The Long Road Home

I’m now in the town of Sheki, up in the north west corner of Azerbaijan. Finally here I’m cycling through really NICE places, rather than just INTERESTING. The temperature has been mainly about 30 degrees, and it feels lovely compared to days over 40 in Kazakhstan. The border with Russia is only about 20km away over the mountains from here.

The road now rolls gently through open yellow stubble, or darkly through deep forests of big old oaks now with acorns on, tall beeches with mast, and hazelnut and sweet chestnut trees. Then there are lighter woodlands with old weeping willows, birch with white bark, pussy willow with pale green leaves, ash trees full of keys and laburnum with pods. There are cherry trees full of fruit hanging over walls,, tons of red and black blackberries, elder flowers, and old may bushes with green haws. Blue prickly star flowers (no idea what they are) but they are everywhere) and yellow short hollyhocks.

There are wooden fences made of sticks propped together, and hedges of woven branches. sometimes the scenery is like a piece of Cheshire that got broken off and somehow drifted out here. or like north Oxfordshire or Buckinghamshire open wide fields.

On hot days it felt like high summer with deep shadow and cows standing in the golden stubble.

Then it rained all day yesterday and there were fallen leaves on the road, cool and wet, and a smell of soggy hedgerows, and suddenly it felt like autumn. The dry riverbeds were full of brown noisy water, which I thought was the sound of a motorway until finally I reached the river. In fact the water a bit further on burst right out of the river, and undermined pieces of the road so whole chunks broke off, and men were standing watching and putting piles of sticks to warn the cars. In other places the river was just flooding right over the road, really fast and deep, swirling muddy water. Quite hard to ride through as it tugs a lot. very dirty too. I was in a muddy mess when I arrived in Sheki.

I’m staying in a big old Intourist hotel, but there’s HO T WATER. Nothing’s been as bad as that collapsing Samaxi hotel, but even here there the upper floors are derelict, there are stray cats up there, and floors piled with mouldy mattresses. The best place I’ve stayed was a wooden chalet in the forest north of Qabala, where shepherds on horses rode through, and you could drink tea and eat sticky halva next to a lake.

I’ve seen big brown buzzards flap up from poles, little kestrels hovering, bee=eaters on the wires, whose little beaks make them look like they’re smiling, hoopoes flitting up from everywhere ridiculously fancy birds with orange crests up, a pair of goldfinches dashing along keeping up with me along the hedgerow, swallows, and sometimes jays and orioles disappearing into the trees with loud alarm calls.

There are baby donkeys (foals?) jumping in happy little parties (v endearing), brown cows that stand in the road and then bellow when I go past, horses and foals nibbling the grass, goats grazing in the scrub, a few big buffalo. There are scattered small villages with non-descript houses made of what look like yellow breeze blocks, and some of mud and straw. New buildings have shiny metal roofs with weathervanes. Tiny post offices. little yellow brick mosques.

Village shops sell Pasha tea in boxes, tins of cooking oil, lots of bottles of spirits, pasta, rice and puses in sacks on the floor, sugar cubes in big bags, boxes of washing powder. In the tows you can get sausages and cheese, flowery dresses hanging from the fronts of thee shop, and beach balls. Along the road are big signboards with photos of Alivey and his father looking serious with the the sunset behind them, or with crowds of men in suits, or patting school girls on the shoulders, or shaking hands with small boys in waistcoats.

There are cafes in the woods with big silver tea urns and smoking wood fires and charcoal shashlik grills. Near the villages there are white wooden cafes with verandahs where you get tea in teapots on trivets, and little narrow glasses with no handle, sugar lumps in a pot, and lemon. Also ewe’s milk cheese, buffalo butter white like lard. Halve sticky chewy nutty. Cheery juice. Water melons, round loads of flat bread. Cold pancakes for breakfast. Honey on plates. Tomato and cucumber, onions sprinkled with paprika, plates of chickpeas. Shashiklik kebabs, chips, meaty bones in oily soup. Flies. Ice creams.

