Travel Week 2: Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan is the seventh largest country in the world. It only has two major cities and apples originated in the foothills of the Tien Shan mountains.
The Tien Shan mountain range separates Kazakhstan from China and when we flew into the old capital of Almaty we were about a four hour car ride from the Chinese border. But we had flown east to go west and we were in Almaty trying to catch a train. We arrived in the early morning after an all night flight from Kiev over the steppe where I couldn't sleep and even looking down in the dark I had seen strange things all night. We rushed through customs but by the time everyone was through and had gotten their bags it was decided that the -best- thing to do was to pile into ten taxis and take a mad dash to the next train station with the hope of catching our missed train. So four of us piled into a car. In Kazakhstan there's an informal network of taxis, basically if you have a car you can pick people up and charge them money for the ride. I ended up in an aging Mercedes without the ability to communicate with our driver who was also reeking of vodka after, what can be assumed, was ahard normal night out. I unfortunately ended up in the middle of the backseat where the seat belts were nonexistent. And so we headed out into the countryside.
The highway near Almaty was four lane and new and as we drove west we paralleled the mountains. It was a beautiful morning, but then the road narrowed down to two lanes and the ride became more and more terrifyingly video-game like. Obstacles would pop up in front of us, like the old slow-moving dump truck or the semi truck with three trailers trained together. Our driver's method for addressing these things was to zoom up behind them as if they weren't there and then drive in the other lane without actually passing. He'd stay mostly in the other lane until we approached a curve or a hill and then he'd accelerate and try to pass. Inevitably we would meet another car, truck, or tank head on and he'd have to downshift* and swerve behind whatever we were trying to pass. But human adaptability is really amazing and instead of clutching at the front seats the entire trip I relaxed into the ride and started recording the landscape whipping by.
After a long drive, what I'd estimate to be an hour (?) we got to the next train station where the first taxi of our convoy, without surprise, saw the train pull away from the station. It was about nine in the morning and we were stuck in Otar without much of a plan. Out of the 40 people in our group only two people spoke Kazakh and one spoke a kind-of Russian and where we were no one spoke English. Somehow it was arranged that the afternoon/evening train would have an extra car attached for us. So we waited seven hours in the dusty train station yard for our 30 hour train ride west to the Aral Sea.
The Aral Sea used to be one of the four largest lakes in the world, but since the 1960s Soviet irrigation projects it's been shrinking at an alarming rate. The plan was to spend a day driving from the former shoreline across the now dry lake bed to the new shoreline; with 4x4s it would have been a four hour one way trip. We got into the Port of Aralsk the evening of the next day and because we were a day late because of our missed connections we spend the evening poking around the former port. We had a group meeting to decide the next course of action: take the 4x4 trip to the new shore or take an all night bus ride to catch a rocket launch the next morning. It was a hard choice but the rocket launch won. So after the sun set we took cold showers in a dumpy hotel had a quick dinner and loaded on the bus.
Now, this wasn't a typical all night bus ride. First off we had a Kazakh driver, who had a similar driving style to our taxi driver. Secondly the entire trip was on either a dirt road or a gravel "highway." Because we were heading to Baikonur, Russia's spaceport, the organizers put a DVD of Carl Sagan's Cosmos PBS series and looped it most of the night. I'd wake up periodically to feel the bus swaying and bumping as if the carriage was separate from the axels and Carl's soothing voice describing stars and galaxies.
We arrived at Baikonur in the early morning and headed to our hotel. When we pulled up to the front it took me a while to realize that we had actually arrived at a hotel and not just another abandoned building. On the plus side I can now say I've stayed in a former Soviet housing block. We, for some reason, unloaded our luggage from the bus into one room and then got back on the bus to head out to the launch pads. The rocket was an unmanned Zenit set to lift off at 08:00 hours. It was, we were told, carrying a weather satellite into space. It launched, it was awesome, and then we headed back to town. By the time we got back to town the officials knew we had changed our plans, gotten there early, and had just watched the rocket launch. This upset them and they revoked our permits to tour the launch pads and other miscellaneous spaceport infrastructure. After a few bribery attempts we were left to tour the museum and spend the next two days in town not doing much.
The last leg of the protracted trip getting back to London. We left Baikonur in the early afternoon to drive three or four hours in an unair-conditioned bus to the nearest train station. This was a horribly hot ride with periodic, unexplained stops where we would all pile out and stand in the shade until the bus started again. I don't know the town we ended up in, but we had enough time to eat dinner and buy food for the other 33 hour train ride east to Astana. When I first heard we'd be on a train for 60+ hours I was dreading the confinement, but the train rides were my favorite parts of the trip, especially this leg to Astana. Our route was more or less diagonally northeast through the entire country. We rode for hours (yes hours) next to a lake where half of it is salt water and the other is fresh; two completely different ecologies in the same lake!
We were on the train a night, a day, and then another night arriving early in the morning. Astana was cold and I was exhausted. We went to a hotel and took showers and quick naps before taking another series of ad hoc taxis to the Pyramid of Peace and Reconciliation. We spent the rest of the day talking about the projects we were to have been working on during the trip, it was a mobile studio after all. Dinner was planned at a yurt on the bank of a river with a sheep slaughter, but we got rained out and ended up at a fancy restaurant in the new part of town. Our flight out the next morning was so early that we would have to leave the hotel at 02:00 a.m. so we decided to stay up all night. We did and got on our flight from Astana to Kiev with a brief layover then Kiev to London. I was unconscious for the first flight and only remember waking up and seeing a box of food in front of me and then the next time I woke up it was gone. On the next flight I only remember being shaken away when the flight attendant put the next box of food in front of me. Then we were in London and everyone split up.
