до свидания, Central Asia

I was afraid this would happen...

Two weeks have passed since my last post, and now I'm left with a jumble of photos and memories from across this giant country that is Kazakhstan. To keep this from being too long (impossible), I will let the pictures do most of the explanations, and fill in the gaps where needed

On the road from Aktobe...

artwork in Aktobe

Blurry photo of a happy Emm

After a couple of days hanging out with my American host, Emm, in Aktobe, I was back to hitchin' and trainin' across Kazakhstan. I had over 2,000km (almost 1,500mi) to cover and two weeks to do it. I wasn't in too much of a rush, so I stopped at a few places of interest (or accident) along the way. 

The "Silk road" needed a facelift. Now it's the "Western Europe-Western China International Transit Corridor"

Cramped, yet comfortable, train quarters

Aralsk

The first stop. Aralsk is Kazakhstan's version of Uzbekistan's Moynaq. Faithful readers will remember that Moynaq was the desolate wasteland that used to be a thriving fishing town on the southern end of the Aral sea. Aralsk managed to avoid desolation, but it's definitely not the source of pride it once was.

 

Aralsk was a big deal in Soviet times

A bit harder-up these days

The sea itself is slightly closer to Aralsk than to Moynaq, but still nowhere to be seen from the town itself. Like Moynaq, there are memorials all over the place and rusty boats in the desert. Unlike in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan has put up some dams to try to save the northern part of the sea, and it seems to be working. Well enough that they can pull enough fish out of there to reopen the cannery, or part of it. (turns out they don't like people wandering around working canneries taking pictures... add that to the "reasons most Kazakhs think Shawn's a spy" list). Between that and its location on a major rail line, Aralsk was a significantly happier place to be than Moynaq.

Dreaming

 

Reality

 
 Unfortunately, they don't have many options for cheap accommodation, so after a cold night on the steppe, I was back on the road.

Resting on the seashore

 Baikonur

This place I was excited for. Many of you know I was once (and still am, to a great extent) super excited about space and space travel once upon a time. This city is the headquarters for the Baikonur cosmodrome, where space firsts like Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova, and Laika all launched from. It continues to be used today by the Russian space agency, and many Americans have also launched from here over the years.

ICBM

Business end of a Soyuz

Soyuz

Because of its history and the craziness that was the breakup of the Soviet Union, Baikonur is technically a part of Russia, despite its location in Kazakhstan. All of the police are Russian, all of the prices are in rubles, the cars have Russian plates, Russian flags are everywhere, and they serve Borsch.

Borsch!

Russian licence plate

The town is clearly proud of its history, and there are monuments on every corner, a neat little museum, t-shirts that say "We were first!" in Russian with a picture of Sputnik, and billboards like this, with a quote from Neil Armstrong about Yuri Gagarin (according to a translation from my host):

"He called us all into space..." - Neil Armstrong

Old Soviet plane

Although the launch site itself is off-limits unless you have thousands of dollars and all the right paperwork, apparently you can still see some of the launches from the city. There was a launch scheduled for one of the days I was there, and I was psyched to get to see my first chunk of metal hurled into space in real-time. Unfortunately, "technical problems" arose, and they rescheduled the launch for 10 days later, so I was left exploring the city itself and imagining what the launches must be like.

The coal plant. Lots of these around...

I was staying with a Couchsurfer, Ilya, who introduced me to his English class on the first night, where I made some new friends who showed me around while Ilya was working. One of them was Don, who brought me to his parents' house for dinner

Hanging out with Mom and Pop

Others were this couple, whose names escape me now but were very nice people. The wife works for the newspaper, and if any of you come across a copy of the Baikonur Daily anytime soon, keep an eye out for a story on a crazy American hitchhiker...

Friendly couple and my host, Ilya (right)

 Kyzylorda

Once I ran out of rubles, it was time to move on, so I went back out to the road and caught a couple rides to the old Soviet capital of Kyzylorda (translates to "Red Capital" in Kazakh). I wasn't really planning on staying here, but hitching being what it is, I ended up here for another night on the steppe. Before setting up my bivy, however, I stopped in a chaikhana for some dinner and met Oleg.