The people you see and meet are almost all men. I’ve seen women in headscarves, with children, picking berries in the hedgerows. But at cafes, there are almost always only men, just once or twice I’ve seen a family. Men stop their cars and talk in the road. They do a loud slapping handshake with a big backswing, and then kiss each other on the cheek. They sit in shirt sleeves playing backgammon and cards, and drinking tea and smoking in the mornings. Old men have big black berets.

Two things are disturbing up here. It’s odd to be in a place so like Cheshire, or the Peak District, but where there appear to be no women. In Kazakhstan I met lots of women as they were running shops and so on. Here I hardly meet any, and people seem to find it UNTHINKABLE to be a woman not married, working, alone, and with no children. I have been battling along explaining g to everyone that yes I’m on my own, and that in the UK for example, it’s not so very odd, really, bla bla, but now to save trouble, and for safety, I’ve in the last few days invented for myself a husband, who’s always just up the road somewhere, a nice chap doing something, getting a hotel, buying things, etc etc. I must be quite convincing when I tell this lie, as some people have rather surprisingly even replied, ‘oh, yes, I’ve seen him”. .I’ve also chopped about 5 years off my age. Not sure if people are so convinced by that. It’s the most conservative male-dominated country I’ve been through.

It’s also troubling to be in such lovely s scenery sitting at cafes in quiet villages talking about volleyball, or watching loud jolly weddings in the towns, and think that if I were to ride just a couple of days north, I’d reach Groznu, and if a day or so south, I’d be in Nagorno-Karabakh. War memorials, and refugee children remind you suddenly.

But, Sheki is glorious. it was the capital of a khanate in the 18th C and a trade centre on the caravan route not only from the Caspian Sea to Turkey but also north over the Caucasus to Russia and south to Iran. It’s a mountain town with 18th and 19th C caravanserai traveller’s inns, all arches and courtyards, where you can still have tea in the rose gardens, and there’s an 18th C Khan’s palace with fabulous wooden lattice windows in deep blue and red stained glass, little Ottoman fireplaces, and a freize of painted horsemen in furry hats hunting and peering through telescopes.

Here’s a quick update. I’m in an internet cafe in the town of Samaxi, in eastern Azerbaijan. The reason it’s a quick update is because it’s BOILING hot in this internet cafe.

It’s packed, and the young men playing video games are all in outsize white flat caps, which are obviously the in thing.

Since I last wrote, I have had a lovely weekend in Baku - thanks especially to JOHN who let me use their company apartment right opposite the French Embassy in the best part of town, and CHRIS who took me round for lunches and coffees and dinners and very nice breakfasts. Both are working on projects for Tenghiz Chevron Oil in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan etc. If you are reading this Chris and John - THANKYOU! and I’m OK, don’t worry!

I feel quite surprised that I made it through Central Asia in one piece, after talking to these people who work there. I didn’t mention it in my blog, but I did feel very ill when I arrived in Turkistan, in south Kazakhstan - sore skin, exhausted, and although thirsty, I threw up the water I drank. The oil engineers explained that these are actually heat stress symptoms, and said they normally put people on a saline drip if they get into that state. Lucky I seemed to be OK just sipping rehydration salts and lying in bed a day. Anyway, I’m OK, and now I know.

Back to Baku: it’s a bit like Trieste and a bit like Manchester - big 19th C city architecture (Manchester), big sqaures and old fashioned sea front (Trieste). Then there are caravanserais and mosques and 14th C Shah’s palaces, which are not really like anywhere I’ve seen before.

People dress up like mad in the streets, and there are European brands like Next and Accessorize and Gap which I haven’t seen for months. There are also Irish pubs and English cafes full of expat oil men, and I had a lot of very nice full English breakfasts…

Now I’ve left that all behind again, and am on the road, heading west towards the Georgia border. I had a hard day battling out from Baku. All around there are just open dry rolling yellow hills, covered with yellow dry grass. THere was an enormous gale blowing, and in places I could hardly hold the bike on the road. There are lots of birds of prey, patrolling the hill slopes, but I STILL can’t tell a falcon from a hawk etc so I’m sorry I don’t know what they were…

I ate at a cafe where the wind was ripping through willow trees over the outdoor tables. I had dinner at a little village where the men were wearing big black felt caps and the women looked like Mrs Tiggywinkle in wraps and cloaks. Everyone was about four feet tall. There were flies everywere and noone minded (except me).

