land of ghosts, sea of dreams

Rounding a bend on the highway about 15km out of Aktau, we pass a white Volga* saloon standing on the roadside. It’s abandoned, it’s facing the wrong way, and its front section is horrifically squashed up into its cabin, like the nose of a pug dog. This is clearly a warning to those who might be tempted to risk a similar fate by driving recklessly on Kazakhstan’s bumpy, pock-marked highways (which is just about every person in the country who owns and operates a car or any other vehicle).

But why here? I mean, why this particular bend, as opposed to any other?

The answer lies written on a gravestone that stands about 20 metres from the edge of the road, directly behind the Volga. Our driver tells us that the grave belongs to a man who died here some time ago in a car accident, and whose ghost has since been making deadly mischief in this spot. He regularly stalks the highway, “throwing people from the road” (direct translation), and his sinister presence has made this corner the premiere ‘accident hot spot’ in these parts. Numerous cars, trucks and the occasional minibus have met their end here, often with fatal results for the occupants.

A real piece of luck, then, that our driver knows the ‘special words' (something like prayers or magical incantations) that will keep the ghost happy, persuading him to spare our lives. Under his breath, the driver has already uttered these words, so we’re safe … for now at least.

A couple of hours later we’re standing at the crest of a low hill, looking down a valley at what appears to be a set from a Sergio Leone film … or possibly (for those of you who are afficionados of Clint Eastwood westerns) the town in High Plains Drifter. This is Fort Shevchenko, a dusty outpost at the far western reaches of Central Asia, where the vast yellow expanse of desert which covers half of this region meets the brilliant blue of the Caspian Sea.

And right there, at the risk of boring you to tears, I have to stop and insert a long and winding tangent. I just can’t let the words “Caspian Sea” go by without comment.

See, when I was in the 11th grade at school (they called it ‘5th form’ in Australia), my Modern History teacher Brother Sean introduced me and about 30 classmates to the concept of revolution – specifically, to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the events leading up to and following it. I honestly don’t remember ever having been so fascinated by anything I'd encountered in a classroom, and the fascination has never really left me. Luckily though, that's a whole other story, and not the subject of this particular tangent )))

At some point while talking about Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and serfs and Tsars, I clearly remember Brother Sean producing a map of western Russia and adjacent territories, on which appeared a huge croissant-shaped body of water – a sea in the middle of a continent. This was, of course, the Caspian. I hadn’t previously suspected that such a thing could exist, growing up as I did in a country entirely surrounded by ocean. It was the precise opposite of what I considered 'normal': a sea surrounded by land. 

"How bizarre!", thought my 16-year-old brain.

To make it seem even more exotic, the shores of this freakish sea were dotted with utterly alien-sounding place names that I’d naturally never heard of. Cities with names like Astrakhan, Aqtau, Makhachqala and the like simply don’t figure much on the mind of your average 16-year-old. So the whole impression was one of something completely ulterior to my world, and somewhat fantastical. I even remember the Caspian cropping up in a dream I had (though what the dream was about, I have no idea now).

Bearing all of that in mind, you can imagine that not long ago, when I realised there was a chance I might actually go to the Caspian Sea, I was just a little bit amazed. It was, as one of my favourite colleagues here put it, a "sea of dreams" from my adolescence.

My first direct sighting of the Caspian was in Aktau, a settlement established in the 1960s. In a uniquely Soviet amalgam, Aktau was developed both as a uranium mining town and an elite resort destination. Nowadays it’s neither of those things; rather it presents as a mish-mash of depressing housing blocks and soulless new development, ringed by an industrial wasteland that is the cadaver of the mining industry.

In the city centre, boulevards that lead down to the seashore look broken and dishevelled; even the MiG fighter monument at the head of one street looks as if it might suddenly wilt and fall off its perch like a dying parrot. And this ugly infrastructure continues right to the water's edge ... so, y'know, it wasn't exactly how I'd imagined the first meeting between me and the big wet croissant from high school history classes. But hey ... reality does that sometimes.

The one small saving grace of Aktau** is the system of street names here. They, um, have none. I mean literally no names at all. To give your address to a taxi company in Aktau, you say "5-24-36" (that's microdistrict/street/building number), and they go "ok", as though that were a perfectly normal thing to say to a taxi company. It adds a kind of appealing spookiness to this otherwise unpleasant place.

