Why I Stopped at Oral

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So I failed in my attempt to get from East Timor to Jordan without flying. I was so close, in fact I was even in Europe. The city of Oral in far northwest Kazakhstan is west of the Ural river, and so is considered part of Europe. In Russian it’s “Uralsk”, but in English it’s usually called after the Kazakh, “Oral”. I went as far as Oral, but I was hoping to go all the way to Kiev. And from there it would have been easy to get buses or the ferry down to Turkey and from there through Syria into Jordan.

Anyway. I left off the last blog in the small town of Turkistan. I got on that train fine, I arrived with plenty of time to spare. I didn’t have much food with me, and the train didn’t stop much to allow me to buy some, so I got a bit hungry but that’s fine, it was only 36 hours. No-one in my compartment spoke much English at all, so it was pretty boring. Near the end, for some reason known only to Loki and historians, the train line cuts through a bit of Russian territory. This gives Russian guards an excuse to act officious and board the train and search it. It also gives the Kazakh guys a chance to do the same thing. I don’t know why, since the train doesn’t stop, it’d make more sense if they just sealed it up somehow, or put guards on to make sure no-one throws anything off. Since everyone on the train seemed to be Kazakh or Russian, they seemed unsure what to do with me when they didn’t see a Russian visa in my passport, because of the two passports thing. None of them spoke a word of English, but when I pulled out my Swiss passport with the Russian transit visa in it (which I thought I’d only need for the Uralsk to Kiev trip, but had luckily requested as a four-day visa) they were content. Tourists and other foreigners had told me that backwater Russian border guards might not understand how someone can have two legitimate passports, but it only occurred to me later that if anyone understood the concept of two passports it should be the Russians, what with Georgia and all that!

It could be worse, they could stamp either of your visas and then say you needed a multi-entry visa. But that would be silly, even for communists. I bet it’s caught a lot of travelers out though, I wonder what happened to them.

So I arrived at Oral, which I have taken to calling “Uralsk” after the Russian because that’s what was on all the train ticket, and what people seemed to call it most, I guess because they mainly speak Russian at the ticket counter and such-like - most signs are bi-lingual, although around Uralsk itself there seemed to be almost as many which were in just Kazakh and English, which I thought was interesting. Anyway, I arrived early in the morning, and the train was scheduled for 21:27, so I checked into a hotel for a half-day and slept and accessed the Internet, and went out for a quick bit of Uralsk, and such-like. I bought food for the train trip which again was scheduled to be about 36 hours. At about 20:00 I got a taxi out to the train station, arriving at about 20:40.

I was greeted by a very persistent taxi driver shouting endlessly in Russian and/or Kazakh, and not apparently getting that I couldn’t understand a word. Confident that I had plenty of time and all was well in the world I headed into the station, until someone translated, and pointed out that the time on the train ticket was not local time, but Almaty/Astana time. I’d missed the train by about 15 minutes. Why on earth anyone would sell a train ticket with the departure time given in some other time zone is beyond me. It’s analogous to selling a train ticket from Adelaide to Darwin with the departure time given in AEST. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing on the ticket to say this.

After standing in queue for about an hour, with the help of the ticket attendant who of course spoke no English and wasn’t very good at playing charades/Pictionary, and a helpful young “translator” who didn’t speak English very well at all, we worked out that the next train was due two days later. This would mean I’d enter Russia on the last day of my transit visa, and overstay the visa by about two days, which I’d possibly have been willing to risk. However it would also mean that I’d quite possibly overstay my Kazakh visa by a few hours, and they have a reputation for locking up visa overstayers, and there’s no way at all to extend your visa. The ticket counter gave me some of my money back, but not all, I couldn’t be bothered trying to work out how they calculated the percentage, as it would clearly have been way beyond the helpful “translators”.

I headed back to the same hotel, but their Internet connection was not working, meaning I had no way of working out when the next flights would be. There aren’t all that many international flights, and many of them are to nations which require a visa in advance (China, Azerbaijan, India …). This is one of the times it’s very handy to know off the top of your head which countries are cool with you just rocking up uninvited and which ones want you to ring ahead so they can do the dishes!

