Kumis face

Nothing is better than feeding other people fermented mare's milk for the first time. NOTHING.

Central Asian food #1 - main dishes

Above: Uzbek ladies know how to party! Correct technique for a bridal welcome party: dump the boys in a skanky dark room to drink vodka and be manly, then assemble in a huge room with delicious food and even more vodka. Eat food, drink vodka. Repeat. The two ladies sitting at the far end of the table are the brides.

So, I think I have been extremely remiss so far in devoting little or no commentary to the wonders of Central Asian cuisine. Possibly that's because "wonders" is a bit of a strong word. The food here is often delicious but, as I may have mentioned once or twice before, the base elements of the local food constitute mutton and, well, mutton fat. Sheep are prized for the size of their booty (the specimen on the left sports a particularly fine example) and fatty meat is much more expensive to buy than lean. The results can politely be described as "hearty", and you quickly become closely acquainted with the very special sensation of congealed mutton fat coating the roof of your mouth. And while home-cooked food is almost inevitably great, restaurants haven't really got the hang of variety, so you can easily find yourself carefully rotating the same four or five meals over and over again in order to avoid eating plov for two straight meals in a row and thus losing the ability to move for the next forty eight hours.

Flavouring is bizarrely hit-or-miss. The most commonly-used herb is dill, in what seems to me to be unecessarily large quantities; garlic makes an occasional appearance and while there might be a hot and spicy sauce on the table if you are lucky, the food in general errs on the side of blandness. Everything is served with bread, round, cooked in a clay oven andspectacularly moreish when fresh, less so when stale or made with mutton fat (no, seriously. In everything.). Vegetables are rather an afterthought although salads can get quite creative (too often drowned in mayonnaise though); fruit on the other hand is so good in season that I don't think I'll be able to bear going back to stuff we get at home.

In summary: artery-clogging is actively encouraged, and vegetarians need not apply (I've met one or two dedicated souls attempting to cross Central Asia without eating any meat - they were to a woman rather wild-eyed). Below is a selection of the Central Asian (well, mainly Uzbek, but there's not a whole lot of difference) greatest hits. Breathe deeply, wash everything down with plenty of green tea and think about how well your stomach is being lined for the forthcoming vodka toasts.

Plov:

Where better to start than with the king Central Asian cuisine, that exquisite mixture of rice, mutton fat, carrot, mutton

fat and a tiny bit of mutton, plov. This almost approaches a religion in Uzbekistan particularly, where among other things it is invoked as an aphrodisiac (personally, I can't imagine how you could possibly be up for anything after a plate of plov, but then again, I'm not Uzbek, and the birthrate here is undeniably high). A good home-made plov is delicious, studded with entire bulbs of garlic and heaps of mutton and carrots; unfortunately the restaurant variety can often end up swimming in half an inch or more of oil. I am going to unpatriotically admit that I prefer the Afghan variety, which isn't cooked in oil.

Laghman:

Laghman is my favourite of the local standards: thick Chinese-style handmade noodles, served either in a soup or dry with on top. At its best, it is spicy and garlicky and full of aubergine and peppers and tomatoes and limited mutton fat. At its lukewarm, flavourless worse it is still approximately 47% less likely to leave you prodding the roof of your mouth with your tongue and wondering if drinking nail polish remover would dissolve the fat coating than every other dish listed here.

Manty:

These are huge meat dumplings, usually steamed but sometimes fried. Often delicious but very easy to overdose on, especially when an enthusiastic hostess is urging you on, so much so that I can barely look them in the eye any more. The pumpkin versions (autumn only) are spectacular, only somewhat less so once you are aware that they, too, have been enlivened with handfuls of mutton fat.

Shashlik:

Nothing can be quite as good, or quite as bad, as meat on a stick. From Iran to Kazahstan, of an evening the street corners are alive with miniature barbecues with an attendant vigrously fanning the smoke, and the smell of roasting meat is everwhere. Usually alternating cubes of mutton and (you guessed it) mutton fat; I personally prefer the whole lot minced up together which is a) tastier and b) you can pretend that what you are eating isn't 50% fat.Served with lots of raw onion and (naturally) bread.

Shorpa:

Meat and potato soup, often with bonus lumps of fat floating in it. I tend to associate it with dismal roadside cafes during long-distance bus journeys where it is often the onlything served and can thus take it or leave it. Usually rather tasteless, but can be absolutely superb when homemade. I think that this one wasn't that bad actually.

Halim:

Meat porridge. Um. It's not quite as bad as it sounds (although admittedly this isn't hard)?. It's more unexpected than anything else.


