The Long Road Home

(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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 6:11 am and is filed under On the Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.