Oleg and I in his chariot

Oleg is a Russian trucker from Taraz, a city in the south of Kazakhstan (despite a Kazakh passport, people here clearly identify themselves by their ethnicity). He speaks slightly more English than I do Russian, and ended up buying me dinner, inviting me in the morning for tea (above), and inviting me to his place in Taraz, when I'm passing through. Noted.

 Turkestan

After waking up with frost on the inside of my bivy, I decided to find a hotel for my next night. I spent it in Turkestan, which is basically an extention of the Timurid relics of Uzbekistan (like in Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva), that happens to fall on the Kazakh side of the border. It was pretty cool, but after several months in Central Asia, you start to get tired of big turquoise-tiled mosques and mausoleums of old dead muslim men.

Mausoleum. The facade wasn't finished before Timur died, so they just left it, scaffolding and all

 As memorable as the mausoleum was Turkestan's smog. For a tiny town, it sure produces a lot of smoke. I was thinking of friends in Wenatchee during the summer's fires as I struggled to breathe walking from dinner to the hotel. To avoid smoke inhalation, I spent most of the evening reading indoors.

That's coal smoke, not fog.

 Shymkent

 So Lonely Planet devotes a decent chunk of the book to this town, but it turns out that the authors (and most tourists) probably weren't here in the winter. Most of the attractions are the national park and the mountains nearby. After my snowy mountain experience in Kyrgyzstan, I wasn't too psyched to get any more frostbite. Instead, I explored the town by foot and spent way too long staring at a computer figuring out Africa logistics...

Zhas, my host, and I

The couch

Santa's popular, but it's for New Years, not Christmas

 Taraz

 As promised, I gave my trucker friend, Oleg, a call when I got to Taraz. He happily came and picked me up (naturally, "5 minutes!" turned into 45 on Central Asian time), then brought me straight to his hairdresser, Zula, with whom he had an appointment. True to Kazakh hospitality, however, I left the building with a fresh trim of my own from Zula, free of charge.

"i go get cut. hair. many cut. cut cut cut. cutterpillar"

Then, he took me on a whirlwind tour of Taraz, where he seems to know everyone, we swang back by the train station to pick up his sister from the Moscow train, then headed to his parents' house for dinner of soup and fish:

Poppa Oleg, Momma Oleg, Sister Oleg, Oleg

Almaty

 Finally, on to my final stop in Kazakhstan, and in Central Asia: Almaty. After 10hrs in a train skirting just a few dozen kilometers from places I'd visited in Kyrgyzstan 3 months earlier, I arrived in the old capital and biggest city of Kazakhstan and met my new host, Dave.

chugachugchug

A view of the city (and its smog) from Kok-Tobe hill

I'll trade mountains for steppe any day...

After a brief respite in Shymkent and Taraz from the snow and cold, I was back in the thick of it. Not as cold as the west, but plenty of snow. Apparently there was a big storm a week or two ago that dumped 2ft or so and destroyed a bunch of trees. Since then, it's been slowly melting and turning to ice, which makes walking fun.

trees down

Mr. Snowman

New Years' trees

Almaty is the most developed city not only in Kazakhstan, but all of Central Asia, and it's quickly noticeable. In this case, "development" leads to a very western, cosmopolitan and European feel. Dave and I went to an Italian restaurant for dinner my first night and you can find anything from Burger King, KFC and Hardees to Japanese, Korean and Chinese buffets. There are loads of fashion boutiques from France, or with French names so they sound like they're from France, everything is crazy expensive, and in addition to the expected Russian, I've also heard plenty of English and Chinese spoken on the streets. Here are some images from the last couple of days:

$6 Chinese buffet!! Feels like home...

Old Cathedral. Russian Orthodox folk are big on gold...

The Fab Four immortalized on top of Kok Tobe

 

So, that's Kazakhstan! Almaty will be my home for the next two days, then on Tuesday it's off to Morocco, via Istanbul!

It's been an amazing 5 months in Asia (hard to believe it's already been that long!), filled with plov and meat and bread vodka and Russian profanity and long roads and hospitality and old buildings and and mountains and steppe and snow and heat and city folk and country folk and sickness and health. I feel incredibly fortunate that I've been able to have all of these experiences over these months to fill this blog and share with you all.

That being said, I'm ready for a new continent.

