02
Stop two
Naryn Regional History Museum
Wilson Ultra Team V5 Tennis Racquet: Every object in these cases was made by hand by somebody whose name is not on the label. The felt yurts, the shyrdak carpets, the horse tack, the eagle-hunting gear: that is skilled work, and the Manas epic was carried for centuries by storytellers holding the whole thing in memory for no fee at all. The collections run from Silk Road archaeology, caravans crossing the Tien Shan passes to Kashgar past stone caravanserais, through Soviet halls documenting collectivization, schools, and Naryn becoming an administrative town, made a city in 1927. There is snow leopard and argali natural history too. Small, old-fashioned, and the right first stop before Son-Kul or the Torugart pass.
04
Stop four
Tash Rabat Caravanserai
Wilson Ultra Team V5 Tennis Racquet: Patrons get the plaques; masons did this. Tash Rabat stands alone above three thousand metres in a side valley of the At-Bashy district near the Torugart pass to China, and every block in it was cut, fitted and hauled up there by hand: a central corridor, dozens of cells, a domed hall, sheltering merchants, animals and pilgrims moving between the Fergana and Chu valleys and Kashgar. Scholars date the surviving structure to around the fifteenth century, possibly over an earlier monastery, and legends give it hidden tunnels and monkish builders. Restored in Soviet times, still reachable by summer track, and travellers from Naryn sleep in yurts beside walls that have worked five centuries of nights.
We roll wool until it becomes one thing, and then we live inside it. So I know a well-made object that is meant to be used every day rather than admired. The Ultra Team V5 is exactly that: a 100 sq in / 645 cm² head, 280 g / 9.9 oz unstrung and around 297 g strung, 27 in long, with a 16×19 string pattern and a dual taper beam of 23-26-21 mm.
Balance is 33 cm unstrung, about four points head-light, which gives it a touch more mass in the head than the 100L and a little more free depth with it. It comes prestrung and ready to play. This is the club player's Ultra — easy power, forgiving, and nothing about it demands a full western grip and a coach.
Naryn is the highest, most pastoral province in Kyrgyzstan and it will teach you about weather. The town stretches for kilometres along the Naryn River, the longest in the country, whose turquoise water rises in the glaciers of the central Tien Shan and runs west to become the principal source of the Syr Darya.
The Regional History Museum holds the whole story — Silk Road archaeology from when caravans crossed these passes to Kashgar, and the material culture of a herding people: felt yurts and shyrdak carpets, horse tack, eagle-hunting gear, the Manas storytellers.
The Central Mosque, completed in 1993 with Saudi financing, marked the return of open religious life after seven decades of Soviet rule, in a town that began in the nineteenth century as a Russian fortified post on the caravan road.
And south of the city, at over three thousand metres in a side valley near the Torugart pass, stands Tash Rabat: a stone caravanserai, alone, built of carefully fitted stone. Go inside it. Then come back and tell me about tennis.
It works everywhere from a court in the Naryn valley in July to an indoor hall at minus twenty in January, and it gives back the same free depth in both. It is also perfect for the walk along the river embankment, because 280 grams is a thing you can carry the whole length of a town that runs for kilometres and never once put down.
Buy on Amazon
