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.