Either embracing Borat's publicity, or a very coincidental marketing choice

From "Sea" to Shining Sea

I began this trip by crossing the largest ocean in the world, then commenced to cross the largest continent and the most landlocked places. In the past week, I've finally reached salt water again in the form of two Central Asian seas. One healthy, one not so much

Aral - no water...

Caspian - Big water! And my new "go Russia" hat.

The Aral Sea (Nukus and Moynaq, Uzbekistan)

I left Khiva knowing that I had a week of Uzbek visa to fill and only two semi-practical destinations: the town of Nukus and its Savitsky art museum, and the old fishing town of Moynaq and the depressing catastrophe that is the Aral Sea. Since I had time to kill, I opted to stick with hitch-hiking.

The Savitsky museum

Nukus was a short trip. The hitching turned out to be a bit troublesome, but I made it nonetheless, just in time for a run-through of the art museum before closing time. The museum was pretty impressive, and quite colorful. Apparently this guy Savitsky ran around during the 50s and 60s collecting art from all over the Soviet Union. Partly because he was in the middle of nowhere, and partly because Stalin was out of the picture, he was allowed to do this despite Soviet restrictions on art and culture. The result is a vast collection of art on all sorts of themes. Many of the exhibitions here were on Central Asian life, the Aral Sea before and after, as well as a handful of landscapes and still life. A nice taste of a true collection of art and culture that wasn't created simply for tourists to buy (as I saw in most of the places of my last post).

Big city Moynaq. The main road.

After an exceptionally long and slow day of hike-hitching (emphasis on the hiking... I walked at least 15km trying to find a decent place to pick up a ride, or just out of boredom), I finally made it to the tiny fishing village of Moynaq. It's a bit tough to describe exactly what Moynaq is like. It definitely still has the feel of a fishing village somehow, yet the water is nowhere in sight. Imagine suddenly transplanting a small Duluth, MN or Aberdeen, WA from their resource-rich locations to, say, west Texas. That's about what it's like. The entire economy of Moynaq and the region relied on the sea and the fishing industry, providing much of the Soviet Union's fish supply. Today, however, it looks quite different.

The view out to "Sea" This bluff was the shoreline 50 years ago

For an idea of what's happening to the Aral Sea, go to google maps, find the sea, and toggle between the "map" and "satellite" views. The map shows the 1970s-ish shoreline (slightly smaller than original, but close to full size) and the satellite shows a view from a few years ago. The real sea is actually smaller than what the satellite shows there...

Something's not quite right...

Avast!

Local playthings

The first Christian cemetery I've seen so far

The town still holds onto its heritage. There are boats all over the place, some rusted out and picked over for scrap on the sea bed, some on pedestals in parks, sand some only in paintings in the small, quiet museum. The cannery that once employed thousands of people is still there, as is much of the machinery and even some of the cans. Today the facility is home only to pigeons in the rafters and cattle grazing in the salty sand in the courtyards.

The cannery

Some parts of the cannery survived better than others

Much of the cannery material was left behind

Even the cans were left behind...

The town isn't totally empty, though. There are lots of kids running around and a few working schools and colleges (colleges in Uzbekistan are basically like specialized high schools). There are lots of drunks, and there are still a lot of older people who seem mostly to lament the lost past. My hotel keeper (I was the only tourist in town at the time, so I spent my first night trying to chat with her) is in her 70s and knew the town when the sea was still there. Most of her children work in Almaty, Kazakhstan or other Uzbek towns now, since there's no work in Moynaq. When I asked her if she liked it here, thinking she must have a reasaon to stay, she laughed, "No! It's a bad place! Bad land, bad weather, bad." Speaking of the weather, apparently a side effect of losing the sea is that there are now terrible sand-salt-dust storms that whip up from time to time, causing excessively high rates of respiratory disorders in the area, among other health problems.

Contextually depressing mural

The first Christian cemetery I've seen so far. A sign of the huge Russian population here during fishing times

"World peace"

But there is a bit of hope for local industry, in a way. Oil companies have started to move in to exploit the reserves beneath what used to be the sea. When I inquired about tagging along with another jeep to the sea (chartering one turned out to be an over $500 trip to camp in single-digit temps with inadequate gear), all the tour guides were only taking oil workers these days. Turns out most tourists like to come in the summertime. Weird.

