first and final moments #3

Im Fernzug* nach Göttingen, circa 9pm (GMT +2)

The pilot plunges us into a thick soup of cloud that seems to stretch forever. For several rather wonderful minutes we are lost in a turbulent sea of white**, until suddenly – wham! – an impossibly vivid sunset crashes into view. The black undersides of the rain clouds are streaked through with überdramatic crimson, in a scene that would have black metal CD sleeve designers wetting their laced-up leather pants in delight.

This cycle repeats itself a couple of times (disappearing into cloud, re-emerging into the black metal sunset) until finally we are clear, and descending rapidly onto the biggest airport I've ever seen. In fact, it's not just bigger than other airports – it's a whole different kind of beast. In the same way that a whale isn't just a big fish, so the 'Fraport' in Frankfurt isn't just a big airport. It's a colossal City of Planes, with an infrastructure so complex that it makes me think they must employ Einstein's, Heisenberg's and Planck's direct lineal descendants to handle air traffic control duties.

We land and immediately join a long line of traffic, rolling along behind an Air China jet as though the two were cars on a motorway. We pause periodically at intersections, where sleek Lufthansa giants heading away from the terminal appear to have right of way. At one point, I see two of these giants heading diagonally towards each other, one turning at the last moment in obeyance of lane markings that I can't see from where I'm sitting. Not one to be overawed by machinery, but honestly, I've never seen anything quite like this. There are planes everywhere!

We disembark, and after a brief wait in the 'non-EU' line, I'm out in the street smoking, thinking, and preparing to enter the Deutsche Bahn rail network for the first time in nearly a decade.

Ok, skip forward. Everything I wrote above actually happened about two-and-a-half hours ago. On the flight over here I wrote lots of stuff about KZ, about the things I'll miss (and won't miss), and about my attempts to get acquainted with some of the country's further reaches during my third year there. Then I decided to delete all of that, and to put up a 'photo log' at some time in the not-too-distant future.

Instead, let me tell you what's happening now.

I'm on a train to Göttingen, about two hours north of Frankfurt. My flight was a little late, and it took me a while to sort out some 'arrival issues', so I just hope the hotel will be saving my room for me, despite the late check-in.

(Once, while on holiday in Sweden, my ex- Natalie and I lost our accommodation booking because our plane landed two hours late, and the owner gave our room to someone else. The result was a night spent walking the streets of Stockholm with our enormous bags ... nice city, but not a pleasant way to be introduced to it! Since then, arriving late to hotels and hostels has always made me a bit nervous.)

"So, Mr. Nerd ... any first impressions upon returning to Germany?"

Well, yeeeah. Lots of 'em, in fact. Let me share a few, as is my habit.

Firstly, Europe is not 'Europe'. I mean, as I learned somewhat to my horror this evening, the cost of a 90-minute train trip in Germany is roughly equivalent to a decent week's wage in Ukraine. You can easily see where the money is (and isn't) on this continent.

Secondly: if people here need a light for their cigarette, they say (in German, obviously) "Excuse me. May I have a light, please?" Then they explain apologetically how they came to be without their own lighter, and finish with a cheerful "Many thanks". This is a wild contrast to some more eastern-lying countries I could name, where you often get no more than a two-handed 'lighting my cigarette whilst sheltering the flame from the wind' gesture, followed by a grunt of thanks (and the grunt is optional).

I'm not saying that I prefer one to the other – in fact, the economy of Russian discourse is one of the things I admire about it. Russian-speakers can say so much with one or two words, it sometimes makes English with all of its clumsy auxiliaries ("Did you xxxx yesterday?", "Have you been xxxxing lately?") and elaborate politeness strategies ("Would you kindly pass the xxxx?") seem a little absurd. I'm just saying that it's a striking difference, when you come here from a place with a very different 'culture of communication'.

(One thing I want to add, though: "Darf ich Feuer haben?", which translates literally as "May I have fire?", is one of my favourite phrases in any language :-)

This cheerful politeness also extends to any encounter which involves asking for help and information. Germans aren't known worldwide for being effusive, but they're extremely keen to help travellers – perhaps, one could speculate, because they're such a nation of travellers themselves, and so can empathise with the experience of being in a railway station in a foreign country with little or no idea of where to go or what to do next. But whetever the reason, they help you gladly with anything you need to know, and either they're all excellent actors or their cheerful willingness to do all this helping is really genuine. If it's the second one, it's brilliant and I love them for it.

Also, there's the food. This country is full of edibles that don't look like they want to hurt me. Everywhere I look, I see the word "organisch" ... and the place brims with freshly squeezed juices, salads with leaves (a feature noticeably lacking from the former-Soviet diet), succulent pineapples, freshly-baked bread, and other thoroughly wholesome-looking stuff. It seems nothing less than a minor miracle, after having arrived from the Central Asian Culinary Badlands.

Most miraculous of all, though, are the sausages. In Ukraine I was repeatedly warned that under no circumstances should I buy a sausage on the street. This advice was usually offered in the form of a question like "Where do you think all the tramps and stray dogs go?". And when you looked at the sausages there, it took little imagination to convince yourself that the warnings were genuine. So, as a fan of a good sausage, imagine my delight to be in a land where they look not only safe and edible, but actually tasty. My stomach is very happy that we came to this country )))

Lastly, the concern for hygeine here really leaps out at you when you first arrive. A German public toilet experience goes something like this: you go into a pleasant-smelling room and do what you need to, and when you're done, flushing occurs automatically. You then proceed to the sink, where you wave your hand in front of an electronic sensor to receive a generous amount of soap in your palm. A second electronic sensor also awaits your attention, releasing a generous amount of water in response to your hand-wave. You may then choose from a variety of hand-drying methods, all of which are similarly 'remote activated'. And lastly, the doors are usually turnstile gates that respond to forward pressure from any part of the body – a little push from the knee will get you through. So you walk out of the public toilet without having touched a single surface. I just can't tell you how much I love this. Really, I can't.

However, having enthused so much about the wonders of being a traveller in Deutschland after just a few hours back in the country, I have to say that things have changed for me a little since I was last here. I've already had moments when I've felt that there was 'something missing'. I mean, Germany is great, the people are super-nice, and the language is the most wonderful collection of sounds ever assembled outside of an orchestra pit***. And being here gives me lots of reasons to smile, whether at the stunning landscape or in response to the smiles I get from locals. But ... and here's the big "but" ... it somehow feels a little lacklustre compared to the intensity of life in the East, and I'm already missing that. Not sure if I could ever go back to this Western life. I just don't think it's really 'me' anymore.

