Come the day, I pass through customs in a record time of less than twenty minutes. I accidently managed this by virtue of a sweaty rotting carrot that I magically produced out of my food pannier when the nice young lady asked me to empty my bags onto her inspection table. Not liking the foreboding sight of my manky carrot she quickly judged my entire tangled baggage apparatus to have been sufficiently searched. She then returned to chatting with her friend over a nice hot cup of tea.
Exchanging a few bloody-hell-my-fingers-are-dropping-off pleasantries with the young guardsmen, I pass across the border being wished a hearty “O’q yul!” By an overhead sign as is frequently seen on Uzbek roads as I passed from region to region.
I have no plan, other than to get to Aktau. It’s 10am. I consider getting a train. Or possibly cycling the 90kms to Beynau and then getting a train. Do I have a short memory or what?!
I don’t get much chance to consider my limited options; no sooner have I set foot in the country than I am greeted by a young slightly intense looking Australian chap who introduces himself as James. He is attempting to hitch a ride in a truck for himself and his 250cc Kawasaki ‘piece of shit’ motorbike. His description, not mine; would I care to join him?
Of course I would. I do like it when someone else pops up and has a plan, especially when I don’t. Saves me a whole barrelful of unnecessary thinking.
When he informs me that the trains are strictly for passengers only that seals it.
Our first offer of a ride to Aktau comes from a chap hopeful of earning some dollars, but it’s clear from the get-go that even by anything-is-possible Asian standards, there’s not a cat in hells chance that we’d ever get even just James’ bike on its own either into or onto the roof of this rather small van. Somehow, the driver then falls into a heated argument with another unexplained chap standing nearby seemingly about to transport us all. Je ne comprend pas. I ought to be saying that in Russian really.
Not long after, an altogether more professional looking chap rocks up in a reassuringly enormous black four by four. We won’t travel in his vehicle but a van that will arrive at 4pm. Price 75US dollars each.
Sweet! That’s fine for a 500km journey through death-inducing ice and desert.
We hang out in the border chaihana (teahouse) and I discover that James is a professional photographer, that fell off his bike for the first time whilst in the desert and has ridden through the night to make the border on time; he too had been told the border would be shut for ten days as of the 25th on account of the country holding its first ever presidential elections since the dissolution of the soviet union twenty six years ago. Karimov, the presiding man in charge, a man not known for having a good civil liberties record, had finally karked it just over a month and a half ago.
James, 26, had been on the road for 7 months, and now all he wanted to do was get to Europe and end his journey. Jadedness hits many long-term travellers. He has a woman in his life, which I suspect might have had something to do with it. James is cold, very very tired and understandably slightly grumpy.
Our 4pm pickup eventually arrives just after 6pm. James is irritated by this. Me being considerably more worldly-wise, I am not phased at all. Smug bastard that I am.
Our transport is a dinky little Russian Kamaz van; the soviet version of a VW camper. Coming in the standard battleship grey livery, it is a wonderfully simple looking design with a high body and no front or rear lower bumpers which make it ideal for rolling over incredibly uneven ground. There were lots of them in Mongolia.
I am very excited to be travelling in one of these; I had been fascinated by them since I first saw them in Mongolia months ago.
As it starts to get dark, our driver high-tails it down the slightly random road/mud track that carries us 90kms to Beynau. After stopping to find an ATM that will actually accept our visa cards we stop for a late dinner at the drivers home. Lots of yummy lemon Swiss roll and tasty biscuits that look like mobile phones. And some lovely potato and beef stew.
We set off again at 10pm. This is turning out to be quite a slow trip. Cupping my hands round the glass I can just about see that I’m not missing very much other than a very cold undulating landscape. I still kind of feel like I am cheating by not being on my bike. Still, I would rather that than be inviting a frozen hypothermic death upon myself.