I stopped for the night under a radio mast, camping in a spot sheltered from the wind behind it. Amazing views into yellow nothingness, and the big sky full of stars.

This morning I rather surprisingly met an Azerbaijani professor from Edinburgh University, whilst having breakfast on the white terrace of a lovely cafe in a tiny ten-house village. He was a specialist in the unusual (to me, anyway) combination of William Blake and Caucasus international relations. He told me about massacres of Muslims in these towns in the early 20th C. Two child refugees from Nagorny-Karabakh were helping in the little cafe, a brother and sister. The six-year old daughter of the professor’s assistant shared my honey and stared at me with huge black eyes. Below the road curved away across the bare hills.

Now I’m in Samaxi. THe town used to be the capital of Azerbaijan’s Shirvan Shahs, but it’s suffered earthquakes etc and there are not many old buildings left. In fact I’ve seen none at all so far. Just nice squat yellow stone cottages with grape vines.

The hotel here is literally collapsing, whole bits of the floor are caved in, there’s no water at all, and most floors are boarded up. Once it must have been nice. I’ve got a whole suite, with chandelier, two old wooden upholstered armchairs, and a portrait of a 19th C Russian lady with her hair up. I dare not go onto the balcony for fear it will collapse. But it’s OK. And the view is nice.

Better sign off. Tomorrow I go on towards Georgia, on the road to Saki, south of the Great Caucasus mountains.

The charity workers at M’Lop Tapang (MT) street children’s centre in Cambodia have now found and purchased land for the sports centre, thanks to the funds we have raised through ‘The Long Road Home’ adventure.

The money we are raising is for two charity projects, one in Pakistan for 10,000 children and one in Cambodia for 5,000 children. We still need over 50,000 USD to meet the overall fundraising target, but the Cambodia project has more or less funded - hence implementation can start.

The land MT have purchased is at a site a few hundred meters from Sihanoukville’s central market, in the very centre of town. The location is five minutes from the slums, and five minutes from MT’s drop-in centre for older, mostly drug-abusing children.
Thouch Seth, MT outreach manager said, “This area is an ideal location, as there are many bored youth using drugs nearby.”
The playground will have a small info point, where all children can meet social workers if needed. “The families of many children do not allow their kids to attend our centers, but this playground allows those children to meet outreach social workers, and at the same time have fun and be safe”, Thouch Seth said.

Currently, it’s the rainy season, and conditions are particularly hard for Cambodia’s poor. Slum areas become a river of garbage, water borne diseases and mud. The MT education center is full of up to 100 kids at any time.
MT tries to help street-children build stable lives and reintegrate into their families and communities. This summer, Map, an 18 year old, ex-drug user, has just been reintegrated with his family after 8 years of no contact. The MT drop-in center and outreach team encouraged him to leave the streets, stop using drugs, learn new skills and seek out his family. Now he has his own small business with pony and cart in his home province. His family are delighted to have him back and thought they would never see him again. The MT Outreach team does regular follow up visits and Map is extremely happy to be both back with his family and making his own income.

Tren, an 18-yr old ex-drug using, street-living kid who has been attending the MT drop-in center for over a year, was one of 20 people selected to attend a MT training programme on how to work with street children. He did so well that he was selected as full-time volunteer in the MT outreach team, a great role model for kids who are still using drugs on the street.
MT expects more than 300 kids a day will use the sports centre, making a terrific difference, not just to MT but to the whole community. Maggie Eno, who runs M’Lop Tapang, writes: “The sports centre will be one of the most effective programs yet. Sports can help enormously when working with kids, for building self-esteem, making friends, keeping fit and replacing boredom. The space will be open to all children, from every background. It will be their place. It will be unique.” A huge thanks and pats on the back to EVERYONE who has made this possible through donations. As the sports centre goes up, I’ll write again with news and photos from the MT team, so you can see for yourself how the funds you have donated are being used. Thanks again to all - and I really hope that we can also reach the target for the Pakistan over the next few months, so that project can also start implementation.