Btw, what you've just read is one reason why I like working (at least now that I'm in a profession which I actually like). If I don't work, there's nothing to stop me from musing endlessly on questions like this ... and if I did that every day, I'd be as mad as a lemon before long.

(What, you don't think lemons are mad? You clearly haven't observed them very carefully. They're all insane! Just try and stare one down for ten minutes or so, and see how you feel after that.)

Ok, time to stop writing. It's been a ridiculously long day, starting at 5am and considerably lengthened by flying westwards through five time zones. Anything I've said in the last few hours can probably be written off as the delirious ramblings of a lemon ... I mean, of a madman.

Bye!


* Can someone please tell me if it should be Am Fernzug"? I can't make up my mind. Thanks )))

** I love turbulence; it's easily the most enjoyable part of flying. Rough descents are especially good )))

***. I realise that not everyone agrees with me on this, but frankly you'll never convince me that German isn't a gorgeous language. So unless you're going to tell me that Russian is more elegant and more tender – the only counter-argument I'm prepared to hear – please just nod politely and let's move on.

first and final moments #2

V drugom aeroporte, Astana KZ, circa 1pm (GMT +6)

You know what I want? I want to go through that security gate. Like, really, really want to. Security won’t let me, ‘cause my flight doesn’t board for another four hours. But on this side of the gate the shops only accept Kazakh tenge, and I’ve already exchanged all of mine for dollars, and I really want lunch!

You know what else I want? I want a razetka (an electrical socket ... but razetka sounds much better). Really, really want one.

I’m just a bundle of wants right now.

Anyone the tiniest bit familiar with Buddhism, Shamanism or any other want-abhorring philosophy would be ashamed of me, and I’d be duly lectured. And I probably deserve to be. Still …

Let me through, you bastards!!!

Part 2 of my ‘day of airports’ takes place in Astana, KZ’s gleaming capital-on-the-steppe, where I’m doomed to wait for five hours for my connecting flight to Frankfurt.

A brief wander outside confirms something that I already know about this city: it’s one of the coldest corners of civilisation! Last time I was here was back in February, when I came to do some seminar presentations for teachers using Oxford University Press course books in their high schools. On the first morning, we awoke early to discover that a blizzard was in progress outside our hotel – and when I say “blizzard”, I’m not exaggerating for effect.
It was -20C, and great flurries of snow were zipping about in all directions, some heading downwards toward the Earth (as you’d normally expect snow to do) while others soared wildly upward and away from it.

I asked if the seminar was going ahead, naïvely thinking that a blizzard might call a halt to plans. But this is Astana, and hence nothing out-of-the-ordinary. These are the kind of atmospheric conditions in which the daily business of life is carried out here as per usual. The seminar went ahead, and it was great … but on at least two occasions, I was amused and bemused to overhear people chatting during coffee breaks about the mercifully ‘Nye kholodnaya pagoda’ (“not-cold weather”) they’d been having so far that winter.

Hmmm. I guess everything really is relative.

That visit was also my first opportunity to see the recently completed, Norman Foster-designed Khan Shatyr. This is basically a shopping centre located about a kilometre beyond the far end of Astana’s main boulevard – so no big deal, you might reasonably think – but I’m betting that most people reading this have never seen a shopping centre of quite this kind.

Modelled after a ‘royal yurt’ typical of those used by the Khans, shatyr’s exterior combines the sterile futurism of post-2001 spaceship design with the somewhat comical form of a partly-erected circus tent, its central supporting pole leaning heavily to one side. It squats on the steppe like a stubborn mirage, determined to make you believe that it's real despite your brain’s insistence that nothing so preposterous could actually be loitering out here in a place like this.

Inside you’ve got three floors of predictably overpriced boutiques, some game arcades and similar amusements … and then you’ve got the upper floors, where thankfully things get a little less run-of-the-mill. The highlight is a beach about 50m long, hermetically sealed and temperature controlled, with real beachfront sand trucked in from Turkey (if I remember correctly) and palm trees from somewhere that has lots of spare palm trees. If you qualify for V.I.P. status, you can buy a membership card which entitles you to do the following:

- hurry indoors out of the frigid cold, in your super jacket
  and your big woolly hat that ties at the chin
- take a lift up four floors
- strip off to your underwear 
- relax among the trees or simply luxuriate on the sand,
  in partial view of shoppers
- take a dip whenever you like
- repeat steps 4-5

The premiere weirdness here: Khan Shatyr’s inward-sloping walls are all glass, so as you sip your tropical cocktail and adjust your speedos, you can survey the ice- and snow-covered expanses of the Central Asian steppe.

Of course, not being vippy* enough, I didn’t go to the indoor beach. I did, however, let two minimum-wagers strap me into a chair, send me up to the roof of Khan Shatyr, then drop me like a stone through five storeys. I’m sure many of you have seen a ride at fairgrounds (if you can even call it a ride) which is basically a tall metal pole with hydraulics inside and chairs attached. The chairs are lifted slowly up to the top of the pole, and then the hydraulics are released and anyone foolish enough to be in one of the chairs comes free-falling back to Earth. It’s pointless and terrifying, and I had to do it.

In fact, I was voluntarily sent into freefall seven times inside a Temple of Retail shaped to resemble a giant tent, in the absolute centre of nowhere … which frankly, looking back, makes me wonder whether I’m really playing with a full set of marbles. Feel free to join me in doubting this if you’d like to )))

With that little adventure over, it was back to the absurdly opulent hotel (previously some kind of theatre, now a virtually deserted fiesta of lavish carpentry, statuary and plasterwork) to enjoy sweet tea and lemon while the weather continued violently arguing with itself outside.

So yeah, that’s Astana: an architectural fun park, largely unknown to the world, where the most whimsical demons of Lord Foster’s imagination are allowed to physically manifest. (Foster has collaborated with President Nursultan Nazarbayev on several architectural behemoths, all of which seemingly bear witness to Pressie N’s wish to be remembered as a kind of ‘New Sun King’ of the East.) It manages to be both fascinating and abhorrent, admirably bold and mildly obscene** at the same time. But still, it’s definitely nowhere as difficult to leave as Almaty is.