Along the way to Beynau, our driver had experienced some difficulties with his gears seeming to disengage. Now, at roughly 2am, the gears give up completely. Upon investigation, we discover that the plate connecting to the driveshaft seems to be coming disconnected. With the driver doing the spanners bit, and me using the very good torch on my phone we lay underneath the van in a biting wind whilst he sorts things out. We are not able to speak to each other, so it’s nice to be able to offer a little solidarity.
After having stayed awake all night, listening to Russian/Kazak folk music which is basically ska with accordions (very good) we finally arrive in Aktau and bid farewell to our driver.
James heads off to find a hotel and me not feeling the need to spend money unnecessarily, I head down to some handy nearby reeds near the sea.
After a couple of hours of only being able to think of all the things I need to do, I repack my tent.
Over the next couple of hours I then fall into one of those situations where everything either goes wrong or breaks. My bike stand fell apart. My coat got totally covered in difficult to remove fluffy reed seeds making me look a particularly shambolic sight. No ATM would accept my bank card. Then when somebody tried to help me I ended getting so confused that I starting losing my temper with the poor fellow. He was only trying to help.
I spot James’ motorbike out the ingeniously named ‘Aktau Hotel’ and admit defeat. And de legs and de arms and de head and de rest of me.
My brains suddenly mangled after no sleep at all. I book in. I shower. I recuperate. Passing random people want to know where I am from. Kindly bugger off. Come back later.
The next morning a note has appeared attached to my bike which has been stashed in the lobby. My bike has also gained a flat tyre.
I check out, mend my tyre and a passing person in the street, after the usual kind of chat, offers to let me call this Russian traveller woman who wants to speak to me.
Before I know it, she is on her way. Which is a little awkward as I had already arranged to meet up with a Warmshowers host who was coming from 90 kms down the road to see me. I had previously arranged to stay with him whist cycling through but the whole arrangement got bypassed; now as an English teacher, he just wanted to come to talk with me to practice his English.
Marina the Russian woman turns up, pointing a camera at me as she approaches. Without asking if I mind, she carries on with the camera. I explain to her that I am already meeting someone else… the Warmshowers host turns up; a very smiley young chap who I instinctively like.
He looks confused by the Russian woman with the camera and after him briefly saying hello to me marina launches into a conversation with him in Russian. He looks somewhat furrow-browed and she unnecessarily intense. I get the feeling that she is trying to take possession of me…
Walking up the street, I manage to have 30 minutes conversation with him while she continues to video us, still not having asked anyone’s permission.
Cutting a somewhat tedious story short, I stay at her flat for two nights and she kicks me out when I arrive back at her flat at 8.30pm instead of 5pm; when she had wanted to know when I was going to be back, She had said that she had had no intention of going out at all that day so I figured my movements should not present any problems. And anyway she had given me a key. When I return she tells me that she had called the police because she didn’t know where I was, and did I think that my behaviour was acceptable or not?
Well I’m fine with my behaviour. Frankly I’m too old to be guilt-tripped or be willing to play someone else’s stupid head games. When we had separated from the nice Warmshowers host she had told me that she didn’t like him, that he made her feel bad. Right then I instinctively figured that if she didn’t like him then she would probably find a reason to not like me too.
Finding this womans behaviour somewhat unsurprising I left as requested. Even after she had asked me to leave she continued to point her video camera at me. At which point I rather angrily told her that I didn’t want her pointing her bloody camera at me.
I left, and she followed me, making sure that I was actually leaving. What a sour time. And I had a flat tyre again.
With nothing very much to do, I hung out with James over a warming coffee, emailed some friends. Talking with friendly people in the street, I put some distance between me and the brain-scrambling marina.
After sleeping out a couple of nights, I would mooch about town getting warmed up. Lots of people stop to talk with me. I think having a big Santa Claus beard and wearing the Uzbek chappan along with the bike makes me somewhat conspicuous. Numerous people offer me money (which I always refuse) and three people say to me ‘if there’s anything you need just ask’.
And so it comes about that I stay overnight with a young husband and wife and their four young kids. Dinner, a bath and the washing machine and good English chat.
