22nd – 25th July
First impressions
Kazakhstan. It is hard to know where to begin with this country. Larger than Western Europe, it has a population of less than 15 million people. Those who live in European Kazakhstan (yes, part of Western Kazakhstan is actually in Europe) live closer to Vienna than the capital, Astana. This is an unexpectedly vast country, and we hadn’t really given it credit for this before we crossed the border from Russia.
The border crossing itself is relatively painless, we’d been expecting the worst but after four hot, chaotic and confused hours with an array of remarkably friendly Russian and Kazakh border officials, we are through. Like so many Russian processes, appearance is very different from reality: whilst the heavily armed guards, interminable form filling and hanging around may allude to a stringent security process at the border, the guards charged with searching our vehicle seem happy to simply ask if we are transporting narcotics or firearms and are amply contented with our unsurprisingly negative response.
It has felt like we’ve been in Asia ever since we arrived in Astrakhan, but remarkably, we have to drive four hours east in Kazakhstan before we hit the official border between the two continents, the Ural River. We hit it at Atyraw, a town that we (like most people I’m sure) had never heard of before – designated on our map as a remote outpost in the far west of the country.
Oil money
But we are amazed and surprised: after the bumpy four hours (about 200 miles), its skyscrapers loom before us out of the desertified steppe. We had certainly not expected those – after the mud brick, dusty villages that had lined our route so far, these were a real bolt from the blue. This is a city built on oil, a lot of it, currently being sucked relentlessly from the Caspian Sea 20km to the south, at an apparently heavy cost to the local marine environment and especially the sturgeon population.
Nevertheless the town and its people are a revelation to us. Forget any thoughts of Borat when you think of Kazakhs: these ancient people, with their soft, round and darkened Mongoloid faces, are about as far removed from a comedian in a mankini as it’s possible to imagine.
Immediately we are greeted with a level of hospitality and kindness we had never seen amongst the general Russian population: someone cheerfully helps us find a parking space in the modern city centre, another passer by stops to point out we have broken a steering link rod on our car (courtesy of the not so great roads), he even points us in the direction of a Toyota parts dealership, which in turn supplies the requisite part immediately and advises us upon a local mechanic who immediately turns up, guides us to his garage and replaces the part rod for free… They are quite extraordinary in their level of kindness, and whatever detrimental observations we might make about this country (and there are a few), they certainly won’t involve the people.
After a remarkably and unexpectedly civilized first night in Atyraw, drinking cheap beer and eating delicious shashlik on the ‘beach’ on the Ural River, we head east the next morning in high spirits.
Potholes, dust and heat
This is when our first real insight into rural Kazakhstan begins, with a vengeance.
Our friendly mechanic from the previous day had cheerfully mentioned that ‘Kazakhstan has loads of money, but they spend nothing on the roads’. How unbelievably right he was. Although warned, nothing at all could have prepared us for the day’s driving we had to come.
We cover a little over 200 miles, in 10 hours. The first 60 or is so on relatively good roads upon which we can average 50 mph. But upon leaving Maqat, a typical rural town comprising dusty houses and dustier streets, the road vanishes. Literally. Neither our map nor our GPS can help us and eventually, on our second lap of this dreary, nothing town, a bored but helpful security guard posted on its outskirts points the way to Dosat, the next town on the main road. He gestures to a dirt track, a three foot drop off the end of the paved road, which heads into the middle of what appears to be absolutely, utterly, nowhere.
We drive on to it, tentative and unsure, but he keeps waving us on so we feel we have no choice but to exit the town in this most bizarre manner. There isn’t another car in sight. Faithfully and determinedly (though not without a little anxiety) we follow the track, writhing, rutted and potholed, for about 2km until, remarkably, it joins the ‘main road’ east. But this is just the beginning of our problems. For the remaining 140 miles (roughly London to Cardiff) the road is beyond appalling: four foot deep potholes make it treacherous; endless, ruthless corrugations damage both our suspension and our morale, and we spend most of the time doing as the locals do: driving along a myriad of intertwining sand and dirt tracks that run parallel to the road itself. These are little better, but at least the sand is more forgiving and we can, in moments of mild euphoria, reach speeds of nearly 40mph.