Still to come (when I assemble the photos): drinks, snacks, desserts (such as there are. Likely to be a love letter to the fruit here). In the meantime I am off to take full advantage of the fact that I'm in a capital city and shamelessly stuff my face with pizza which may be of questionable authenticity, but is 100% guaranteed not to contain any mutton fat at all. Score.

Kyrgyzstan again: a question of avalanches

What is it about this country that inevitably leads to me doing slightly silly things in pursuit of scenery? It's not as if it's hard to find the stuff here.

The pass was higher than I'd ever been in my life. The south side had been snow free, but the north was covered with overhanging snow bluffs, softened by the sun and the previous night's rain. A sentence I'd read once in a book about an avalanche disaster on K2 or some other such baleful mountain leapt to the front of my mind and lodged itself happily there, replaying again and again: "Strangely, the party had chosen to cross the snow field during mid-afternoon, the most dangerous time for avalanches". It was 2pm. Every ten minutes or so, a vast load of snow and rock rumbled off the neighbouring mountainsides, easily one of the most menacing sounds that there is. I probably wouldn‘t have been so concerned if our guide hadn't also been so very obviously Not Happy. “Too much snow, too dangerous”. With a rope or an ice axe the bluff would've posed no problems, but mountaineering equipment was just one other thing that we had not thought especially hard about. Of course, most people don't perish in avalanches. It's just that, well, some do.

The idea had been to do some gentle trekking in the hills around Karakol, in the east of the country. We had been informed by the head of the local trekking agency that there was a beautiful azure gem of a lake called Ala-Kol just two day’s hike away, and we could breeze up there, admire the Alpine scenery and breeze back down again. The pass crossing might be a little tricky because of the altitude he conceded (Oh ha ha, I thought bitterly, struggling to put one foot in front of the other at 4000 m), but there would be no snow, and we would be laughing our way down to the hot springs on the other side. Things we were not entirely aware of when we launched ourselves merrily into this enterprise: a) June still counts as spring in Kyrgyzstan, not summer and this had been the wettest and coldest June for a while and b) due to the unrest, we were the first group of tourists going up the pass this season. For a brief comparison, this is Ala-Kol as it usually looks in late June:

This is how it looked when we were there:

The similarities are, you must concede, striking.

We eventually scrambled down some snow-free boulders, which were vertical and unsteady in a way that lent new and intensely personal meaning to the phrase "rocks fall, everybody dies" and bolted across the snow as fast as we physically could, which was not very as it was up to our thighs, as one of the snow bluffs above us collapsed, sending a stream of snow and rubble past us slightly closer than I would've preferred. One slightly unexpected river crossing later (who knew that unstable ice sheets can harbour glacial streams underneath? Well, most people I suppose. I'm reasonably sure I've never uttered such high-pitched noises in my life) and we were down in a green, flower-filled valley, contemplating the uniquely ex-Soviet attitude towards health and safety. Actual mountain climbers do stuff like that all the time and at much higher, its just that they tend to have stuff like experience and equipment and some idea of what they're getting into. Evidently in Kyrgyzstan not much of this is important.

Still, the guy wasn't lying about the hot springs, and if there's one thing Kyrgyzstan is dead good for is hot springs. The thing to do with these is apparently to build a sanatorium on top and then depending on temperature either bathe in or drink the water, which of course cures everything, and everywhere you come across these decaying concrete complexes where cosmonauts used to convalesce and heads of state to meet and write constitutions and carve up new republics, and now they crumble gently but you can still get a two hour massage for five dollars. Fortunately the ones we stayed at that night were a bit too far away from anywhere for much of that, but there were still small concrete huts and huge baths smelling strongly of sulphur of which I got one of my own, because men and women sharing the same pool even while wearing bathing suits leads to the kind of moral degeneracy that even very smelly water can't cure. In the evening we talked politics, because now what else is there to talk about, and toasted to our survival and peace in the country with a bottle of vodka which had heroically survived being thrown over a cliff during our descent. It felt a little silly that here we were, wandering around scaring ourselves by having inept and mildly dangerous fun in the mountains, when everyone I speak to has a relative or friend in Osh that they're worried about, but then people are cancelling their holidays here in droves, and tourism is a major source of income in the rural areas, almost all of which are still safe, so we're probably not doing any actual harm.

Back in Bishkek now, keeping an eye on things and working out what to do next. Things are calmer now but tense, with everyone anticipating further trouble in the run-up to the constitutional referendum on June 27th. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

In less depressing news

Issyk-Kol is still beautiful.

