Back in the U.S.S.R.

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In an effort to avoid my normal boring titles, I was going to title my blog “Kazakhstan is nice”, and then after a few days I was going to title it “Kazakhstan has a veneer of niceness”, but I was already sick of people making the Borat references, so I decided not to reference that film at all and instead go with the title from the Beatles song which got stuck in my head. In his book “In Search of Kazakhstan”, which I mention here in my attempt to sound more literate than I actually am, Christopher Robbins talks about how in conversation with one of his friends he made the politically correct point that Sacha Baron Cohen (“Borat”) would probably never have even felt that it was OK to pretend to be from Germany or France or suchlike. “Of course not”, replied Robbins’ friend “That’s why he invented a country”. That’s the way it goes - despite having the area of Western Australia (or, if you prefer, it’s the size of Greenland - larger than Western Europe), the world’s ninth largest nation in area and the place where apples came from, most people don’t seem to know anything about Kazakhstan. I at least know that it has nice scenery, seemingly endless grasslands, some pretty high mountains, corrupt cops, rich businessmen, and friendly people struggling to survive the global financial crisis.

At various times during my first week in Kazakhstan, I bumped into three different groups of people I’d met on the road in China. I don’t know if that was some bizarre coincidence or it it’s just because there’s so few tourists. I don’t think Kazakhstan gets too many tourists. So in my last blog I left off at Almaty, although I forgot to describe the roads (it’s funny lying down on a bed in a bus that’s bouncing around everywhere from the poor quality roads - it feels so different from sitting upright), the meal we had at a roadhouse (I don’t know what it was so I don’t know how to describe it) and my surprise at all the beat-up old Ladas all over the place, or the graffiti in English outside some small town, saying “Saina, I love you”, which made me wonder. Were Saina and her suitor the only two people in the town who could read English? Or perhaps he was a shy, frustrated, young man and Saina herself could not read English. It was a little town with Eastern-European-looking houses with mudbrick fences and sheds, with beat-up old Ladas in most driveways and the occasional donkey - it didn’t look like a town in which there was anyone who could only speak English. I guess we’ll never know.

I knew that the taxi from the bus station to the guesthouse should be no more than 500 Tenge (about $AUS 4.40) even for a tourist. I got a taxi at the bus station. The driver of course spoke no English, but at least the street names here are pronounceable (unlike the Chinese ones) so it was clear where to go, and we negotiated 500 Tenge by the use of the appropriate number of fingers (five, not five hundred, obviously), and off we went. It was nearly midnight. He dropped me off at the right place, and got out of the car with me as I checked that the guesthouse was there. I then went to pay him and didn’t have a 500 Tenge note. I offered him a 1000 Tenge note, but he shook his head and as I was trying to work out the money, never having used it before, he grabbed a 5000 Tenge note out of my hands, jumped into the car and raced off. Because I’d hardly slept for two nights, and because in most of the countries I’ve visited recently a thousand of the local currency is either an awful lot or hardly anything, 5000 sounded about right to me and it took me a few seconds to work out that he’d just taken about $44, and by that time it was too late to stop him.

The next day I had to register. I think they make people register for some sadistic pleasure, as in “we had to endure 80 years of soviet bureaucracy, so we want you to suffer as well”. Most countries are content that you have a visa and that you fill in the entry form at the border. But here you have to learn the process by divine inspiration. You then have to find the Immigration Department, and register before your five days are up otherwise you’ll get fined when you try to leave. There’s no extra information in the registration process than on your visa application or the entry form, and people who fly in don’t need to register because it’s automatically done at the airport. It seems completely pointless. In China you have to be registered at every place you stay, but that happens seamlessly in the background, between the hotel and the government. In Kazakhstan it seems to only have to be done once, but you have to do it yourself.

