To Shymkent
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)