Kyrgyzstan: bad timing

Words and phrases in Russian that I now know and wish I didn't: civil war, ethnic conflict, murder, rape, genocide. The appalling violence between ethnic Uzbek and Kyrgyz that exploded in the south of Kyrgyzstan last week is the only thing that anyone here is talking about (warning: both articles contain graphic descriptions of violence, and I found the latter in particular very difficult to read).

From here's it's pretty difficult to tell exactly who or what lies behind the eruption of violence: the interim government (and many locals I've spoken to) are quick to blame provocateurs in the pay of former president Bakiyev, ousted in April (and it certainly seems that a lot of the violence was organised in advance) and it also appears that the security forces may have been complicit in the attacks. No one here in the northeast seems to harbour any particularly strong ant-Uzbek sentiments or blame the Uzbeks for the attacks, but then there are hardly any Uzbeks in this part of the country. I rather suspect that opinions are very different further south.

I'm in Karakol, in the northeast of the country, which so far has remained peaceful and thankfully looks like it will remain so. Most of Kyrgyzstan's international borders are closed at the moment, so I'm here for at least the next couple of weeks (which actually suits me down to the ground, as rural Kyrgyzstan is as wild and beautiful and hospitable as ever) but keeping a close eye on developments (given the tight visa regimes in all the surrounding countries, short of flying back home there is rather a shortage of quick and easy escape routes even if the borders do reopen, so that should prove interesting). Watching this play out is miserable: this country is easily one of my favourite places in the world, and just a few months ago seemed to have so much going for it; although now the threat of civil war seems to have receded a little, to see things disintegrate like this is just heartbreaking.

Turkistan

The mausoleum of Kozha Akhmed Yasui in Turkistan is Kazakhstan's sole entry in Central Asia's Blue Dome Hall of Fame (currently dominated by Uzbek specimens), but a good effort, I think. I like the rose garden.

Adventures in public transport #2: across Kazakhstan by train

In Europe and America people in a train travel in a train fully aware that it belongs either to a state or company and that their ticket grants them only temporary occupation and certain restricted rights. In Russia people just take them over.

-- Laurens van der Post, Journey into Russia

The problem with Kazakhstan is that it is a sodding big country. It is approximately the size of Western Europe, except with a population of only about fifteen million and not an awful lot going on apart from a lot of steppe. Aktau on the Caspian is, according to my Beacon of Progress map, at least 1000 km from the nearest town of interest, and my own particular interest lay with the Kyrgyz consulate in Almaty, over 2000km away on the other side of the country (3000 km travelling distance. The placement of transport links here is somewhat eccentric.). Since internal flights are not exactly cheap and buses non-existent, I was obliged to grit my teeth for the four-day-three-night marathon train journey.

Ex-Soviet trains aren't awful - OK, so they're not the Orient Express, but the compartments are clean (even the toilets aren't too hideous) and the bunks are comfortable and there are samovars of hot water in every carriage so the tea supply remains constant - but not anywhere I'd choose to be stuck for four days in a row. Particularly when I haven't showered for the previous two (the Aktau customs-house was good, but not that good). Plus, the scenery for the first three days was not especially stimulating. Having spent much of the past year or so visiting cities whose illustrious histories tended to end with "and then Jenghiz Khan came and burnt it to the ground", I had been given in my more idle moments to speculate vaguely about what drove a person to such extremes of destruction, but no longer. After a mere eight hours of brown, scrubby steppe I was ready to set something on fire just for variety's sake.

However, my mood was improved immeasurably when I succeeded in wheedling two kettles of hot water out of a woman at the station at Aqtobe (1000 km from Aktau in the wrong direction - seriously, what is up with the trainlines here?) where we stopped to change trains, and I can now confirm that it is both possible and exquisite to wash in 3 litres of water when the need arises; and more so when I returned to the train to find that my compartment now contained a Kazakh matriarch who immediately produced a large bag of bread and cakes and pronounced it time to drink tea. Train travel here is a ridiculously sociable affair, and though most passengers were younger guys returning home from work on the western oil and gas fields, and thus not necessarily the best choice of conversational partner (unfortunately experience has indicated that it is for the best if my Russian skills vanish entirely when faced with any unaccompanied guy between the ages of about fifteen and fifty - when the opening conversational gambit is "Soooo, do you have a boyfriend?" you know it's only going to go downhill from there), there was a family or two and seeking out the women rarely goes wrong. I commiserated with girls my age about how tiresome it was to have to find a husband when you're also trying to get your phD, admired various small children, was firmly advised against my planned travels to Kyrgyzstan ("Don't you know they're having a revolution there? Anyway, you should stay in Almaty. It is civilised. Not like Asia.") by everyone, and drunk tea and kefir (fresh drinking yoghurt, absolutely heavenly) by the bowlful. Every hour or two the train would idle to a halt at a tiny settlement with no name on the platform (I have no clue how anyone else knew where we were, I only occasionally saw a sign), just dozens of women selling iced water and instant noodles and fried fish in plastic bags and meat dumplings of dubious freshness, so although there was a restaurant on the train, no one bothered with it. As a foreign guest I was urged to eat more and more, and people kept stopping by with ice creams and blini and fish and mutton and potatoes and plov, none of which could be refused. It's probably a good thing the journey didn't last much longer, or I probably would've exploded.