Apparently the proper process is that you find a form from somewhere, fill it in in Russian (of course no-one at the Immigration Department speaks English, why should they, after all not one of the signs is in anything other than Kazakh and Russian?). Then you have to stand in the correct queue (either by luck or by reading Russian), give them your passport and 800 Tenge, and then bum around illegally without a passport for the afternoon, coming back in the evening to pick it up. Or you can do what I did, go to the counter, try in vain to get a form, and get redirected to some lady who takes you outside past all the queues, phones up her friend who speaks English and translates via the phone, asks only for your passport, name, and the place you’re staying, and charges you 5000 Tenge. This actually worked for me, but it was the second 5000 Tenge I’d been conned out of in less than two days. Two rooky mistakes in two days, it didn’t bode that well for Kazakhstan. Still after my relief at actually getting my passport back with the registration stamp, I found out that if I’d attempted to do it through an agency it would have cost 15000 Tenge ($AUS 130) so I probably didn’t do too badly after all. By the way, when I talk about “queues”, I mean disorderly throngs, with people pushing and shoving in all directions. Of course, Soviet-era communist countries were famous for their queues, and I guess in Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union people rebelled and swore an oath along the lines of “the Kazakhs are a proud and noble race, never again shall we queue”. The strange thing is that here is where you’d expect to see foreigners, and of course they were all foreigners, but almost all from Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan (hence the Russian).

One of the groups of people I bumped into were the Australians I mentioned in passing in my Beijing blog, the ones going the same route that I had intended to go. They seem to have had a bit more time, and to have planned the visa thing better, so by now (May 23) they’re in Uzbekistan and about to fly into Iran. They were going hiking up the Tian Shan Astronomical Observatory, and so me and a British guy who didn’t seem keen to be an honorary Australian for the weekend tagged along.

According to Lonely Planet, the observatory is at 2750 m altitude and the main telescope was only installed around the time of independence, although the complex itself does have what I imagine is a Soviet sort of feel to it. The main thing I noticed is that it was freezing cold. The weather was nice as we started climbing up the valley along the pipeline, and by the time we got to a lake that marks the end of the pipeline, a few kilometers from the observatory, the weather was looking real nasty. We all put on wet weather gear and I quickly stripped to the waste to put on my polypro top, which I was very thankful for after a bit. It began to hail as we left the lake, which soon changed to what I think of as fairly heavy snow. It was a fairly steep walk too which reminded me that I’m still not that fit (or perhaps just not that young). It was a relief to get to the compound where we had heated rooms and even warm showers of sorts, and were provided with a hearty meal at night.

It kept snowing all afternoon and over much of the night, and the snow was piled up high around the windows. This isn’t the typical image most Australians have in their heads of Asia, but of course it’s accurate for much of Asia, only a small percentage of which is tropical. Still, it seemed cold given that it was late spring, and indeed I did hear from a few people that it had been an exceptionally cold spring.

Lonely Planet says that the lake is a good place for bird-watching in May. When we passed the lake we commented something along the lines of “so much for the bird-watching” as it was still frozen and looked fairly desolate to us, unlike the green hills further down the valley. However the next morning we met a group of two American retirees and a younger middle-aged Brit, who were serious birdwatchers. As they trekked through the snow they were quite happy as they’d found the birdwatching good, and told us happily how many different species they’d counted. They were obviously very serious, with expensive equipment and what seemed to be a life of constant travel, so it just goes to show how little the rest of us knew about birds.

After taking lots of photos of the snow and waiting for the sun to come out, and admiring the scenery, we headed back down the mountain again, but were overtaken by rain as we got lower. Luckily we got to where we could catch a local bus into town before we got too drenched. All up it was a nice walk, which if one was fit enough or started early enough in the morning, one could do in one day, but staying at the observatory was interesting. The thing that spoils it is how much rubbish there is everywhere. The lower parts of the walk are a popular picnic area, and almost every metre there is rubbish - broken glass bottles, remains of campfires, left-over food, plastic bottles, etc. It extends back from the track a fair way too. As well as being very unsightly, it’s also strange, because Almaty is so incredibly clean (and leafy too, with lots of parks). The observatory compound was likewise filthy, although the thick snow covered a lot of that. A soviet-era truck with flat tires was completely piled high with old household waste, and there were sheds full of disused equipment and building supplies, but there was still junk everywhere. I didn’t see any other forest parks to compare them, but I heard that at least some of the others are full of rubbish too.

I also met a German-Australian called Oliver who I travelled with for a few days. We walked around the city on the first day, to get a feel for the place. It’s neat and fairly orderly, and I didn’t see any homeless people or suchlike and very little graffiti. The city is very green, and the CBD is laid out in a nice grid, but seems to have a fair bit of pollution because there are still some quite old cars on the road. The city slopes down from the hills, so it’s always easy to tell which direction South is, as you can always see the mountains. This means that some maps are orientated towards the South, which makes it tricky when comparing maps. We took the cable car up to a hill which overlooks the city, giving a clearer picture of how the city is spread out. There’s a bit of an old financial district, and a current attempt to build a new financial district, but generally the office blocks are spread out all over the CBD and down one or two streets. I think since the president moved the capital to Astana, there’s been a lot more planning and money going into building that from a small town into a world-class capital, so perhaps Almaty isn’t getting quite as much planning as it might.