Meanwhile, I’ve now finally made it to Baku in Azerbaijan, on the other side of the Caspian Sea, and am getting ready to set off on my next leg, through the Caucasus…

I’m in the town of Aktau, and after two days’ search round the hot streets, I’ve finally found an internet cafe. Two were locked up, but this one’s open. Aktau’s a port on the Caspian Sea. This is, I think, my last place in Central Asia.

From Aral I took two LOVELY trains, all comfortable with bunks and clean sheets with a hot water boiler and patterned red carpet runners on the corridors. I met a Kazakh man married to an Azeri wife who gave me cucumbers and tomatoes from his garden, with salt out of a matchbox. A Kazakh woman in a leopard skin nylon blouse working for an oil firm drilled me in Russian verbs and told me to read Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova. A group of young Russians and Kazakhs from Almaty going to summer camp on the Black Sea sang Russian and Kazakh songs, fed me mashed potato and apples and lemon tea. The girls gave me a camel which they said was called Susanna. Their teachers were painters and architects. Everyone was very excited they would see the Motherland statue at Volgograd - Stalingrad from the train.

The only hard part about getting trains is getting on. At a little station like Aral, there’s no platform, and you have to drag your stuff over the tracks and then haul it up onto the train, which stops for two minutes only. Once I dismantle the bike, and I’m carrying four panniers and tent roll, it’s quite a lot of heavy stuff. In Aralsk, a chain of old Kazakh babushkas somehow appeared and, in their flowery dresses and headscarves, handed my bags one by one across the tracks, and I just got onto the carriage steps with it all as the train clanked and moved off.

The steppe here is flat dry and brown to the uttermost horizon. There are very few settlements. Only about every 100km are there groups of five or six rough cabin houses with white corrugated metal roofs. Dust tracks, no green, no trees, piles of rubbish. A few camels on the dry dust. Women in headscarves carry plastic bags of things along the tracks. Children hold up bottles of fermented camel’s milk. Boys run racing the train as it pulls out. Probably very tough people would cycle this, but it’s deadly boring and awful with no water, and I would have gone MAD riding through it. So - train - very nice.

I stayed a day in Atyrau. It’s Kazakhstan’s oil boom town, with Landcruisers and BMWs. Huge glass offices of KazTransGas and CHevron and Halliburton. Green sprinkler lawns and buses for oil company staff going here and there. There were men in shirts holding document bags and laptops. In the main hotel, Scotsmen and Americans were ordering cars and wheeling suitcases and having beer in the Guns and Roses bar with Kazakh girls in little skirts and little shoes.

There’s a gorgeous old Russian Orthodox cathedral stranded in the old town, a messy waste of dust tracks and old villas with crumbling faded stucco pillars and plaster. The Ural River goes through slow and brown. On Saturday morning, people were doing canoe races, four-up sprints below the bridge. It was a rather awkward type of canoeing, with each person kneeling up in their canoe paddling over one side.

Atyrau town museum had wooden dombra Kazakh guitars, and wooden cups for mares’ milk and camels’ milk, and 14th C blue ceramics from the ancient city built by Genghis Khan’s son, destroyed finally by Ivan the Terrible. Khans and horsemen, and the awfully complicatd genealogy of the three Kazakh hordes. A photo of serious young men at the first school sitting in a circle, in the 19th C. A portrait of the leader who sbumitted Kazakhstan to RUssia, mustache, medals. A field gun and a greatcoat made of camel’s hair. A little cabinet of smudgy photo protraits from Stalinist repressions. Then there were white tuxedos in glass cases, worn by 1960s dombra players. And then glass jars of oil and photos of pipes and plants and the big joint venture with Chevron.