73 hours later the train pulled into Almaty, and I was immediately whisked off to the house of a couple I'd met on the train, to be fed even more and oh bliss, they had a sauna too which I practically had to be dragged out of. I can confirm two things: that Almaty is indeed very civilised, and that I am never doing five nights on public transport ever again.

Adventures in public transport #1: the Caspian ferry

Waiting for the Kazakhstan ferry proved a depressingly Beckettian state of affairs. My companion in this endeavour was Juergen, a German backpacker who'd missed the previous ferry by twenty minutes, having waited a week for it beforehand and was thus understandably losing his sense of humour slightly. After a week, the only news that we had received was from a rather wild-eyed Filippino tourist who'd just taken the ferry from Turkmenistan and whose English wasn't great, but the phrase (accompanied by a lot of emphatic gesticulating) "it's hell" came across pretty clearly; we had just begun to reluctantly investigate flying, when I got a phone call from the tourist office. "The ferry is leaving in an hour. I think maybe you should go now!". Right.

Frantically dashing to the port, we were cheerfully informed that yes, a ferry was going to Kazakhstan, and we could even buy tickets, but of course it wasn't leaving at once, and in fact, no-one knew when it was going to leave, so we'd better sit down and wait until something happened. This frequently takes a while in Azerbaijan, and so it proved. Six hours later, we were all aboard the Akademik Zafira Aliyeva, a surprisingly (to me) shiny and modern boat (I only saw one cockroach in the cabin) carrying goods wagons and Turkish trucks and a mere eleven passengers (the tendency of the shipping companies in previous years to overload the ferries with passengers and the accompanying tendency of said ferries to sink had apparently prompted authorities to be pretty strict on this point) across the Caspian to Kazakhstan.

J and I had stocked up on bread and tea, expecting to ride out the eighteen-hour crossing in limited comfort and space, but this is apparently the wrong attitude to approach boat travel in this part of the world. One of our fellow passengers was a Georgian, which of course meant that within seconds a whole cold chicken, a bag of khachapuri , a (literal) gallon of wine and two bottles of chacha (the Georgian national drink, a home-brewed firewater of a potency so lethal that it should probably be banned under international treaty, and that any self-respecting Georgian male keeps at least a flask of on his person at all times in case of a toasting emergency) made their appearance. The evening predictably degenerated into round after round of heartfelt and tearful toasts to the friendship between all nations (except Armenia - it is generally not a good idea to get Azerbaijanis started on this particular topic) and the brotherhood of all men (except Armenians), one of the most enthusiastic participants in which turned out to be our chief navigator, which seemed to me to be a bit of an error given that we hadn't even left Baku at this point. Indeed, everyone having boarded around 7.30 pm, the ferry only began to move at midnight, around about the time at which England and Germany were being declared honorary members of the Caucasus.

I woke up the next afternoon, rather wishing that I hadn't (chacha frequently has this effect), but in time to get the full effect of the sun setting across the Caspian. This also meant that we were several hours behind schedule (evidently the navigator was feeling the effects of the previous night as much as the rest of us) but punctuality is an overrated trait, at least when there's plenty of tea to be had. We drew into Aktau at midnight, only six hours behind schedule to the tinny strains of the Kazakh national anthem played through the port loudspeaker system. Signs that I had entered Central Asia proper abounded: the increasingly ludicrous size of the peaked caps worn by various members of officialdom (the customs officers' looked as though they had some sombrero in their ancestry), the return of tricky geopolitical debate at immigration ("You are Irish?" "No, English." "But your passport says Ireland." "No, it says 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'. Great Britain. Velikobritannia?" "That is Ireland!" "No." and so on, ad infinitum) and, as we picnicked at 2.30 am in the customs house, the presence of large women ladelling generous spoonfuls of homemade jam into our cups of tea. It's good to be back in 'stan central again.

Tea with rosehip jam drunk out of a saucepan lid at 3 am in the Aktau port customs-house. Yep, definitely back in Central Asia.