Added to this, the temperature reaches 45°C by midday and peaks at 48°C in the afternoon. During 8 ½ hours of relentless pounding on the road we pass three isolated villages that sell absolutely nothing, plus one filling station (thankfully open). We see a car or lorry, followed by the obligatory quarter mile cloud of dust, about once every half an hour. This really isn’t country to break down in, or to run out of petrol. Comfortable though we are with our car’s reliability and robustness, our off-road skills and our fuel levels, it’s really hard to shake off a constant feeling of unease about the ‘what ifs…’ should your suspension suddenly implode, or similar.
Some light relief
But thankfully, by seven in the evening, we reach a destination of sorts: Shubarquidiq, a pleasantly bustling town in the middle of absolutely nowhere, 110km short of our original destination but as far as we dare go with the light threatening to fade. It turns out OK though – after half an hour’s unsuccessful bartering over the price of a room in what may have passed for the local brothel, we are directed by the short tempered, vain and young Russian madame to the truckers café on the outskirts of town. Tempers and patience short, we are met with friendly smiles, a room, cold beer and delicious lamb shashlik (our principle diet for the moment).
Just before going to bed, a large party of local twenty-somethings arrive: it is one of their birthdays, and with typical Kazakh hospitality we are invited to join the party. One of their number, a charming girl called Assel, is an English student and keen to practise, so acts as our translator for the night (thankfully everyone speaks some Russian here, so we can get by, but it is difficult in social situations!).
They are a raucous, loud and incredibly kind bunch: so excited to have English guests at their party, we are introduced to each new arrival as new best friends, invited to eat more delicious food and drink more welcome beer. At these events, it is traditional for each guest to make a short, sombre speech then propose a toast to the birthday boy. We are invited to do the same, so decide the best cause of action is an appallingly out of tune rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ which seems to go down a treat. Later, dancing to Western pop music: we show them some UK style rock’n’roll moves which, despite being a little drunken and rusty, prove hilarious to the locals (perhaps that’s why…). Eventually we make it to bed at midnight, utterly exhausted, but in far better spirits than when we’d arrived.
The port with no sea
The next day is much the same although thankfully the first 150 miles of road, to Aktobe and a little beyond, is excellent, largely due to a burgeoning oil industry here. We are aiming to get to Aralsk (formerly the main port on the Aral Sea) by nightfall. We make it, just. A total of 510 miles, the equivalent of London to Edinburgh, and all bar 200 on the similar roads as yesterday: at best UK style farm tracks, at worst a dried up, rocky and treacherous river bed.
It takes us 12 hours, and Aralsk is no place to rock up in as night is falling, in need of a cold beer, decent shashlik and a comfy bed.
It takes us nearly an hour to find the first of these two, asking virtually every citizen we find on the dusty, decrepit main street. Luckily a kindly local assists us in finding accommodation: at the astonishingly overpriced Hotel Aralsk, a typical Soviet hotel - a crumbling, concrete mass of etiolated pub carpets, smoke stained lime green wallpaper, rotten windows and dribbling showers that alternately freeze and scald you. But we are tired, very tired, and sleep well.
In the morning, we spend half an hour wandering round this town. Even by daylight it’s a miserable place, as any port without water might be expected to be. It’s not its fault, but astonishingly, the Soviet central planners who decreed in the 1950’s that the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya Rivers should be largely diverted to irrigate great new cotton fields in Uzbekistan actually expected this once great sea to dry up.
Whether they knew or cared about the environmental disaster that would be caused by the asphyxiation of the world’s (once) fourth largest lake, who knows. Either way, the people in this area have the lowest life expectancy of any in any part of the former USSR, due to the toxic mixture of sand and salts left by the sea, that now blow in great dust-storms through the area.
There are some positives and dozens of international initiatives to revive the northern part of the sea; indeed some fishing has been restarted in the northern Aral Sea and a new factory built near Aralsk, which employs 60 people. But these are few and far between, and feeling a little guilty, we are happy to move on.
It is easy to sound negative about our first few days here, but that would be harsh and unwarranted: though the roads may make you cry, the people always revive one’s spirits. No matter how awful the route, the endless, awe-inspiring landscapes of the steppe grasslands always lift our spirits, as do regular sightings of golden eagles hunting wild gerbils and gofers (we’re not sure exactly which) and the occasional sighting of semi-nomadic herdsmen on their horses, guiding their herds of cattle, goats and camels in the most remote parts of this wilderness.
It would have been very easy to choose a quicker, easier route through Kazakhstan, but we wouldn’t change it for the world.