Now, finally, I’m in Aktau, a port in northern Kazakhstan jsut north of the border with Turkmenistan. It’s a 1960s planned Soviet town, with no street names jsut numbers for microrayon areas and housing blocks. Half dilapidated five-storey apartment blocks baking in the sun. Graffiti, broken glass, spilt ice-creams on the pavements. The sea is fantastic aquamarine and there are terns diving for fish and cormorants flapping across the waves further out. The beach is yellow, scruffy, dusty, but the locals are out there under their beach umbrellas. Children diving off the jetty, and Kazakh grannies holding up their skirts and cardigans standing in the waves laughing at their grandchildren in the sea.

I’m waiting for the boat to Baku in Azerbaijan. Noone knows when there will be one, and I’m just told to phone each day… So I’m washing stuff and airing my tent and sleeping bag and mending tent pegs a picking tyres mending inner tubes et etc - and I really hope a boat comes soon.

(These posts a bit rushed as it’s really hard to get internet rond here. I’m on the one dial-up terminal at the Kazakh Telecom office in Aralsk to write this…)

Near Shymkent the roads were busy with heavy goods vehicles, big container lorries from Turkey and Iran and Uzbekistan and Kazakh trucks. So I turned off at Temurlan onto minor roads towards Aris. There were then just a few cars, the odd minibus. The road was empty for long stretches. Mainly the scenery is dry brown grass flat flat dry mud and sometimes gold corn. It’s been very hot - over 40 degrees and I was drinking 6 litres of water per day.

Dust gets blown up twisting in big columns and hangs in the air really high brown stains in the sky.

There were only a few villages quiet with the odd cafe. Children in sandals and bare feet, earrings, dark hair, chewing cucmbers. MOthers in long loose patterned dresses and headscarves, lifting pails of water, bringing trays of tea in metal teapots and thick tough bread in baskets.

some villages are set to the sie of the road and you have to go up a rough track to get to them. Sun-drenched dusty afternoons, quiet, people shut in dark cool cottages. As I arrive, children get someone to open the shop. I sat on a broken chair and they gave me tea and a plate of cold pasta with chunks of lamb. Everyone had bare feet on the wood floor. Teh shop had wood shelves with sacks of rice and pasta, some tins of peas and fish, a few bottles of detergent, a jar of eyeliners and combs, some coloured pencils. They gave me tomatoes and fried dough and wouldn’t take any money and waved like made from the shop verandah.

I camped one night at the edge of a cornfield. Grasshoppers and dragon flies everywhere. Ground baked so hard I broke two tent pegs adn then had to use trees and my own bags to peg out the guylines. Dogs barking distantly and donkeys braying. A black cow with horns appeared at nightfall out of the wood and looked at the tent and me and then crashed away slowly through the corn (thank goodness).

I reached Arystanbab at sunset. There is a 14th C mausoleum there, and a hostel for pilgrims. The mausoleum was an isolated dark dome on the flat horizon against the oragne sunset. Tehre were busloads of people in white headscarves and skull caps. They were sitting in the scrappy carpark praying silently with hands cupped in their laps. In a covered platform people were sitting listening to a lady chanting a huge long chant on and on.

They gave me a place to sleep on a carpet near the kitchen in the hostel. I had the longest ever cold shower. THey gave me more cold pasta with lamb and fermented camel’s milk in a bowl. It was like oily powerful yoghurt (first sip nice, then suddenly I didin’t want it at all). I talked long with a lovely young Russian doctor who was staying there too, delivering scanners to the local hospitals, with two drivers. They were cross-legged and reclining at a mat having tea and noodles.