See, in addition to being home to quite a few of my favourite humans, Almaty has the undeniably impressive Zailiskiy Alatau mountain range towering over it like a chain of huge mountains over a medium-sized city.*** They’re unbelievably tall, wild-looking, fearsome rock massifs that are terrifying to walk on at night, and require a serious commitment to climb at any time of day, in any weather, at any time of year. Or, if you prefer your descriptive prose short and sharp, they’re freakin’ big, freakin’ tough and freakin’ goddam cool.

My personal favourite thing about the Zailiskiy Alatau is their noticeable mood swings. A little over three years ago, I moved into a top-floor flat on Zharokova street, from which I had a frankly stunning panoramic mountain view, and this is when I got acquainted with the many moods of the Zailiskiy. They could be bright, cheery and cogent one morning, sketchy and vague the next, and then turn positively dark and Mordory the morning after that.

What all of this means, in relation to the present entry, is twofold: first, the Zailiskiy Alatau have always contributed to my feeling that Almaty is “a great city to come back to”. (I stuck that in quote marks because I’ve said it so often.) Every time I return there, whether from another country or another part of KZ, the mountains give me a fresh thrill on my way into town. And secondly, they make leaving Almaty a somewhat fretful experience. As you look over your shoulder at the receding peaks, you think “What the heck am I doing, travelling away from those ridiculously cool things, instead of towards them?” And then “If only I'd spent more of my weekends up there in the Zailiskiy”. And so on.

On this particular morning – my last in Almaty – the mountains were in stunning form. There was a low cover of cloud blanketing the city, so they were invisible at street level, but in the air you could see them soaring majestically  skyward, their sunny sides a brilliant white and their shaded sides a deep, mystic blue. From where I was looking, they actually seemed to be sitting on top of the cloud bank, slowly floating across the sky in a way that somehow reminded me of a Terry Gilliam animation. And I thought what I usually think: "Well, bye guys. Prob'ly see you before too long."

And then we were over the horizon, and I was heading in the general direction of a funny, lop-sided circus tent with a thermally heated beach inside.

Funny old thing, life.

* A word I made up specially for this occasion – it’s an adjective, and it means “possessing the qualities of a V.I.P.”.

** (Because these building projects have cost SO many billions of dollars, which could have been used to improve conditions in other parts of the country.)

*** This is a new literary device I’ve invented called “zero simile”. It’s easy to master: just describe something performing an action, and say that it performs the action “like xxxxx”, where “xxxx” is the thing itself. (Example; “The Desert Sun, which had been punishing us so mercilessly since early morning, finally disappeared in the West like a fierce red celestial orb dipping below the horizon of a vast sandy plain”.) I think this is definitely gonna catch on … don’t you?

first and final moments #1

V Aeroporte, Almaty Kazakhstan, circa 9am (GMT +6)

So, this is it. One chapter ends, another begins. One door slams shut, another yawns open. One discoloured, exhausted-looking lemon slice gets a lift back to the bar at the bottom of an empty martini glass, another arrives floating gaily atop the next round of delicious vermouthy fun*.

Or, y’know, something like that.

In case you’re wondering what has motivated this sudden outburst of “best of times, worst of times, times when really opposite things were happening”** metaphors, they've been occasioned by my arrival at Almaty International Airport this morning. And as always, it’s an incalculable pleasure to be here.

*a-khe a-khem!*

(That's the official transliteration for "sarcastic clearing of the throat", recognised by international treaty.)

Ahhh, the airport … where so many great journeys begin, so many plans reach fruition, and so many life decisions transform from abstract thought into concrete action – and all this against an aesthetic backdrop that makes the average hospital waiting room appear thoughtfully decorated and charmingly rustic by comparison. A huge, over-lit building filled with parting loved ones ready to cry, taxi drivers ready to mercilessly rip you off, and dreadful, pre-wrapped food ready to unfairly diminish your roll of recently-exchanged currency, and leave you with a vague feeling of disappointment. What a place.

Sorry. Enough of the endless, aimless blah – it’s getting-to-the-point time. I’m here today because I’m leaving Kazakhstan to go and live elsewhere … and for the third time, no less! This time, though, it seems pretty final. And as with the previous two departures, if I could sum up the feeling of the event in one word, the word would be “conflicted”.

On the one hand, my wife left KZ some time ago, and is waiting for me with ‘Timurchik’ (our yet-to-be-born son, coming soon to an operating theatre near you) in a warm cosy flat in Ukraine. So obviously that’s a sizeable incentive to get on my figurative bike and leave this great ‘stan in the metaphorical dust. Also, between now and the point in time when I see them both, I’ll be taking the ‘long road home’ – visiting some unvisited bits of Eastern Europe, calling on a couple of old friends, and generally indulging my appetite for being on the road, which has been eating away at me all year. So while this morning brings the final moments of one adventure, it also ushers in the first moments of another. Which is both fun for me, and a nice link to my hastily-thought-up title for this series of entries ;-)

Moving now to the contents of the other hand: on that hand, there’s Almaty. It's the only city in this hemisphere where I have more than one or two good friends, and it has effectively become my ‘home’. For all their faults (mostly driving-related), I love the local people here, and they’ve graciously returned the sentiment over the last few years. And I also love quite a few of the foreigners who end up on Kazakhstan’s south-eastern border. For some reason, Almaty attracts a rather interesting crowd, and I regularly meet ‘new’ people who I like / get along with / have stuff in common with.

(I mean, I guess you have to be somewhat interesting and/or unusual to think “I know what I’ll do: I’ll leave my safe, comfortable life in Britain, Europe, the US, Canada or wherever, and go to Kazakhstan. Yeah, that seems like a logical step.”)

So this week has been a ‘typical last week’: a million things to do in an impossibly short time-frame, from visiting consulates to get visas for the next place to posting things you can’t carry with you, through to farewells and work handovers and a hundred taxi rides to fulfil a hundred errands.

This, btw, is exactly when I'm most susceptible to the odd charms of Almaty: when I move around the city, enjoying the fabulously mismatched clutter of its architecture, and being chauffeured by outgoing, friendly, quirky and occasionally insane folks who drive as though they were just one in a vast herd of wildebeest, thrusting boldly forward and trusting their horns to prevent them from being crushed in the general melee.