Pictures are here.
*I'm pretty sure his brakes were mostly unhelpful.
The Tien Shan mountain range separates Kazakhstan from China and when we flew into the old capital of Almaty we were about a four hour car ride from the Chinese border. But we had flown east to go west and we were in Almaty trying to catch a train. We arrived in the early morning after an all night flight from Kiev over the steppe where I couldn't sleep and even looking down in the dark I had seen strange things all night. We rushed through customs but by the time everyone was through and had gotten their bags it was decided that the -best- thing to do was to pile into ten taxis and take a mad dash to the next train station with the hope of catching our missed train. So four of us piled into a car. In Kazakhstan there's an informal network of taxis, basically if you have a car you can pick people up and charge them money for the ride. I ended up in an aging Mercedes without the ability to communicate with our driver who was also reeking of vodka after, what can be assumed, was a
The highway near Almaty was four lane and new and as we drove west we paralleled the mountains. It was a beautiful morning, but then the road narrowed down to two lanes and the ride became more and more terrifyingly video-game like. Obstacles would pop up in front of us, like the old slow-moving dump truck or the semi truck with three trailers trained together. Our driver's method for addressing these things was to zoom up behind them as if they weren't there and then drive in the other lane without actually passing. He'd stay mostly in the other lane until we approached a curve or a hill and then he'd accelerate and try to pass. Inevitably we would meet another car, truck, or tank head on and he'd have to downshift* and swerve behind whatever we were trying to pass. But human adaptability is really amazing and instead of clutching at the front seats the entire trip I relaxed into the ride and started recording the landscape whipping by.
After a long drive, what I'd estimate to be an hour (?) we got to the next train station where the first taxi of our convoy, without surprise, saw the train pull away from the station. It was about nine in the morning and we were stuck in Otar without much of a plan. Out of the 40 people in our group only two people spoke Kazakh and one spoke a kind-of Russian and where we were no one spoke English. Somehow it was arranged that the afternoon/evening train would have an extra car attached for us. So we waited seven hours in the dusty train station yard for our 30 hour train ride west to the Aral Sea.
The Aral Sea used to be one of the four largest lakes in the world, but since the 1960s Soviet irrigation projects it's been shrinking at an alarming rate. The plan was to spend a day driving from the former shoreline across the now dry lake bed to the new shoreline; with 4x4s it would have been a four hour one way trip. We got into the Port of Aralsk the evening of the next day and because we were a day late because of our missed connections we spend the evening poking around the former port. We had a group meeting to decide the next course of action: take the 4x4 trip to the new shore or take an all night bus ride to catch a rocket launch the next morning. It was a hard choice but the rocket launch won. So after the sun set we took cold showers in a dumpy hotel had a quick dinner and loaded on the bus.
Now, this wasn't a typical all night bus ride. First off we had a Kazakh driver, who had a similar driving style to our taxi driver. Secondly the entire trip was on either a dirt road or a gravel "highway." Because we were heading to Baikonur, Russia's spaceport, the organizers put a DVD of Carl Sagan's Cosmos PBS series and looped it most of the night. I'd wake up periodically to feel the bus swaying and bumping as if the carriage was separate from the axels and Carl's soothing voice describing stars and galaxies.
We arrived at Baikonur in the early morning and headed to our hotel. When we pulled up to the front it took me a while to realize that we had actually arrived at a hotel and not just another abandoned building. On the plus side I can now say I've stayed in a former Soviet housing block. We, for some reason, unloaded our luggage from the bus into one room and then got back on the bus to head out to the launch pads. The rocket was an unmanned Zenit set to lift off at 08:00 hours. It was, we were told, carrying a weather satellite into space. It launched, it was awesome, and then we headed back to town. By the time we got back to town the officials knew we had changed our plans, gotten there early, and had just watched the rocket launch. This upset them and they revoked our permits to tour the launch pads and other miscellaneous spaceport infrastructure. After a few bribery attempts we were left to tour the museum and spend the next two days in town not doing much.
The last leg of the protracted trip getting back to London. We left Baikonur in the early afternoon to drive three or four hours in an unair-conditioned bus to the nearest train station. This was a horribly hot ride with periodic, unexplained stops where we would all pile out and stand in the shade until the bus started again. I don't know the town we ended up in, but we had enough time to eat dinner and buy food for the other 33 hour train ride east to Astana. When I first heard we'd be on a train for 60+ hours I was dreading the confinement, but the train rides were my favorite parts of the trip, especially this leg to Astana. Our route was more or less diagonally northeast through the entire country. We rode for hours (yes hours) next to a lake where half of it is salt water and the other is fresh; two completely different ecologies in the same lake!
We were on the train a night, a day, and then another night arriving early in the morning. Astana was cold and I was exhausted. We went to a hotel and took showers and quick naps before taking another series of ad hoc taxis to the Pyramid of Peace and Reconciliation. We spent the rest of the day talking about the projects we were to have been working on during the trip, it was a mobile studio after all. Dinner was planned at a yurt on the bank of a river with a sheep slaughter, but we got rained out and ended up at a fancy restaurant in the new part of town. Our flight out the next morning was so early that we would have to leave the hotel at 02:00 a.m. so we decided to stay up all night. We did and got on our flight from Astana to Kiev with a brief layover then Kiev to London. I was unconscious for the first flight and only remember waking up and seeing a box of food in front of me and then the next time I woke up it was gone. On the next flight I only remember being shaken away when the flight attendant put the next box of food in front of me. Then we were in London and everyone split up.
Pictures are here.
*I'm pretty sure his brakes were mostly unhelpful.
posted by Ellen at 10:25 PM
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