The next day I rode to the ruined medieval city of Otrar. This was a big Turkic silk road city in the 14th and 15th C. Timurlane stayed here in the late 14th C in the governor’s palace. But it had been sacked by Genghis Khan and then again by Zhungarian Oyrats in the 17th C. It was abandoned in the 18th C. Now it’s just a large dusty brown hill, all the buildings melted back into the dust and soil. There was noone there except me. The sun was intensely bright and high so no shadows. There was a track of fine dust like walking in custard powder. The wind was clanging a metal sign and whipping grit across the dry grass. Hoopoes flew out from the old bathhouse outside the walls. Now only a yellow brick hypercaust left. There was an old well near the palace and mosque foundations, and some small low walls of yellow brick. There were little piles of shards of blue and white ceramic and fired clay brown pots and bones.

From Otrar to Turkistan was one of the hardest days on a bike I’ve ever done. It was 40 degrees and windy. There were no villages for over 50km and the road I was on was not on the map, for some reason, so I wasn’t even sure where I was. There were no signs to indicate any places, just mileposts. The wind was blowing hard against me, and the road surface so rough I went off it and rode along the baked dust. I was only doing 10-12 kph for long sections, brutally hard. I got mixed up with directsion and couldn’t be sure which was north south east or west. I couldn’t see any features - the land is just flat brown desert steppe in all directions. There was no water anywhere, just occasional dried channels with reeds rattling. There were no birds at all. I saw orange scorpions in the road and dead silver snakes. There were a couple of isolated farmsteads with dusty buildings, some distance from the road. I saw people sheltering from the sun in the shade of their donkey, crouching. I stopped to eat at a dry river bed and shletered under the shadow of my bike, a bit. I was drinking my water in rations, calculating how many km I thought it was to Turkistan and how long it would take. I’ve covered my arms with cotton sleeves (from Guangdong). There were salt marks even on my gloves and sleeves from sweat.

I saw herd of about 30 horses all colours grey to brown to black flicking their tails walking somewhere, nowhere. Occasionally there were herds of cows brown and black out in the desert eating dry grey tussocks. I thought I saw a ridge of fire on the horizon but I think it was a mirage flaring on the skyline. I thought I saw a village but it turned out to be a ridge of brown earth. Finally I saw a line of camels near a few houses. I drank a pail of water at a dry mud cottage. A lady gave me a cermaic bowl to scoop it with.

Finally I arrived in Turkistan, a little quiet empty town with the most stupendous mausoleum to the first great Turkic holy man, Kazha Akhmed Yasaui. It was built by Timurlane in the 14th C. It’s being restored with Turkish support. It’s brown and high with starlings in the tops of the door arch. There are blue and white tiles. The Russian doctor had arrived there too, so we walked around the vast crenellated walls and around the huge dome by moonlight.

Now I’m actually in Aralsk, north of the Aral sea, as I COULDN’T ride any more dry hot steppe. I got a bus here overnight. There are rusty ships right outside the dilapidated town guesthouse in the old port, and sand everywhere and it smells of salt - but there’s no sea anymore, of course. I’ve bought a train ticket (amazed I coudd get one) to Atirau this afternoon. From there, I’ve got to somehow get to Aktau, and then from THERE, I need to find a ship to cross the Caspian Sea. Atirau is on the Ural, so it’s technically on the border of Asia with Europe, but it here it feels an AWFULLY long way from home.

After Taraz, I rode west up the main road. There were two 14thC mausoleums above a small village, gorgeous decorated pale brown bricks. Families arriving in old cars and taking photos and quietly praying outisde with their hands cupped open.

A brown black and white mountain range all along the south, the border with Kyrgyzstan. Vast fields of corn to the north. Kestrels and rose starlings and magpies. DOnkeys and Friesian cows in the villages, and wagons loaded with hay with children on the top, some straw blond tiny girls in the sun.