I realise it’s perverse, but I just can’t help being tickled when I climb into the passenger seat of a rusty old Mercedes, and an elderly moustachioed gentleman bellows at me “Tebye ne kholodno?” (“Aren’t you cold?”), then pulls a traditional Kazakh hat out of his glovebox and rams it onto my head before I have time to answer.

He adds to the general amusement by laughing raucously at how ridiculous I look in his little round hat, throwing his head back as he does so – and all without taking his foot off the accelerator! I mean, whatever else happens on that day, you’ll never be able to mark it down in the diary as “Dyen kak dyen” (“a day like a day” – meaning one like any other, without anything special to distinguish it).

... right?

The unusual character of the last week can be largely attributed to what I'll call the ‘ryhthm of leaving'. I've experienced it before, and it goes sth like this: you run to the street carrying odd collections of things, you ride in taxis, you leave stuff and collect stuff and sign stuff, you run madly back, teach a lesson, run somewhere else, sign another thing, run back … then stop to drink champagne and listen to moving farewell toasts from people you’ve grown quite close to … then run again, jump in another taxi … and so the cycle repeats.

The thing is, this leaving rhythm is quite exciting in its own way, but it can also be rather sad and depressing. Obviously there's the "saying goodbye to good, valued people" issue, but there's also this: I know from experience that the level of acceptance I have among people in KZ isn't available just anywhere. You need to find a culture that’s a reasonable fit for you, so that you give out the “Hey, I dig this place” vibe and so that, as a result, people fully accept and embrace you. It’s an uncertain process, and it takes time, and it doesn’t happen that often. Hence the sad.

Meanwhile, the city has unexpectedly pulled out its first fresh and glistening snow-coat for the year, seeing me off in style but also cruelly implying that I’m missing another opportunity to plunge into a hardcore Kazakh winter, which I would love to do.

Evil little city!

Anyhow, the second boarding call has just sounded (the first always being my signal to run to the smoking room and breathe in a final dose of precious, sanity-enhancing nicotine before entrusting my life to a complete stranger who wears a silly hat to work every day). So I’ll continue these ramblings in a few hours, when I land in Astana.

Right now, it’s time to say another farewell – this time to some mountains …

Bye )))



* Unfeasible though it may sound, I only recently discovered martinis. Had my first one maybe three or four months ago … and gosh, was it great or what?


** A quote from an entry in the Edward Bulwer-Lytton Awards for "writing the introduction to the worst of all possible novels". It’s a contest that happens every year somewhere in San Jose, California. Cool idea, no?

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.)

surkhandarya

For me, one part of Uzbekistan’s appeal is this: it’s undeniably, and inescapably, a land of weirdness. Stuff happens here that genuinely surprises you, and people regularly say or do things that catch you off-guard. And since I'm a firm believer in the idea that life should include regular moments of "Huh?" if you're doing it right, I find this quality irresistible.

A few random examples: first, Uzbekistan is the only place I’ve been where you quietly tell hotel staff that their 'traditional' tea room is heavily infested with flying ants, and they respond proudly, as if you've just discovered one of the hotel's selling points. “Oh yes", they reply. "Some of our guests eat those. They say they’re very good for health.”

That's what I've started to think of as the 'Uzbek Response' – shorthand for "the last thing you expected to hear". 

Uzbekistan is also the only country I've visited where you walk into a restaurant to find a huge, almost empty floor space with only a few tables clustered around the walls, and as you stroll around wondering where the patrons are supposed to sit, you narrowly avoid being knocked to the ground by the very thing you need: i.e., by a huge wooden table. As your brain recovers from the shock of so much oncoming furniture, you realise that two staff have members actually been chasing you with the damn table ... and, in their enthusiasm to serve, have almost caused you an injury that no-one will believe when you try to explain it.

Another simple way of bringing out the weirdness here is to complain about your seat on an overnight train. This, we've recently discovered, can lead to bitter competition between conductors, as each attempts to find you a better place for a better price – to the point where one offers you his own compartment, and you sleep in the conductors’ quarters while he stays awake all night. (Of course this is all done for an 'unofficial fee' ... which kind of adds to the fun.) And if you're looking for the next extreme sport to take the world by storm, Uzbekistan has your answer. So far at least, it's the only place I've been where cows are put out to pasture in a field also used for football practice, leading to the inception of an entirely new, fast-paced and ferociously competitive team sport: “cowball”.

But if you come here partly in the spirit of Louis Theroux (i.e. in search of the bizarre), my foremost piece of advice to you would probably be this: try to spend some time down in the country's far south, heading away from the Silk Road cities and into the relative unknown. Life down there is … well, quite a bit different to what you and I would call ‘normal’.

Our own mini-adventure in the Uzbek Deep South began late one overcast morning, when we arrived at a shiny new railway station with a platform not long enough to accommodate our train. The station was about 40 minutes out of Boysun, a town that nestles up against the Tajik and Afghan borders.

The journey to these parts had been rather picturesque. Boarding the train in Samarkand at 2am, we’d slept until about seven and then spent most of the next three hours staring out the window at mist-shrouded hills covered in mossy grass. Said hills occasionally grew in stature to become mountains, including the dramatic, almost vertical granite cliffs of the Hissar range, which form one of Uzbekistan's natural borders. (The cliffs were completely blanketed by thick fog when we passed them, so none of the photos turned out.)

Strewn all over this wild terrain were shards of shale-like rock, sometimes assembled into winding, rustic-looking fences (one of which you can see in the pic). Streams wound their way down the gentle slopes, flowing through shallow rocky clefts. Farmhouses frequently sprang up, as did the occasional village, and the damp soil ranged in colour from deep red to rich greys and military greens. (Don’t know if you’ve ever seen green soil, but I can tell you that it's rather odd-looking.)

Much of the territory we saw through our window is off-limits to travellers because of border issues, so we were getting privileged glimpses of areas that remain almost completely unexplored by foreigners. Which, as you can imagine, was pretty cool.

