For anyone planning an expedition to Kyrgyzstan any time soon, below is a link to the expedition report of the 2012 Queen's University Belfast Mountaineering Club Tien Shan Expedition.
It's a ridiculously thorough thing (written by a out of work scientist with too much free time, mostly) but in summary we visited the Dzhirnagaktu Valley of the Western Kokshaal Too, climbing 11 new routes including 3 first ascents, all above 4500m. Conditions were reasonable but rock in the valley was of bad quality (ice was good though). The next valley over to the east is Kizil Askar and has good solid granite.
Our valley doesn't have a huge amount of potential left bar one peak we called the Monolith (approx 5600m) lying between Dzhirnagaktu and Kizil Askar. This has a kilometre high wall of granite on its south side (China) which looks amazing.
Transport was organised through ITMC who were just brilliant. We took the Ural truck out (ridiculous 6wd monster) and a Gaz-66 back. Would not recomment anyone taking a UAZ to the western kokshaal-too as it will get stuck in rivers - we had toruble getting the URAL across the main one in the valley.
The entire trip (for 6 people) cost less than £10,000 of which approx £6,000 was grant money from the Mount Everest Foundation, Mountaineering Ireland, QUB Annual Fund and QUBMC.
So Kyrgyzstan is great for affordable expeditions and I highly recommend going there - there's tons left to do farther east. (Pk Dankova and around there)
Anyway if anyone would like any more info just email me.
Link:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bw7kwCjznmBPQy1keHZ1T05Jb2M