I have bowls of tea in sleepy cafes in the middle of the afternoon. Villagers won’t take my money. They give me bread and tea and sweet rolls.
In the evening, I pass the Rayon district guard post, and men in hats fiddle with my passport for ages, and I’m impatient as the sun is slanting low. They’re just messing around looking at what visas I’ve got. Finally I get away and camp near Aksu Zhabagly nature reserve, by a small river with the mountains across the grass. Shepherds ride past, fling down their water bottles next to mine and we try to talk - they study my stove and equipment, and we name Russian cyclists - they love Vinoukourov. FLocks of birds flap loudly up river at dusk, roost in trees, insects call all night. IN the morning last night’s spiky grey plants have all opened in the sun pale blue like cornflowers across the grass.
Hot hot days; it’s between 35 and 40 degrees C. Truck drivers stop and sleep under their trucks. My arms are burning stretched in the sun. In the villages, people are winding up water from wells, or working pumps and carrying pails. I see a flock of stilts black and white and pink legs all tilt and swerve in synch over a still pool. I eat shashlik and bread at an open air cafe with a wood stove. The lady chopping onions suddenly rattles off a childhood verse in English about a picture of Lenin “on the classroom wall”; Lenin “who tells all Soviet children they must learn and learn”. It was the only English she could do. They give me juice and bottles of gaz fizzy water and the whole family wave me off.
There are fields of orange wallflowers and blue lavender and miles and miles of corn to the horizon. Finally I wind into Shymkent. There are casinos and open-air beer tents. Little cars full of men are driving crazily about. One crashes into a ditch next to a cafe and is shoved out by men who then fall into the ditch themselves. All a bit crazy. SOmeone opens a car door into me.
I stop at the Sapar Hotel and there is glorious AIRCON and I have to have a whole apartment because the place is full of Chinese oil men working for PetroKazakhstan. First time I’m in a flat since April. Lovely; I make tea on the stove and sit at the kitchen table.

Photos of Shymkent (Flickr)

Well here I am back on the road… I’ve crossed from Kyrgyzstan to Kazakhstan, and arrived in the town of Taraz. I’m in a posh HOTEL having blinchiki pancakes with sour cream. It’s lovely to be in a hotel after mainly camping my way from Bishkek to get here.

Since Bishkek, m plans have changed a bit (a lot). After three failures to get a visa for Uzbekistan I’ve had to change my route to go around Uzbekistan. I’m aiming for the Caspian Sea - I can’t really go south of Uzbekistan to get there, as that’s through Afghanistan and Iran, so I’m going north, through western Kazakhstan. I’ll follow the Syr-Darya river (Jaxartes) up to the Aral Sea on the northern edge of Transoxiana, rather than the Oxus Amu-Darya on the southern edge. I’ve been studying the map pretty hard. It’s a pity to miss Tashkent and Samarkand, but according to the books there are some monumental old Islamic centres up here, some great battle sites, some weird old Soviet places, some weird new oil towns, and a lot of desert. Nobody really comes up this way. Well, here we go. Hope it works out.

I left Bishek heading west into a wind. There were lots of villages with white one-storey cabins with cheerful blue and green shutters and little gardens behind wicket fences. Nobody was really bothering with their gardens much, but there were still pink and yellow mesambriamthums (?), roses and tiger lilies. The cottages are under lines of old oaks and willows. There were some big white wooden orthodox churches with fancy blue patterns, and onion domes and crucifixes, and little churches with sagging green roofs. There were big mosques four storeys with shiny grey steel spheres on the roofs and crescents on spikes. There were lots of little mosques. On Friday men in white skull caps were dashing up on bikes to Friday prayers.

The village shops have tins of peas and canned fish, stacks of bread loaves, biscuits in wood boxes, crates of beer bottles, milk and cheese in the fridge, and boxes of washing powder neatly piled in pyramids. They have a lady in a flowery apron to give you things, and those weighing scales like a big triangle.

There are cafes where you can get rice plov and manty dumplings and lagman noodles, and Russian bread on a plastic tray, and balck Turkish tea in a pot with roses on. The cafes have white net curtains and a washstand. One had a swallows’ nest inside and swallows zooming in a nd out over your head.

The road is busy. There are people going along chaotically in tinny Ladas and Volgas, and a few beaten-up buses with flags flying and curtains flapping out of the windows. There are (oddly) lots of second-hand coaches from Germany and Fracne which have somehow ended up here (how?) and still have the German holiday firm’s name on but now have crowds of Uzbeks in them going to build houses in western Kazakhstan etc. There are convoys of container lorries from Turkey and Iran hammering east into Kazakhstan and towards China, and wooden Kazakh trucks loaded with melons, potatoes and onions and logs going west.