We’d chosen Surkhandarya for its scenery – and, I suspect, because the name sounded a bit wistfully exotic – so thus far all seemed to be going according to plan. Cue the weirdness …

As we stepped off the train we felt a damp chill, resulting from the thick mist which hung everywhere. And then ... mud. LOTS of mud. It immediately started caking around our shoes and splashing across the legs of our trousers – and this clearly brought it considerable satisfaction, because it continued doing the caking-and-splashing thing for the whole day.

Striding through the happily-coagulating brown goo came a tall, slim, elderly man wearing a skull cap and something like a velvet bathrobe. He sauntered over to us and offered a lift into town for $2. He then threw our suitcases into the boot of his beaten-up old Lada, but as they were too big for the available space, he left the boot open.

The ensuing ride was shared with a demure-looking Uzbek woman in the typically bright-coloured dress-and-headscarf ensemble, and with three other guys. As four of us squeezed into the narrow back seat, sitting almost on top of each other, I looked over and noticed that the woman was also clutching a leather handbag. Stamped onto one side of the bag was a bronze plaque, on which were written (in English) the words “World Peace”. The message seemed utterly strange and incongruous here, in the region through which most of Central Asia's Islamic extremists are funnelled southwards into the Afghan fray. I wondered if she even understood it.

A couple of minutes later we suddenly swerved right, left the highway and went completely off-road, descending one side of a rock-strewn valley towards a fast-flowing, muddy stream. Before I had time to spot a bridge or any other way across, the driver had steered us straight into the water.

Showing no hesitation whatsoever, he pointed the Lada directly at the deepest part of the stream, then turned right and actually drove upstream for about five mad seconds. Finally he pulled out onto the left bank, which was extremely steep and bumpy. The car lurched and bounced around in a violent act of protest, and Yuliya asked “Do we still have everything?” Our driver laughed gently, and jumped out to check that our suitcases weren’t currently tumbling downstream towards Afghanistan.

“Vsyo normal’no” (everything’s ok), he said as he climbed back into the car to resume the journey.

Once in the town, we left our luggage in the hotel (a word which I'm tempted to put inside rabbit ears here) and took in a bit of the townscape. In doing so, we accomplished the next task on our list: find a driver to take us to some local sights. In Surkhandarya this is ridiculously easy: you just walk along the main street looking foreign, and almost immediately someone will offer you their services. So it took us less than five minutes to find our ride, but before asking him to take us exploring, we needed to go back to the railway station, 'cause we’d decided to buy onward tickets. (The original plan was to stay overnight, but for complex reasons, that had changed.)

I know this all sounds fairly straightfoward – to the point where you might be thinking “Why all the unnecessary minute detail, Anthony?” – but in fact, when we arrived at the station all the ticket-selling guys were having lunch in the staff dining room … located, naturally, on a local farm almost a mile away.

When contacted by phone, one of the ticketing guys agreed to meet us outside the dining room, which looked like the abandoned safehouse of a rebel guerilla army, and was separated from the main road by a shepherds’ track. Our driver Abid steered us around the sheep, and Mr Tickets appeared in front of the house. He took our money, then told us that, since lunch was still in progress, he was unable to issue us with any tickets at the moment. We’d have to come back later to pick them up.

Without a guarantee, without a receipt, and without any other options, we just had to go away and hope that the guy was as good as his word. But the incredibly affable and helpful Abid* re-assured us: “Don’t worry”, he said. “Down here we like honest people. A man must be honest – if he isn’t, we punish him.”

I figured it'd be better not to visualise what this punishment might entail, so I did my best to just put the thought out of my head.

Abid’s car was yet another decrepit Lada with threadbare seats and a loudly complaining gear box, which occasionally needed some firm physical encouragement to keep it going. Needless to say, I pretty soon found myself in love with this machine, and envied its owner a little bit. But during the course of the day we would share the Lada with some odd characters … starting with a member of the Uzbek militsia.

The militsia man was standing alone on the roadside, more or less exactly in the middle of nowhere. Uzbek militsia used to have a dreadful reputation among tourists (though I personally haven't seen them do anything to justify this), so when our driver voluntarily pulled over, it crossed our minds that some kind of extortion may follow. But no … the guy got in, said Assalam-u-Alaykum ("May the blessings of Allah descend upon you") to everyone in the car, and chatted amiably about village affairs until we dropped him off 15 minutes later, a bit closer to the nowhere/somewhere border than where we’d found him.

Then we headed off on our main excursion for the day: a long drive along remote, high-altitude dirt roads to a place called Oman Hona, which is a mosque in a cave on a mountain – or at least, so we’d read.

The fact that we saw neither a mosque nor a cave at Oman Hona seemed to fit perfectly with the kind of day we'd been having up to that point. Instead, there was a kind of rock shelf overhanging a mineral stream, around which had been erected a few rather hideous buildings.

As so often seems to be the case, locals here believe that the water has special curative properties, useful for treating or preventing all kinds of ailments. So there were guys collecting it in huge 20-litre plastic bottles, for sale in Tashkent and elsewhere. Meanwhile, a solitary old woman sat on a randomly positioned plastic chair beneath the rock overhang, deep in thought and utterly inscrutable, not even glancing up as we passed. She was striking in that she was doing – and seemed as though she'd spent the whole day doing – absolutely nothing. And I mean nothing at all ... she wasn't reading, knitting, waiting for friend, waiting for a ride, clutching goods which planned to sell, or acting as a curator. She was just there, and that was all. 

Abid, meanwhile, was keen to have us know that people flock to this spot in summer to enjoy the pure spring water and the warm weather. We pulled our coats around us tighter, as the wind and the damp mist tried to creep beneath our various layers of clothing.

He then took us to the 'lookout' from where we could 'view' the Mosque, but ... well, if a Mosque could talk, this one would probably have begun by saying something like "I'm stuck behind so much damn fog here, it's like being stuffed inside a frikkin' pillow case! Can someone let me OUT, please?!?".) It was, in a word, invisible.

But despite all this, the journey to Oman Hona definitely didn't leave us feeling disappointed. The scenery rising around us was stark, mysterious and at times little foreboding, as well as being completely different to anything we'd seen elsewhere in this marvellous 'stan. On the way down, we noticed a distinct 'fogline' – an altitude above which nothing could be seen but fog – and this gave us the feeling of being completely cut off from the world in these high, almost-deserted valleys.