In truth, though, the crappiness of Aktau hardly mattered. We were in the Caspian basin for unrelated reasons: one, because I wanted to pursue my ridiculous mission to visit Fort Shevchenko (for which I had no justification at all … I’d just somehow got it into my head that I had to go there); and two, to see the remote desert region of Mangyshlak (Mangistau in Russian), an area of stark natural beauty which has recently shown up on the radars of archaeologists as a place to go digging for the ruins of undiscovered ancient civilisations.

And so there we were, on the first of these missions, standing next to a gigantic colonnade stuck incongruously in the middle of nowhere, with the name "Fort Shevchenko" written on it in Cyrillic letters. A few stray horses ambled by as we looked down at this town which no-one else I know had ever been anywhere near. I was excited – this was really going to be something!

Btw, I know some of you have heard the name Shevchenko before, and yes, the guy you’re thinking of is the same guy after whom this town is named.

For everyone else: Taras Shevchenko is considered the national poet of Ukraine. He was also an accomplished painter of Ukrainian landscapes, a composer of Ukrainian folk songs and, according to some sources, a progenitor of the modern Ukrainian language. So we're talking about a real 'favourite son of a nation' here. His face even features on the Ukrainian 100 hryvnia note.

At some point, though, Shevchenko annoyed Tsar Nicholas I with his dreams of a pan-Slavic uprising and the emancipation of serfs, so he was exiled. He ended up at a tiny military fort called Orsk (it wasn’t even a town then), situated on the western edge of what would later become known as Kazakhstan, seemingly because it was the remotest place that his exilers could think of. And although he always missed Ukraine, this harsh, dusty outpost by the sea slowly became his second home.

One crucial link in this chain of events was Shevchenko’s meeting with a senior army officer who greatly admired his work. It was an amazingly fortunate coincidence. The Tsar had specified that, as a condition of his exile, Shevchenko was forbidden to write, paint or do anything else remotely artistic, but the military man decided to help him, giving him a semi-underground room where he could continue his work away from prying eyes. This became Shevchenko’s studio, and the output he produced here was prolific.

Today, the town formerly known as Orsk now bears Shevchenko's name, and you can visit his studio – a small, low-ceilinged room at the bottom of a stone stairway, reminiscent of a a burial chamber more than anything else. Next door to that is a museum, where Shevchenko’s artwork is displayed.

It’s so, so weird to see this Ukrainian artist’s work, lovingly catalogued and curated not in his green European homeland, but here in the middle of a desert on a different continent. The curators have not only kept the building in tip-top condition; they've built a green shady grove around it, which (this being an arid region, to say the least) requires constant maintenance and irrigation. So you walk in through a gate, and all at once the dust and heat and glare give way to cool respite. The temperature drops noticeably as you enter, and there are workers scurrying around, tending to the upkeep of the place. It's quite a singular experience.

The thing is, though, I’m not even sure why I wanted to come here. I’ve never read Shevchenko’s poems, and knew nothing about his illustrative skills (which were rather good, I have to say). I just don’t know.

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent time in both Ukraine and KZ, and I enjoyed learning about this relatively little-known link between them. Or maybe I liked the fact that our talented but rather dark and gloomy Ukrainian hero (many of whose countryfolk tend to share these qualities) was saved by the no-nonsense, ‘can-do’ Kazakh soldier (many of whose countryfolk share his qualities).

Or maybe I’m just perverse, and therefore making a taxi driver take us to a ‘fort’ in the middle of the desert seemed like a cool idea. Yeah … it was probably that ;-)

Anyway, a little way north of town was a hotel which, from its description, seemed like the only place around which might be able to provide us with some semi-edible food. So we piled into the car and went there, passing a pink lake (!) on the way.

I asked the driver “Why is it pink?”, but he had no idea. A follow-up question – “Is that its natural colour?” – failed to draw anything more than a shrug and a three-word response: “I think so”.

There's actually a pink lake somewhere in Western Australia***, and companies like 'Crikey Tours' (such a dreadful name!) offer to take people there on buses. But out here in the furthest reaches of Central Asia, a similar natural phenomenon (if indeed it is natural) draws zero reaction from the locals and zero attention from anyone else. Odd.