Staying with Jorgen and Nora was lovely. They are hoping that I will now book into a hotel. I am pretty sure that I won’t.
I have met a number of people here who have Scandinavian names. I also met an Erik. Okay so that’s only three…
Having just listened to an ‘In Our Time’ podcast entitled The Volga Vikings, it’s clear that the Vikings had left their mark, including their names.
Aktau is an international petrochemical city. Not especially glitzy or ravaged by industry either way; just quite a normal friendly city.
Fifty years ago the place had not existed until the soviets discovered uranium and had an open-cast mining operation some 30kms north east of the city. The uranium went for weapons production. When that all wound down in the 90s, the city very successfully reinvented itself as an oil town.
I spend the weekend camped in some reeds next to the sea and can’t be bothered to take down my camp in the daytime. Monday morning comes, the day before I am due to leave. A couple of workmen turn up at the industrial block next to where I’m camped. Some slightly broken conversation ensues mentioning along the way something about policemen turning up and demanding money…
Not worried, I take my time packing. I’ve got nothing to do anyway so there’s no point in being in a hurry.
Sure enough, a cop car turns up. Not a cardboard cop car. This is Kazakhstan after all. They can afford real ones here. A real cop gets out and approaches. A young fresh faced chap with a spectacular blue Russian-style fur hat. I want one. It would look great with my racing green chappan.
I show him my passport as requested and then without any explanation, he wants me to follow him. He drives ahead of me, warning indicators flashing whilst I follow behind him impossibly slowly through town for a mile or two. Perhaps he thinks I’m going so slowly just to annoy him. I think 18 days of being off the bike has done me in somewhat.
We arrive at the migration police department. I am ushered into the police office where they have some very interesting posters of a range of police equipment of the Kalazhnikov variety.
Between them the assorted policemen tell me ‘Palatka nyet!’ giving me the standard crossed arms gesture at the same time. ‘Hotel! Hotel!’.
So that was what the trek across town was for. He wasn’t going to put me in a dungeon and extort money from me at all. He just needed some help in explaining to me that camping wasn’t allowed… hmm. I kind of got that bit when he turned up in the first place.
Well that filled up my day a bit anyway.
Outside I discover that my rear wheel isn’t at all keen to rotate. It seems that after mending yet another inexplicable puncture yesterday that I remounted my wheel slightly wonky. No wonder I was so slow this morning.
Having seemingly exhausted the possibilities of Aktau (the cinema seems to have turned into a permanently closed nightclub and the museum shown on my phone map didn’t seem to exist either) I book myself into a splendidly cheap edge of town hotel for 3 quid.
Expecting some raucous dive full of boozed up Russians, fag ends and sputtering brown water taps, the place is nothing of the sort; I get an impeccably clean en suite room all to myself. Lovely.
The following morning, a 5km ride back into town to buy a ferry ticket… I have 40 minutes to cycle a further 5kms to the ferry port to catch a container ship heading for Baku. Appropriately for my haste, my boat is called ‘Mercuri’.
Jammed wheel now rectified, I arrive at the massive port with minutes to spare.
I consider panicking and then remember that 9 times out of 10, me freaking out usually makes no difference to anything whatsoever and also that actually everything is perfectly fine anyhow.
And so I now find myself eating a bland but cheap pizza and drinking green chai in the Limon Cafe with other seafaring types also waiting for whatever they are waiting for.
An exotic new language on the overhead plasma TV. For the last three months the international TV broadcasts of choice have been Russian, now it’s the non-Cyrillic funny c’s and s’s and all the k’s you can eat of Turkish. From the news broadcast it seems to be that the Turks are experiencing a freakishly cold and snowy winter. Uh-oh.
So this is the end of being in central Asia for me. Now I get to discover what’s different and what’s the same in the Caucasus region.
I leave behind the colours, shapes and nuances of central Asia; a bit like Mongolia, probably a bit like Persia, not much like soviet China as far as I can see, except in the evidence of much needed road building in crumbling Tajikistan.