Oliver has contacts with the German-speaking community in Kazakhstan which is apparently quite large, having been sent there by Stalin I think. They found him a local hotel to stay in which was much cheaper, and a few days later I moved there too, it was good, with my own room for less than $AUS 20. It was cheap because it was still being renovated and most of the time we were the only people there. Occasionally one or two locals would come in. I think it was used as a place to do business deals, as they had a full-sized pool table downstairs and at all hours of the day or night people would come in and talk Russian or Kazakh.

Oliver is more adventurous than I am at trying out Russian phrases from his phrasebook, whereas I’ve taken more to waving my hands around and talking in English like a typical tourist. I guess it’s because I’ve been on the road longer and have given up on trying to learn the languages of all the places I pass through. His way probably risks offending people more often but conversely gets to talk to people more than my way. We have a fairly good conversation over copious cups of tea with the manager, a Muslim man who doesn’t drink alcohol. We go to a café that’s been recommended, with a German name, thinking they might at least have a menu in English or German, but they don’t, and we end up ordering by pointing at random items on the menu.

The owner of the hotel turns up, I think to see the foreigners. He speaks a little English. He seems to be keen to practice his English, and seems to be a very successful businessman although quite what his business is we’er not quite sure. Some of it at least appears to be acting as a loan shark, which proves profitable for him in the current financial climate, as he proudly shows us his new pajero which is one of the four cars he’s repossessed in recent times. He promises to take us out for dinner at 19:00 the next day, and turns up at about 22:00 and takes me out for coffee, Oliver already having gone out. He then promises to come back the next night, my last night, to take both of us out for dinner, and never turns up, leaving me hungry.

On the first night, we talk about corruption. He claims that there is a lot of crime and the police are very corrupt. Of course everyone thinks that there’s a lot of crime in their town, because of the way the media works, so it’s not easy to judge how much there actually is. He talks about the number of stabbings, and Oliver remarks that you wouldn’t want to get stabbed in Almaty because the doctors are probably not very good. Without a trace of irony, the businessman tells us that actually the doctors aer very good, at least when it comes to treating stab wounds because they have so much practice.

He is there with his “office manager”, a young Russian with the “naughty librarian” look who says nothing and whom he tells us is his second wife. He has another wife at home, but talks about planning to travel overseas with her. It does seem fairly common still for men to take a mistress, I don’t quite understand how it all works.

The question about stabbings had been prompted by an event a few days earlier. Catching the bus back I got talking to a young man who was studying at university and spoke excellent English (and, apparently, 6 other languages). He told us to watch out safety as there is a lot of crime. Afterwards I remarked somewhat disparagingly to Oliver how everywhere I go, people tell me that the next place is very dangerous, particularly if the next place is somewhere in their own country. Or occasionally they say how dangerous their own place is. I went through a list of all the places where this has happened on my trip. I didn’t think more of it.

The next night he was robbed. By the police.

Apparently he was walking home along at night and they stopped him and asked for his passport. As soon as he handed it over they grabbed it and wouldn’t give it back, and made him empty out his pockets. In the end they got away with about $AUS 200 in local currency, so not the end of the world. That’s the problem with having to carry your passport around. We talked about how ironic it was that he was trying to catch the attention of anyone, to get help against the police.




I’d discovered that although Russian tourist visas are hard to get, Russian transit visas are much easier. So now my only hope of getting to Jordan all the way overland lay in a Russian transit visa. I went to the train station and bought a direct ticket from Uralsk (Northwest Kazakhstan) to Kiev (Ukraine). This took about an hour of waving hands around and scribbling numbers down on bits of paper, just as it did a few days later when we went to book tickets for a trip out of town, and my ticket to Uralsk. Anyway, on my final week it left me with one day to get my visa. This blog is too long already so suffice it to say that this involved me getting there at about 09:30 and leaving at about 18:00, standing in queues almost the whole day. The form has a lot of questions about ever having visited, or had citizenship of, "Russia or the USSR". "USSR" is a phrase I hadn't heard in a long time, since before the Millenium Bug destroyed life on earth as we knew it.

