Where it all started.
BISHKEK → SONG-KUL
I grew up in Bishkek — the capital, the concrete, the noise. But every summer, I escaped. My family would drive south to Song-Kul Lake, a high-altitude pasture ringed by the Tian Shan mountains, where nomadic families spend the warm months with their herds.
For a city kid, it was another world. No roads. No phone signal. Just horses, yurts, and a freedom I couldn't find anywhere else. I drank kumys with the herders, rode horses across meadows I couldn't see the end of, and spent weeks with families who became my second family. I used to dream about staying — about living in the yurts and never going back to the city.
It was also where I met my first foreign travelers. This was the early 2000s — no internet, barely any infrastructure, and yet somehow people found their way to these remote mountains. I was fascinated. They were brave, curious, open-minded. And even as a child, something about those encounters planted a seed.
This is me — Nazima, the founder of Piala Trails.
After those summers ended, the seed didn't disappear — it grew. I studied International Relations at the American University of Central Asia, and every summer break I still found myself running back to the mountains. Eventually I stopped pretending it was a hobby and started guiding.
I worked for several travel companies, guided dozens of groups across Central Asia, and discovered that what I loved most wasn't the logistics or the itineraries — it was the moment when a traveler sat down in a stranger's home, shared a meal, and realized that the world is smaller and kinder than they thought.
That was the feeling I wanted to build a company around.
What Piala Trails is
A company built on a feeling.
Piala Trails was born from everything I just told you — the summers, the strangers who became friends, the belief that travel should change you in quiet ways, not loud ones.
We are a female-founded company based in Bishkek. We work with local female guides for our cultural group tours, and we actively support female-led businesses and cooperatives across Kyrgyzstan. Not because it's a marketing angle — because it's who we are and who we want to lift up.
Our approach is simple: authenticity, human connection, and real culture. That's what every trip is built on.
Whether you come to Kyrgyzstan for a mindful reset in the mountains or a deep cultural immersion in its villages, we're happy to have you — as long as you bring the same openness and respect that those early travelers brought to Song-Kul.