The Long Road Home

Sue seems to be a bit lost on a long road somewhere in Kazakhstan.

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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.