As luck would have it, while the lady at the front desk of the hotel didn’t speak English (they seem to have a token English-speaking person for dealing with the foreign business people that come through, but she only works during the day) as they were trying to get the Internet working for me, it turned out that the floor lady who seems to do all the cleaning as well, actually spoke quite good English. She phoned the airlines for me and spent a considerable amount of time (I think it was more meaningful to her than cleaning) and while she had no idea what a credit card was, she was able to ascertain for me that there were no international flights leaving from Uralsk any time soon, and that there was a flight to Almaty at 09:30 the next day and one to Astana at 16:10. She booked a taxi for me for 07:00 the next morning so I could have a shot at racing out there to buy a ticket. Of course if they’d had the Internet I could have booked it online, but there you go.

The taxi turned out to be an unofficial taxi, as they pretty much all are. The driver whose name I forget worked in for some large scaffolding company, as a safety inspector, having just started a few weeks previous after finishing his education. His one year of compulsory military service would have been in there somewhere too. He didn’t speak very good English. After asking how old I am, and the normal questions about whether I was married, if I’m really a tourist, etc., I guessed that he was about 27. No, he was 22. Married, with one son.

A little later I asked how long he’d been married.

“four years”

“wow, didn’t you say you’re 22? So you got married at 18!”

“yes, my son is four years old and I am married for four years. Haha”

“ahhh”


He talked about his work a little, and about how he is studying English because he hopes to one day work in Australia. He’d said earlier that the only foreign country he’d visited was Russia, and I mistakenly remembered that as him being Russian, probably because there was a passport on the dashboard. I said something suggesting that he was Russian, and he said quickly “I am Kazakh, I am not Russian”.

Then a few minutes later, when talking about his work, out of the blue:

“And too many fucking Indians”.

Hmm. I said: “Really. You have a lot of Indians working in your company?”

“Yes, some are very black.”

“Really? Black? They must be from the south. Where in India are they from, Chennai maybe or Bangalore?”

“I don’t know”.

Fair enough.


Later, he mentioned some Kazakh town, which I’d never heard of and I’m annoyed that I’ve now forgotten the name. “You didn’t go there?” he asked, when I had no idea what he was talking about.

“No”

“Oh, I thought you go there. Got many Americans. Too many Americans and English and Germans and from Holland, all over. Too many”

Apparently it’s a hundred or two hundred kilometers from Uralsk, which I guess would put it fairly close to Aqtobe or Aktau. I have a half-formed understanding that there’s a lot of foreigners in those places because of the gas and oil plants.

Later at the airport watching the queue, he noticed a group of Indians. As a matter of fact, one or two did indeed have a rather impressive amount of melanin in their skin. He said, not in a hateful way but with the sort of conspiratorial tone one might use in Australia to say something politically incorrect about Ethiopian taxi drivers or Aboriginals when talking to a trustworthy friend “Oh, there are the Indians”

“Oh yes” I said. “how do they work, would they speak Russian?”

“No, just English, and not good, just a little bit, even worse than me some of them”

It’s a very different attitude from in Almaty, where they get a few people coming through on business, (so everyone assumes that one can’t be just a tourist, one must be doing some business as well) but not that many. It’d be interesting to explore a bit more, to see if there’s a more general resentment to foreigners taking the best jobs, particularly with the Global Financial Crisis hitting Central Asia so hard, and to see if expats have congregated into little “expatriate ghettos”.

He drove like someone who’d never driven a manual transmission before. Along the way we crossed back over the Ural river, putting us back in Asia. I commented on this but he didn’t seem to realize. Eventually we got to the airport and he very kindly came in and tried to translate for me. The lady at the counter spoke no English of course. The flight to Almaty was full. A young Russian with impeccable English came to help. What about Business Class he asked. No, that’s full too.

Well, I thought, I’ll have to go to Astana then. There was a remote possibility of going to Aqtau a couple of hundred kilometers away, maybe by taxi, and trying from there, but it would be a fairly risky strategy. There were international flights from Astana too, but I didn’t want to arrive there late at night on a weekend, when nothing was open to try to book a ticket for the next (or the same) day. Eventually she asked me to give her the money and she’d try to book me on the flight, depending if someone didn’t show up, from what I could work out, and if not, book me on the late afternoon flight to Astana.

I told the taxi driver to go, he’d been very helpful and had by now spent about an hour there. However the lady behind the counter wasn’t very good at communicating without language though. She sat there adjusting her makeup, so I figured there was nothing we could do until everyone had boarded. At one stage she locked up her little booth, ran as fast as her high heels could carry her, with my passport and money, to some spot at the other end of the airport. At about 09:35 (remember the flight was scheduled to leave at 09:30) she motioned me to stand by her window, and she again raced off. A few minutes later she was back, motioning me to hurry, scrawled out a boarding pass in handwriting so illegible I can’t tell if it’s English or Russian, and motioned for me to the departure window. I asked what to do with my backpack and she said “carry-on”. So I took my 75-litre hiking backpack, which by now weighs about 18 kg, on board as hand luggage, plus my bulky daypack. The upside of this was that at the other end I got out first, so it’s a good trick if you can get away with it.