The scenery is VAST and lovely. One the left are golden fields and then the mountains of northern Kyrgystan, brown and sunny slopes up to white and black icy crags. On my right is just flat flat plains of grass and corn and dry earth the colour of butterscotch. The grass is full of big red beetles like ladybirds and millions of grasshoppers which flip up all over the place when you walk through. there are wild white hollyhocks and purple vetch (?), and hoopoes in the trees, blue magpies on the wires, and huge flocks of pink starlings calling noisily all day.

I crossed the Kyrgyz-Kazakh border a couple of days ago. Leaving Kyrgyzstan was quite easy. I sat on a concrete block while some men in a green hut did something with my passport. Getting into Kazakhstan was a bit more difficult as there was only a narrow gap with a metal turnstile next to a hut, and about 50 people all trying to squash through at once. My bike got stuck and then sort of burst through as finally lots of big ladies with big handbags and a nice man who turned out to be a greco-roman wrestling champion pushed it through.

People have been amazingly kind. All along the road people cheer as if I was in the Tour de France. Shepherds far out on the plain wave, people on horses herding goats wave and shout, lorry drivers toot and wave, teenage boys give me thumbs up. Children going to the village pump put down their buckets and wave, and grannies with headscarves make babies on their laps wave. Boys with cropped blond hair race me on their bikes. People in CHina were nice, but mostly just shouted ‘foreigner’, whereas here people say ‘Sportsman!’ (sic) and cheer me on. It’s all veyr encouraging and I find mylsef putting in little fast(ish) bursts in repsonse.

When cars stop etc, I’m obviously quite wary, but people turn out to be trying to give me things or invite me for meals. Three brothers called Sayeed, Hameed and Basil in a half wrecked Lada stopped to give me apples. Two Kazakh lorry drivers climbed into the back of their truck to get me two melons (how to carry two massive melons? but so nice). A lady in a shop gave me tons of (awful) chocolate and crisps and drinks and would not let me pay. Back in Bishkek, the hotel engineer in proper dungarees insisted on fixing my new hooter most elaborately using three different tools from his toolbox. I do not know how to really say thankyou properly.

The days have been hot hot with bright sun making the huge wide plains yellow and gold. My arms and face are burned in stripes again. People squeeze their Ladas right under trees to find little bits of shade when they stop at the raodside. Each day towards evening, the sky clouded over, went black, and then a huge wind would blow up picking up sheets of dust stinging my legs. Everything in the fields bent in the wind trees grass bushes driven sideways. First there would be hot and cold blasts then it would thunder and blow suddenly really cold, it would thunder and the rain would come slashing down. But the storm would pass and there’d be gorgeous sunsets and calm still nights with insects buzzing and chirring (new word) in the dark.

For my last night in Kyrgyzstan I stayed in a huge half derelict concrete hotel. No hot water so I went to the village Banya bathhouse. The old lady with a mop fussed me like mad, very nicely, and was horrified I didn’t have a loofah, so she gave me a knitted one like a giant panscrub. The place was a bit like a sauna all wood and tiles and pipes and taps and hot water. Apart from that hotel, I had to camp wild as there were no guest houses.

Anyway, now I’ve reached the town of Taraz. This feels like the MIDDLE of my trip. It’s near the site where the Tang dynasty Chinese were beaten in a huge battle with Arabs, Turks and Tibetans in 751. The Chinese never advanced further WEST. And it’s close, I think, to the EASTERN-most point reached by Alexander the Great when he was fighting his way through central Asia in about 300BC. When I cycled in I saw lots of derelict factories on the edge, but there are some beautiful pink and blue Russian-built mansions in the middle, and some mausoleums of Turkic Kharakhan leaders from the 11th century. I’m going to stay here a couple of nights to look around.