At one stage a firey Portugese man aged about 40 stood up and said loudly in English something like “Someone must be able to help me”. He wanted a transit visa too but had no ticket, and no clear idea of where he was going, so he had no hope. A Georgian guy in a suit, probably only about ten years older than him, said in a fatherly kind of way “sit down”. And then in a whisper which I could hear across the room, sais “Communism”. “Oh yes, I keep forgetting”, said the Portugese man. So out of my seven days in Almaty (including the two on the hike up to the observatory) I wasted two in officialdom - one for the “registration” and one for the Russian visa, which ended up costing nearly $AUS 300.

A day after getting my Russian visa, we took a train to Turkistan, a small town west of Almaty. The train journey took only about 17 hours. We were lucky in that our compartment wasn’t too crowded, and as well as the two of us there was also a girl who spoke very good English, working as an interpreter for a multi-national gas company. She was able to translate for us in to Kazakh and Russian for the others, including an old lady and a young girl with beautiful voices who sang us a bit of a Kazakh traditional melody.

Turkistan, “Land of the Turks”, (not to be confused with Turkmenistan, “Land of the Turkmen”; or Turkey) is a fairly small town with not much happening. There’s a large mausoleum there of some dead Muslim holy man, but it wasn’t clear to me where the body was actually kept, so in that sense it was less interesting than Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, although you don’t get rushed thorugh so quickly! The building itself is impressive, and it was interesting to watch different groups of people coming through and listening to recitations, or kneeling before a wall presumably something to do with the holy man, and holding their hands up and then to their face as if washing themselves with invisible water. This last group was mainly middle-aged women. The site gets a lot of Government funding, in an attempt to revive Islam as a symbol of cultural identity in the young nation. There’s also a couple of archaeology museums, a half-underground Mosque, and some other mausoleum, although I couldn’t tell which was which as the signs were all in Russian and Kazakh, and the site didn’t match up with the Lonely Planet map.

Turkistan looks much more economically depressed than Almaty. We wondered the streets a bit, and the roads were often dirt, but still the houses were solid and seemed in good condition. I guess one can’t be homeless in countries where half the year is well below zero Celcius. We took a taxi out to what Lonely Planet promised to be a deserted Silk Road village,but perhaps we went to the wrong place because there was nothing there, other than a shack full of homeless men, who invited us in for tea, but we couldn’t stay long because of the taxi driver waiting for us. Their shack seemed to be composed of an old railway van or suchlike, buried under a large mountain of soil, which would probably be fairly well insulated. They seemed to sleep on two giant metal bunks.

Other than that there didn’t seem to be an awful lot to do in Turkistan. It was only there that I noticed the writings on the trucks. I was surprised to see a “Tourist bus” with lots of writing in English, until Oliver pointed out that they all had such slogans, usually in German. They appear to all be old second-hand buses from Germany, just like the cars, and they hadn’t even bothered to paint over them. Even the music that’s popular there are apparently bands left over from 1980s Germany.




I feel like I’ve left out bits about Kazakhstan but there’s so much to write about, I probably should have pruned back more. Next blog (which I’ve already written so I’ll upload soon) is make or break time for my goal to get all the way to Jordan by land. You’ll have to read it to see what happens next.

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Photos

Almaty
a monument in one of the many parks, note the mountains in the background.

Almaty
I'm not sure what this building is either, perhaps the conservatory of music?

Almaty
monument to the women

Almaty II train station
I was trying to strike a funny pose but it just came out looking like I was measuring fish. The first word of the name is "Kazakhstan" in Kazakh (not in russian) I can't read the rest.

Almaty II train station
A statue outside the train station commemorating Ablai Khan, a great Kazakh khan (ruler)

Almaty
Looking down over Almaty from the cable-car terminus

Almaty
on our way up to the observatory, in the south of town

hike up to the observatory
holiday yurts

hike up to the observatory
about half way up, looking down the water pipe

hike up to the observatory
a bit further up, looking up the pipe - starting to see snow

hike to observatory
the lake, still partly frozen in May

hike to observatory
the lake again

hike to observatory
view out of my bedroom window at the observatory accomodation

hike to observatory
view out of my bedroom window at the observatory accomodation

hike to observatory
the observatory

observatory
typical Asian spring weather?
the building we stayed in, the next morning when the sun came out.

observatory
old soviet era truck, used as a rubbish bin

observatory
looking up intot he hills. A track leads through there into Kyrgyzstan

observatory
looking up into the mountains

observatory
me a fraction of a second after throwing a snowball which unfortunately the photographer didn't quite capture