After 5k the irony struck - doing a long detour the day before, to avoid 30k on a small road and now I had to ride the remaining 35k to the border on a horrible gravel, stony, bumpy, washing board road. When riding south of the lake some days earlier, I had jokingly suggested to myself that nobody could make even a gravel road as bad as that road  - but of course it exists in Kyrgyzstan...