Odd though it may seem, the landscape vaguely brought to mind images I've seen of some out-of-the-way places in the British Isles. There was definitely a bit of Balkans thrown in there too, though, along with incongruous-looking white blossom trees and an atmosphere of intense poverty. The farmhouses were barely standing, the watchdogs were huge and fierce (one of them ran beside our car, barking at us in a white-fanged fury, until Abid beat it away by opening the driver’s door and swinging it forcefully at the dog’s head), and life in the mountains outside Boysun was clearly pretty tough.

I was stirred from these thoughts when Abid suddenly stopped our car, jumped out and started talking to a guy who was standing near a gate on the opposite side of the road. They evidently knew each other, and Abid’s friend was having some kind of problem. He pointed a few times at a goat that was on the far side of the gate, for reasons we didn't quite comprehend. The two of them then went through the gate, picked up the goat by its legs, brought it over to the car (which, remember, we’d hired for the day as our taxi) … and put it in the boot.

Abid’s friend jumped into the front passenger seat, and we headed down the mountain, the sound of the goat's bell periodically audible over the engine.

And so there we were: two travellers massively out-sized by our situation, one clutching a digital camera worth several times more than the car we were sitting in and frequently thrusting it out the window to take photos of intimidatingly huge rock formations, while a live goat aimed the occasional kick at the back of our seat, its owner tried to joke with us in regional Uzbek (or possibly Tajik – neither of us would've been able to tell the difference), and our driver ploughed recklessly over enormous road obstacles, any one of which could've spelled death for us if the car had struck it at the wrong angle and consequently left the road, ending up in the valley below. And of course, my brain went where it always does on these occasions ... which is to say that I was thinking "Yep, definitely adding this to my list of 'Central Asia Moments'."

So anyway, we made it back to town (obviously, given that you're reading this an' all), and Abid parked near a restaurant he’d selected for us. He then went off momentarily with his friend and the goat, returning a few minutes later. Shash’lik (BBQ’d meat on skewers), tea and vodka were being served in the restaurant, along with some tomatoes that looked as if they'd been accidentally machine-washed along with the owner's shirts and handkerchiefs. We ordered a skewer each, being very careful to specify that we wanted lamb, since the idea of eating the stately horned fellow we’d just shared a taxi with kinda repulsed us. Then I excused myself to go to the toilet, which was out the back of the restaurant.

A quick word about Uzbek toilets: in big city hotels many of them are the Western ‘sitting down’ kind, but elsewhere you’re in squat territory. I’m pretty much ok about squat toilets if they’re clean. In Boysun, I was not ok about them at all.

Regarding the specific toilet in question, let me just put a quick question to you: what’s the one thing you want to know more than anything else when you’re suspended over a giant pit of human waste? There are undoubtedly a wide range of possible valid answers to this question (which you're more than welcome to post here). My own answer, though, is simply this: you want to know that the structure supporting you is reliable.

In this particular case, the WC featured two wooden platforms, one original and one a later addition. The original had collapsed into … er, how can I put this politely? [prolonged pause] Nope, I can’t. It had collapsed into the shit.

Inspecting it more closely (as one does when entering a toilet which is the subject of some trepidation), I saw that the original platform was half-submerged in gooey excrement, the top half sticking up into the air at a ridiculous angle, like a cartoon picture of a sinking ocean liner. But the most disturbing thing I learned from my inspection of the two structures – on the left, the cartoon Titanic**, and on the right, the platform which suspended me above a septic bog deeper than a Japanese bathtub and about as wide as three average-sized household fridges lined up side-by-side – was that they were exactly the same. No design improvements whatsoever had been made after the first toilet had sunk into a lake of poo: no extra bolts, no supportive beams, no tweaking the set-up to forestall future mishaps. The management had simply put another, absolutely identical piece of wood next to the first one, inviting its clientele to take part in a bizarre scatological variation on Russian roulette every time they felt the need to reduce their green-tea-to-overall-bodyweight-ratio by making a brief visit to the Little Room out the back.

And so, thinks the Word Nerd, taking all of this in:
“Just how unlucky can I be today?”

Fortunately, not as unlucky as some vodka-addled customer probably will be in the near-ish future. I pity that diner ... though, in a way, I guess it serves them right for frequenting such a dreadful establishment.

Anyway, having escaped the restaurant toilet, I furiously washed my hands with antibacterial gel and finished my (pretty appalling) lunch. After a brief stop at the market and another to collect our luggage from the "hotel"***, we then exited Boysun by Lada, for the third and undoubtedly final time.

To our intense relief, the guy we'd met at the guerilla safehouse / railway station dining room did indeed have our tickets, and as we approached he waved them at us proudly. But we had about 45 minutes to wait for the train, so the driver decided – in one last gesture of Surkhandaryan weirdness – to try and get us a seat inside the brand new, incongruously shiny medical clinic which stood on one side of the station's main entrance hall.

Heading inside, we found ourselves in probably the cleanest, newest-looking medical centre I've encountered in my entire life, and almost certainly the best one in this or any neighbouring postcode. Exactly why they stuck it at the railway station (as opposed to, say, in the 35km-distant town centre, where 98% of the folks 'round here live) eludes me. But whatever the logic of this, it seemed the receptionist agreed to let us recline on her furniture because we were foreigners.

After a whole day of slurping around in the giant mud smoothie of Surkhandarya, it felt fantastic to sit on a soft, clean chair in a softly-coloured, clean surgery. Or at least it did until the farm boy with the broken leg came in. His parents laid him down on the sofa opposite ours, a protruding bone bulging grotesquely beneath his trouser leg, and his quiet, agonised sobbing took at least 75% of the fun out of my comfy chair. I suddenly felt kinda guilty for getting the red carpet treatment ... but not guilty enough to separate my ass from the leather-upholstery! Evil, spoiled Westerner ;-)

When the train came, we ran the length of about 15 carriages – once again off the end of the inadequate platform and into the mud – climbed the almost-vertical stairs, and waved goodbye to what is possibly the strangest, most alien part of this altogether odd country.

