polo in 1961 and two out of the three motorbikes had to be ditched and he biked from Peshawar to Calcutta with not one but two pillion passengers “like some multi-limbed Hindu God,” as he writes in his new book, but still.

Here’s the trio of Stanley Johnson, Tim Severin and Michael de Larrabeiti in Bombay as proof.

I considered my plight. By 7am I was supposed to be meeting the Tolstoy group and driving for 11 straight hours into the mountains, to meet our horses and horsemen.

At 6am I gave up on the bag and left Bishkek airport - having reported the loss to Lost and Found - and got into a taxi to the group hotel. After a quick local breakfast of pickled cauliflower and dried sheep milk balls, we all climbed into the minivan to Kizel Kel.

I had no washbag, no underwear, no toothbrush, no pyjamas, no sleeping bag, no Glaze and Gordon jodhpurs, no Glaze and Gordon gilets or Glaze and Gordon deerskin gloves (yes they were all “gifted” and I couldn’t be more grateful)…I was dependent on the kindness of strangers and all my efforts to make sure I didn’t let the side down on my chestnut stallion when it came to the inevitable photos to accompany my piece would be in vain.

Over the first few days I accepted the following with heartfelt cries of genuine gratitude.

William Astor had not only packed two magnums of vintage Rioja and cigars, he also supplied me with a Swype moist towelette (“No Shower, No Problem”).

Davina Powell lent me some Virgin Atlantic pyjamas. The top was red and the bottoms were grey, like a toddler sleepsuit.

Alexandra Tolstoy, the most stylish woman alive (she purveys her own range of wares on her Dacha website) gave me a pair of clean, brown lacy Stripe & Stare pants.

And here’s the thing. By Tuesday morning I had adjusted. It goes to show you can get used to anything. In fact, I was going around saying, “It’s amazing how little you actually need,” as the sapling-slim yummy mummies of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire on the safari somehow emerged from tents at cock crow, refulgent in crisp pressed linen blouses, sand-coloured jodhpurs and gleaming leather chaps, blonde hair smoothly in chignons as if they were about to hunt with the Heythrop.

I even tried to work up some thesis in private about excess baggage and how we accumulate stuff to prove we’re alive and how the urge to get more stuff is a hiding to nothing. True freedom, I told myself as I crouched in my tent in the same clothes I’d worn on the plane, apart from Alexandra’s pants, was to travel lightly through airports as through life…you get the drift.

And then, Tuesday lunchtime - Vasilii the ponytailed camp commander, galloped up alongside me just as we were skirting the rushing, pale green Kara Suu river, boiling with snow melt.

“Is this your bag?” He asked and he held up his phone.

It was. My father’s green bag. It had been located and had arrived Bishkek.

We were now 12 hours drive away and a flash flood (you’ll have to wait for my Times travel piece for that) had washed away the road.

I had a choice: did I pay to have it driven by taxi all the way to the camp or did I reunite with it back in Bishkek at the Asia Mountains HQ at the end of the trip? The traveller’s dilemma.

There were eight days to go. Given we were striking camp every day it was actually a mercy not to have to fill my small tent with two bags of damp clothing and muddy boots.

I made my decision.

The next day, as the sun sank over the snow capped mountains I saw a white van nudging past the herd of cows coming home to be milked across the river. It turned into the camp.

It was the taxi from Bishkek.

When the taxi driver bore the Samsonite into the camp in exchange for all my dollars everyone cheered, mainly because I wouldn’t bore on about it any longer.

I think the moral is this. You can’t take it with you but it’s nice to have it along for the ride, especially if your only change of clothes is some borrowed flight pyjamas.

And go hand luggage only, unless you are of course bringing your own fine wines and Cuban cigars in a bespoke travel case on safari, in which case it has to go into the hold.

Oh and of course I managed to leave plenty of things behind in the Tien Shan and Bishkek as I always do, but that’s an even more boring story (and lastly if you are a paying subscriber you can read a blessedly shorter version of this in last week’s Spectator, in a piece entitled “true freedom is wearing someone else’s pants”).

*As a last bonus, here’s an image of the invitation to the launch of my father Stanley’s his new book (I couldn’t go as was en route by then) but it had everything - pints, speeches, bikes and mics.

From one Stan to another in one Substack!

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