A surprisingly good lunch was followed by another little excursion out of town in the car. We’d been told that there was a beach not far from the restaurant, and after the slight disappointment of the less-than-stunning Aktau beachfront, we figured that finding another view onto the sea might be a good idea. 

In fact, this little detour turned out to be a high point of our journey: a beautiful and almost deserted coastline, stretching as far as the eye could see in either direction. In the distance was a yurta, pitched on the shore. Closer to us, two local kids frolicked in the gently rolling waves, calling out and waving a friendly "Privet!" ("Hi!") to us. Other than that, we had the sea completely to ourselves.

Yuliya decided to go in for a dip, and as I sat on the shore taking in the whole "sitting-on-the-edge-of-the-Caspian" vibe, two Czech backpackers came wandering randomly out of the haze. We briefly swapped travel stories and tips, and then they went a little further along the beach, stripped off and jumped into the sea. As soon as they were out of earshot, the calm resumed and the only audible sounds were those of nature: waves lapping the shore, wind blowing the sand, and the occasional bird. 

At this point, it crossed my mind that I really had seen the Caspian now, and I had a moment of extreme, undifferentiated happiness. Those are always good )))

Next we tried to get our taxi driver to take us to a place called Beket-Ata, an underground mosque situated in a remote desert cave and inhabited by some kind of Sufi master. Some Kazakhs are known to make  pilgrimages to this place, and after Fort Shevchenko it was one of the main things on our itinerary.

Ourselves, our driver and his friend (supposedly a good source of knowledge about the region) all thought we'd be able to reach Beket-Ata by taking a desert road for a few miles and joining up with the main highway a little further southeast. We were all completely wrong.

Instead, after bouncing wildly along a track so dusty that one car half a kilometre ahead could make the way forward almost invisible, we suddenly rounded a corner and found ourselves staring at a virtual impasse. The previously flat road suddenly fell into a huge valley, degenerating into little more than a track as it did so. At the bottom lay a kind of plain, which stretched to the edge of the sea. (And all this time, we'd thought that we were heading away from the water!) In the middle of the plain stood a collection of buildings that the driver told us were mausoleums – though to be honest, they looked more like mud-brick cottages to us.

Of course we were dying to find out whether the inhabitants of this remote settlement were corporeal or spectral in nature, but the driver said his car probably wouldn't make it down to the remote village/cemetery/whatever-it-was and back. (I personally think he may have been spooked by the idea.)

With that, our journey effectively came to an end. We agreed to head back to Aktau, and make a separate round trip to Beket-Ata the following day. And so we took to the road once again, throwing up so much dust in the process that it got inside the car and tickled our throats.

That evening we quarelled with the driver over money, and after calling the friend of a friend of a friend who'd set up our meeting, the driver took the cash we offered him and drove away in a temper.

This pretty much killed off our chances of seeing anything else in western Kazakhstan without time to plan, because finding another driver seemed almost impossible, and joining organised excursions in this part of the world generally costs much more than an English teacher can afford. So the next morning, we went to the airport and left Aktau prematurely.

It was a strange and unsatisfying end to a holiday that promised to deliver a lot more. But at the same time, we certainly weren't going away empty-handed. It had definitely been a trip worth making.

By the time I got back to Almaty (a three-and-a-half-hour domestic flight – almost as long as Sydney to Perth!), I was already planning a return to western Kazakshtan. I wanted more than anything to see the mysterious underground mosque of Beket-Ata, the wind-sculpted mountains of Mangyshlak, and the weird 'Valley of Balls', which is reputed to be one of the strangest and most dramatic landscapes anywhere in Central Asia.

However, since I'm writing the closing bits of this entry with the benefit of hindsight, I can tell you that it wasn't to be.

Oh well ... maybe next year.



* Fabulous old Soviet cars ... kind of the Russian equivalent of Chevrolets.

** Apart from the fact that two excellent former colleagues, Mirian and Vasiliy, who I met in Almaty some years ago, have spent the last year living there. Our visit to Aktau therefore meant a chance to catch up with them both, which certainly made for a more pleasant stay )))

(*** Its pinkness is explained by a high presence of a salt-tolerant form of algae called Dunallela Sailina. Whether similar things apply to the pink lake near Fort Shevchenko, I've no idea.)