And that was our whirlwind visit to the Uzbek Deep South – one which part of me never wants to repeat, while another part secretly hopes I'll find myself back there again one day in the not-too-distant future. I'm developing a weird love/hate relationship with these backward, undeveloped corners of Central Asia where you can meet people at their rawest, weirdest and best, and see things which few Westerners ever lay eyes on. But while I relish that chance, I simultaneously struggle with a few things like hygeine issues. (Watching the market guy in Boysun pile honey into a jar for us by hand, licking his fingers as he went, made me want to throw up.) I'm sure this will continue to paly itself out over the months and years to come. And I'm equally sure you'll hear about it :-)

Until then ... take care!

Anthony.


* It seems against the law to be anything other than incredibly affable and helpful in Uzbekistan, unless you happen to a) live in Tashkent, b) work as a taxi driver near a major railway station or airport, or c) have a hand in running the country.

** I actually wanted to write RMS Lusitania rather than Titanic, but I figured that might be too obscure. Not sure ... is it?

*** There, I did it.

**** A "coupe" is a sleeping compartment with four bunks, so if you're travelling with one companion, you share the compartment with two strangers. It might sound icky, but it's generally a pretty stress-free arrangement ... plus, with Central Asian hospitality being what it is, it very often involves scoring some home-made food that your cabin-buddies insist on sharing with you. They even bring seasonings for you to sprinkle over your food – most commonly, salt packed inside a matchbox.

cryptids, yurts and wedding mobs

(Karakalpakistan Part 2)

The road to Ayaz-Qala fortress is quite unusual, in that it's both a highway and a dead end. The asphalt suddenly gives way to sand at the crest of a hill, and that's it: you've arrived at civilisation's outer limits. It's cool :-)

At this point, if you look right you'll see the fortress in all its lonesome splendour. If you look left, you'll see a little cluster of camel-brown yurta squatting in the desert, with a few assorted out-buildings gathered around them. This is the Ayaz-Qala yurta camp.

In case you're wondering, a yurta (anglicised as "yurt" for some reason) is one of those portable, tent-like dwellings made from wood and felt, most often associated with Mongolia* but also native to the traditional 'steppe folk' of Central Asia. Although very few people actually live in them nowadays, yurta occupy a significant place in the national psyche of Kazakh and Kyrgyz people. They also seem to be swimming around like bell-shaped croutons in the cultural soup of western Uzbekistan. Which was lucky for us, 'cause it meant there was somewhere for us to have lunch out here in the Kyzylkum.

The plan was basically to remain here for an hour or so, just long enough to eat and have coffee. But the woman who runs the yurt camp invited us to stay overnight and enjoy a whole evening (and morning) in the desert. Given the incredible location, the great price (a 70% off-season discount) and the fact that the owner was rumoured to make fantastic plov**, this was an offer to good to refuse.

So now that I've spent a night in a yurta (something I had to do at some point in Central Asia), here's what I can tell you about them:

First, inside they're incredibly plush, elegant and cosy. The interior is lined with traditional carpets and decorative cloths, with a stove in the middle, all topped by the impressive shangyrak (the centrepiece at the top, which often tends to have the status of a treasured family heirloom). They feel at once luxurious and homey ... great places to relax and chat, or read a book, or just shelter from the glare outside.

The second thing: as a focal point for Central Asian hospitality, the yurta fulfils its function admirably. When you're a guest in one, you're offered the best of everything ... from the blankets to the vodka!

And thirdly ... to wake up in the middle of the desert in a camel-skin tent, with the fire long since burned out and only a few inches of mattress between you and the ground, is to wake up cold. I don't care how often anyone repeats the phrase "warm in winter, cool in summer"; my stiff limbs and frozen toes remain unconvinced.

Still, I have to admit it was much chillier outside. Don't quite know how the camels survived out there without a comfy blanky to warm them up!

Anyway, when not luxuriating in the interior of our yurta, Yuliya and I spent most of our time getting to know our surrounds a little better. There are lots of things I could say in praise of the Kyzylkum, but I'll try to limit myself so as not to bore you all to death. I love the huge skies out here, for one thing, and when you get to a place of elevation (like the one in the pic below), they seem even more expansive. They also change colour constantly. The last time I felt so positively affected by the sky above my head was in Finland. Here, there's a similar sense of spaciousness, which brings a certain mental calm with it.

Meanwhile on the ground, it seems that the desert is completely ... well, y'know, deserted. Even the few birds living there have extremely quiet calls, almost inaudible while you're moving.

(Not that I imagine you're dying to know this, but the reason for their quietness is that they've evolved in an environment where there are almost no obstructions to the passage of sound waves. Generally speaking, you find the loudest birds in the thickest forests, 'cause they have to be heard through all those damn trees! And of course vice versa. So there you go ... another glimpse of the ridiculously irrelevant stuff I've managed to fill my brain with over the years.)

So where was I? Oh yeah: desert = quiet. Not exactly a revelation, but still quite striking when you're in it.

However, growing up in Australia trained me to examine the ground I walk on very closely, in case there's something nasty and poisonous down there that wants to bite you. So we hadn't been walking for long when I noticed that, in fact, we weren't alone out here after all. Far from it. The desert was pot-holed with burrows, and quite sizeable ones too.

A little while later, we got to meet one of the inhabitants of these burrows. We were heading to the salt lake when this little guy suddenly broke cover and bounced across the sand right next to us. He'd clearly emerged from one of the holes, and he stood around sniffing the air and checking us out for quite a while before carefully choosing another hole to disappear into.

The interesting thing about this furry little wanderer (apart from his general cuteness) is that all attempts to discover what species he is have so far failed. I've cross-referenced his pic with lots of sites about mustelids (the family of mammals that includes everyone from meerkats and otters to badgers) and peered hopefully at all manner of susliks (Eastern European/Asian ground squirrels), but without making a successful ID. And while pages that profile desert wildlife in Uzbekistan wax eloquent about gerbils and jerboas (both little hoppy mouse things with comically long hind legs), and tell you that you might be lucky enough to spot a polecat (sort of a cross between a ferret and a mongoose) in the Kyzylkum, nowhere can I find a reference to a kind of slender ratty squirrelly marmoty thing on any of them.

And so, what I seem to have here is kind of a mystery critter***. At least, he is so far, and to me. His face looks awfully familiar, and I keep thinking that I'll suddenly go "Hang on, wait a sec. Of course! He's a -------! Why did it take me so long to realise that?" But so far it hasn't happened.