They rushed me to the bus, which was full of most of the other passengers. The bus took off and drove all of about 50 metres to where the plane was, by far the shortest bus ride I’d been on. I sat down and they took off. So about five minutes after finding out that I was going to be on the flight, we’d taken off. Still, it wasn’t nearly as rushed as that time in Fiji a few years ago, but that’s another story. Blogging hadn’t been invented back then.

Air Astana is the Kazakh national carrier, after Air Kazakhstan which was shut down, I think, after being banned from much of Europe because the Europeans have a thing about bits of airplane falling on their head. However Air Astana is safer and seemed fine to me. It was strange to see and hear things in English and meet service staff (in this case the flight attendants) who spoke English. Even the security people spoke English. As they scanned my day-pack, she asked “what electronic devices do you have in your bag?” I answered truthfully “Computer, and camera” which work in most languages anyway. She then asked “What’s in the bottles, water?” and I said “water” and that was that. I’m not sure why she asked. Do they get a lot of terrorists who either when asked “what’s in your bag?” say “a bomb. Whoops! I mean a computer. Dammit”, or when asked “what’s in your bottles?” answer “by the beard of my favorite goat, I cannot tell a lie. It is nitroglycerine. And I cut down the apple tree.”?

It was good to be in an airplane again. The in-flight entertainment, food, and English, is so different from the trains or busses. I arrived at Almaty and, praise be to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, they have a 24-hour ticket counter, as the guidebook said. In fact they have a few. With the aid of hand gestures and the use of the word “Istanbul” and “Стамбул” (pronounced “Stanbul”, the Russian name for “Istanbul”) I booked a ticket for a flight to Istanbul at 03:10 the next morning. This meant I would leave Kazakhstan on the day my visa expired, with nearly 21 hours to spare. So as I write this (May 23) I’m sitting in the small but neat airport, without Internet access but with my computer plugged into a power board that someone has one of the ATMs plugged into, trying to stay awake until check-in which should be around 01:00. I got here at about 21:30, to make sure that even if they were using New Zealand Daylight Savings Time or something equally bizarre, I’d still make the flight!

The whole thing probably wasted me about $AUS 900. It’s hard to measure because it’s hard to know what I’d have spent otherwise. Certainly the two airline tickets, the extra taxis (both airports are a fair way out of town), luggage storage, etc., added up to well over that. Then I guess I could add the almost $300 for the Russian transit visa which I didn’t use, but of course that was a sunk cost. The most frustrating thing was flying all the way back, from the edge of Europe, half-way to Bangkok, and now tonight flying back almost the same direction, not quite over Uralsk but fairly close. A short hop between Uralsk and Kiev wouldn’t have been as annoying.

Still, I made it pretty much from one end of Asia to the other, from East Timor in the far Southeast, to the western edge, overland. Other than racing through Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria, I’m not missing out on seeing anything (and I can still go up through them if I want, but I think I’ll use the extra time to see more of Turkey). I’m kind of more disappointed that I missed out on Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran, but I’m resigned to that now. If I pop across to Israel after Jordan, I won’t get to do Iran either, unless I “lose” my Australian passport.




What’s the moral of this story? “Always turn up early for trains”? I did arrive about 50 minutes early. Arriving 90 minutes early would be ridiculous.
Or is it “always check the time zone”? But who actually does that? I never hear anyone do that at home … “is that summer time or standard time? / Is that Melbourne time or UTC? …”
Perhaps the moral of the story is “Buy train tickets through an agent who might be able to explain these things, rather than from the station”. But as well as the cost, how do you actually find an agent who speaks English? And would they think to explain it?

I think the moral of the story is to expect the unexpected. And when you apply for a Kazakhstan visa, tell them you’ll be there for 30 days because some embassies don’t give you a visa valid for 30 days, although most do. You might be the unlucky one.

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Photos

Oral - church
a Russian Orthodox church. The makeshift signs out the front mean "Christ is risen" in Russian, a traditional Russian Orthodox greeting.

Oral - park
I don't have many photos of Oral (Uralsk) to show you, so here's one of some weird statue in a park.

Oral - Church
the same church again from the other side.