The Long Road Home

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 11:56 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.