Help me out if you can – I'm not planning to switch to my new career in cryptozoology**** for at least another four or five years ;-)

Leaving this little mystery behind us, we left the yurta camp some time around late morning, heading back in the direction of Khiva. Our driver suggested that we stop off along the way and take a look at one more fortress that we hadn't squeezed into the previous day's itinerary, to which we agreed. To get there, we had to drive down the main street of a dusty, poor village where some kind of commotion appeared to be going on.

We got to the entrance and found the fortress walled up and barred to visitors (possibly for some archaeological or restoration work ... though we never managed to find out). As we prepared to jump back in the car and go, inhabitants of the town – specifically, grubby little boys and a couple of men in tattered suits and forward-facing caps – came to meet our car, and told us that the fortress had recently been closed. They didn't say why.

What they did say was that they'd really like us to stick around for a while, because today was a big occasion: there was a wedding in the village. At the very least, they said, we should come and have a look at their kazani (enormous, round-bottomed metal pots, placed inside the rim of an outdoor tandyr***** oven), where the plov was being prepared.

We chewed over this proposition for a while and decided to accept. I'm glad we did – and not only because of the impressive size of their kazani.

First, of course, we inspected the plov ... but it was no great surprise when our sudden hosts insisted that we try some, and heaped three mammoth servings onto plates (one for me, one for Yuliya, and one for the driver).

We were next shown into a low-ceilinged, gun-barrel shaped house, where we removed our shoes and were led down a hallway jammed with people and noise, until we reached the final room. In this large space, decked out with cloths and carpets, we dined with an ever-expanding circle of men and teenaged boys, seemingly delighted at their new Ukrainian and Australian guests. The plov was accompanied by three separate toasts in a matter of ten minutes, and at each toast we were encouraged to swallow a rather manly amount of Karakalpak vodka, poured into Asian-style teacups.

Emerging a few minutes later, somewhat less sober than before, we were ... let's see, how to explain: something happened to us that wasn't exactly like being mobbed, but wasn't too far short of it, either. The wedding guests appeared to be growing in number by the minute, and a sizeable portion of them were right here in the house with us, lining every inch of wallspace and filling the air with raucous cheerful noise. (It later transpired that, in a Karakalpak village, there are no such things as "wedding invitations" – you just make the date known, and anyone in the village who wants to come just turns up. Which means basically the entire local population.)

Part of the reason for this attention was our inherent novelty value, I guess, accompanied by the general exuberance which characterised the occasion. But there was also another factor: the camera. It was a magnet for these people, and everyone wanted to be in at least one photo. As luck would have it, Yuliya had the photo-making apparatus around her neck at that point, so she basically became the unofficial wedding photographer.

Whisked out of the building, past more enormous kazani, we were taken around the village to other houses of a similar style, and in every house the story was the same: large rooms with carpets in the centre and people (mostly women) sitting around the walls chatting, generous amounts of food being offered, curious kids and big welcoming smiles all round. We must have seen at least four or five hundred guests, and Yuliya took pictures of most of them! (We have almost 100 wedding photos, which we've promised to make prints of and send ... and of which I've reproduced just a few favourites here.)

Then it was outside, where a band was playing over a PA system. I asked if I could sit and record them for a while (I've recently bought some sound equipment to do field recordings, and I'm taking it everywhere with me). Not only did they allow me to do this, but one of our hosts (a guy who bore an eerie resemblance to Robert de Niro when he had his hat on) managed to go one further by getting me on the stage. Which was great, except that I had no idea what I was supposed to do there! Did they want me to sing, or was I just supposed to point the microphone? I really couldn't tell. Still, it was cool to see the dutar (metal-stringed Uzbek guitar, with a body shaped oddly like a marmot) being played up close.

Finally, having ingested as much plov and as much vodka as we could possibly handle without exploding, we took our leave and went to the car, feeling shell-shocked but kinda privileged to have had this – albeit rather brief and superficial – glimpse into Karakalpak village life. While drifting off to sleep in the back seat, I thought of all the times I'd heard people talk about the 'legendary hospitality' of Central Asian peoples. If we'd been seeking to confirm or debunk the claim, this morning would've been absolute, resounding confirmation. The welcome we got in the village was huge, it was overwhelming and it was extended without reservation. In other words, we'd been lucky little campers )))

About two hours later we arrived back in Khiva, stumbled into our hotel room, crawled into bed and slept for the rest of the afternoon. Meanwhile, if we'd had a webcam set up back in the village, we would no doubt have seen the wedding party continuing unabated ... in fact, it was barely half-way through Day One, which meant that the part we'd participated in had been mere preamble. There were more than two days of celebration still to come!

Exhausted, stuffed with rice and carrots, and experiencing something not entirely unlike a hangover, I could only wonder how it was possible for anyone to have so much stamina. As I was thinking about this and other Karakalpakistan-related stuff, my eyes gave up and my brain shut down ... which, at that point, was exactly how I wanted this little adventure to end )))

Good night!

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ...

* In the Mongol tongue, they're called ger, gyr, or one of several other alternate spellings.

** The national dish of Uzbekistan. It's basically pilaf: a big plate of spiced rice with meat, carrots, onion and sometimes other stuff like chickpeas or golden raisins. I love it!

** American slang for "animal". I'm guessing, but I think it probably originated as a tender form of the word  "creature".

**** Cryptozoology is one of my all-time favourite words. It means "the search for creatures whose existence is unproved". The Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti are two famous cryptids (unproven animals), but there are loads of others. I like the word so much that I've even taught it to students, so that we can pretend to be cryptozoologists together and interview some weird creatures. I think my current teen class are probably the only group of 16-year-olds in Kazakhstan who know what kind of beast 'El Chupa Cabra' is, and where he comes from )))

***** One more irrrelevant fact for you: I think a lot of people reading this will be familiar with tandoor ovens, commonly used in preparing Indian cuisine, or at least with the adjective "tandoori" (as in "tandoori chicken"). But what I didn't know until this week was that these ovens actually originated in Central Asia, where they're called "tandyr". Likewise, the wonderful round loaves called "non" became "naan" in India, while the triangular-shaped pastries known as "samsa" or "somsa" here were adopted (and, it must be said, vastly improved) by the Indians to give the world the much-more-famous "samosa". Just another random example of how Central Asian influences have permeated out into the world over the centuries :-)