Me, Baatar and Nik in their abode

I did meet a few "fishermen", however! They weren't all Uzbek, in fact most of them were Chinese, and they weren't quite looking for fish... These guys spend the summer going back and forth to the sea collecting brine shrimp eggs from the super saline water, which they then bring back to Moynaq for packaging and sending off to China for... something. They turned out to be awesome guys, and one (Nik, on the right), spoke a bit of English. I almost got a ride with them to the sea, as they were leaving the next morning, but they didn't know if they would be gone for a day or two (no problem) or maybe two weeks to a month (bigger problem). Since I only had 5 days left on my visa, I opted to stay behind. Oh well, there's always the Kazakh side!

The Caspian Sea (Aktau, Kazakhstan)

After leaving that depressing sight, I started my trek out of the country and to Kazakhstan. As it turns out, there's not much in Western Uzbekistan. Just hours and hours of this:

Steppe/desert riding...

With a few of these thrown in:

Camels!

Again, hitching was hard, and it was cold and windy. Despite the deserty-look of this terrain, the weather was frigid. Even getting a ride wasn't always a guarantee of warmth. One van I rode in had a broken heater AND a broken windshield. The three of us crammed up front shivered our way across the steppe. But at least we were moving. So often my rides ended up looking more like this:

It's amazing how much hitchhiking looks like this sometimes

I finally made it to the border (where they didn't even mention anything about the registration slips I had so diligently collected...) and across, I still barely managed to find a ride from the complete middle of nowhere to the nearest town, Beynau. At that point, I'd had enough of all of the above, and opted for some of the below:

I've been workin' on the railroad...

I figured the next several hundred km of steppe probably looked a lot like the last several hundred, and a night train would also get me out of paying for an expensive Kazakh hotel for the night, win-win! Turns out when you ask the cashier for the "very cheapest" ticket on an overnight train, you probably shouldn't hope for a decent night's sleep...

Nevertheless, I made it to Aktau and the Caspian Sea, my first glimpse of water big enough to reach the horizon!

море!

I didn't realize how much I'd missed big bodies of water until I finally got to the beach. I had plans to go out and explore the desert and some supposedly cool historical sights near here, but instead I've spent the past two days mostly sitting near the water and reading. 

While doing this my first morning, actually, I had an old Russian man power-walking in a neon track suit stop and look at me. At that point, I was still bundled up in my winer travel clothes, scruffy as ever and a week unbathed  (Khiva was the last place with running water), and I was munching on sausage and stale bread next to my behemoth backpack. I smiled at the man, and after a mooment he asked in Russian, "You're hitch-hiking?" I was shocked. I'd spent months generally having people assume that I was lost, stupid, destitute, or all of the above when I tried to explain what hitch-hiking was. Here was someone who not only knew what it was, but pigeonholed me for one immediately!

"Da,"

"Oooohhh, Molodyes!" (Good for you!)

He asked a few of the basic "where are you from" "where are you going" "how long" "alone? really?" questions, then realizing my Russian was limited, just sat there beaming at me, shaking his head fondly. I'm guessing he either spent part of his life doing the same, or always wanted to. He shook my hand and started to walk off, but only got about 10m before he turned on his heels, powerwalked back and gave me 1000 tenge (about $6.50). Despite my protests, he insisted that I take it, then waved and powerwalked off into the distance. Maybe I wouldn't stick to trains from here on out, after all...

MiG memorial

I have gotten out to explore Aktau a bit, though, despite my sea-centered-ness. It's definitely a very Russified place and not so much Central Asian anymore. Sure, most of the people still speak Kazakh first, but there are a lot more white people wandering around, a lot fewer headscarves on women (and more shaved heads, actually), and a lot fewer chaikhanas and shashlik stands. They exist, but they're generally overshadowed by these:

Phonetic translation: Vinni-Pooh! I wonder if Kristof Robinov eats here

and these:

"Hmm, whom should we blatantly imitate: McDonalds or Burger King? Why not both?"

Also, apparently Aktau was only created by the Soviets for Uranium mining and enrichment, along with other heavy industries. All that petered out in the 90s, so now there is a ton of sketchy industrial wasteland surrounding the town. On the plus side, lots of room for street art (and graffiti...):

I hope Mr. Fox accepted the apology

Oh yeah, and today I saw a kid playing with a syringe. So, that's cool.

The sea!