The regions buildings and clothes, the cross-pollination of a thousand years of criss-crossing peoples, ideas, beliefs and inventions (bigger horses, Buddhism and Islam went west, paper, gunpowder jade and silk went east).
I love experiencing how people blend across places and change region by region. My memories of the ex-soviet nation states are fond; of hundreds of children in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan rushing across their gardens and open fields to meet me at the roadside and high five me and ask me my name and to tell me theirs, of herders of farm labourers wishing me ‘salaam al I cum’ with their hands on their hearts; like they really actually mean it; peace be with you.
Of fabulously dressed young ladies who generally seemed to look rather like Amy Winehouse with her clothes, the same make up and black beehive hair but with more enthusiasm for colour in the clothing.
Big wide rotund babushkas, will sell you melons melons and more melons, eggs. And anything else that they might happen to have.
Sometimes dressed plainly for work or dressed like queens when at the bazaar.
Sometimes together in stunningly colourful and regal groups of three, chattering gregariously or sometimes moving slowly in the background, the earthly underpinnings of all that holds family together. They have seen everything. Nothing will faze them. Ask them a question; they will probably know the answer.
I frequently bemoaned the limitedness of my diet (being vegetarian by natural inclination), but I have grown to love the simple format of the chaihanas (teahouses) and oshzonas (cafes). Delicious chai, green or black (green please), inch thick discs of usually stale bread (only Uzbekistan seemed to have regularly fresh bread), the stale bread made good by dunking it into sweet chai and turning it into cake.
Relax reclined on cushions, raised on a big square platform like a king size bed with a low table in its middle, outside in the sun and shade.
Snickers bars. After China and its dearth of shockolada, snickers bars have kept me happy and energised for considerable parts of the journey.
Donkeys. I love donkeys. They always look so pleased. I could never quite get that with their top heavy proportions of tiny legs, massive heads and ginormous ears that they could ever manage to stay upright. Especially with some enormous bloke sitting on its back. I loved that they often could be seen apparently waiting at bus stops. Enjoying the shade, or waiting for the number 25 to take them to town? Who knows.
Kyrgyz dogs were bored vicious would-be ankle-biting bastards. Tajiki dogs were altogether more serene. Lifting a lazy eyeball and noting the slight change in the scenery was usually about all they could ever be bothered to manage. And who could blame them after spending their time chasing goats up and down mountains for a day job.
The endless posters in Tajikistan of the president Emilie Ramon. Cuddling babies, meeting the workers, enjoying smelling flowers, and generally demonstrating by way of endless huge posters that he is indeed a man of the people and a man of peace. I do hope so. Even if he turns out to be a corrupt bastard like most of the rest of them I would rather be subject to his version of propaganda than the Chinese cheerlessness of endless reminders of the military might of the chinky soviet block.
The mountains of Tajikistan, the crazy colours of the Pamir wastelands, the thousand kilometre long Wakhan Valley wriggling its way impossibly between high up walls of rock…. the endless slow gritty bumps of the Tajiki almost-roads… the almost-touchable mysteriousness of the afghan villages on the other side of the rushing gushing Wakhan river. Shouting hello! across the river to afghan shepherd boys shunting sheep with sticks and road-builders going twos up on motorbikes, brown robes flapping as they go.
Flat straight smooth traffic-free no thinking required shiny new tarmac stretching almost the entire way across Uzbekistan; a welcome change after most of the Tajiki roads.
Uzbek cakes! How many kinds of cake? Well all of them of course!
Uzbek shepherds wearing Jonli/Chappan, the national dress for men. Perfect for a windy mostly dry country. A wearable bed for a chap tending his animals out in the open overnight. Practical, elegant, beautifully coloured and comfortable.
I have never understood much of your language, but thank you for your kindness so far… rakhmat.
So ends another chapter of my trip. Like the blank night sky between the old moon and a new one, I feel the natural lull that comes from being between places.
For now, I head west across the Caspian Sea.
Richard Terry 