The cabin was hardly spacious, but I wouldn't exactly call it cramped either. I could stretch my legs when I wanted to, although getting back up onto the bunk was a bit of a pain, and the mattress was comfortable enough; the constant movement made sleeping a bit difficult, however. On the journey down I shared a cabin with a middle aged Kazakh business woman and an old Ukrainian woman, who both held the bottom bunks, and a 30 year old Kazakh woman who turned out to be an assistant to one of Nazarbayev's advisors. Only in Kazakhstan!
17 hours on a train quickly gets rather tedious; there really is so much sleeping, eating and reading Wallander that you can do. Even the little sleep that I did get wasn't very good, but who's complaining right?
After three quarters of a day in an aging Soviet metal container, I finally arrived in our biggest and most beautiful city, Almaty. To describe Almaty is a difficult exercise; there really isn't any way I can describe it that doesn't make it sound like an old, grey, concrete block. There is something there though, some charm I can't just put my finger on and can't describe. Maybe it's just that after living so long in the cold wilderness of the central steppe that the mountains just called to me in some kind of simple, prehistoric way. Or maybe it's the fact there's a Costa coffee there. Who knows? Depends of situation.
People call Almaty a large city, but it didn't really feel like that when I was there. I mean obviously when compared to London or New York it is small, but when I compare it in my mind to cities of similar population in the UK it still seems small. While I was there I managed a little exploration, something which my host and friend Ross hadn't even attempted in all his time there. I found very little in my short time there, but I did feel like there was definitely more there to be found, sometime in the future, perhaps.
Most of my time in Almaty was spent in our office there. The staff seemed like a nice enough bunch, and I tried to make myself useful while I was there. In reality though I spent most of my time waiting to finally be sent on the long-awaited visa run to Bishkek. After two days waiting, and on the final day of my Kazakhstan visa, I was finally sent across the border to finally make myself a legal worker of the Glorious Republic of Kazakhstan.
It all started at 7am on a cold and snowy Wednesday morning. I met my driver Zhanat on the corner of the road outside my rented apartment and together we began our long four hour journey to another world. Outside the snow had started to be cleared away by the Uzbeks that they employ to do that sort of thing. My nerves were on edge; I hadn't got much sleep and I really wasn't exactly sure of what to expect. Not only this, but (anybody who knows me will not be surprised) I was incredibly hungry and in need of something to eat desperately. Nevertheless, I bravely soldiered on into the unknown wilderness of the south Kazakh border.
As I was sitting in a cafe somewhere on the Kazakh side of the border, I pondered how long exactly I would have to spend in Bishkek. I had hoped by this point to have been and gone already, but given the delays I had encountered already I was hardly expecting for it to be a short trip. My soup festered somewhere below me, I had lost interest as my mind worked over and over in its head. I mean, what exactly was I expecting from Bishkek? The staff in Almaty had told me to imagine it as some kind of holiday, but I was under no illusions. Of course, I had no idea it was going to be as truly terrible as it turned out to be, but I still didn't think it was going to be some kind of action-packed adventure. At the time I imagined it more as a convalescence.
It didn't feel very relaxing as I crossed the border though. For some unimaginable reason, I had to leave the car and proceed on foot over the border while Zhanat drived through; this of course left me vulnerable and exposed to the wolves in Kazakh border booth. After getting in the wrong queue, being asked if I was an Uzbek by fellow border-crossers, and being asked about a million questions in broken English that I could barely understand, I crossed the border into Kyrgyzstan. On this side the procedure was unceremoniously easy as the guy behind in the booth stamped my passport and sent me through. No visas here needed, apparently.
Bishkek is a hard place to describe. The main street (Chuy) looks approximately like any other grey, concrete, post-Soviet city, while anything surrounding it looks pretty much like a giant Russian village. Dachas in the centre of the city? Torn up roads? Dreary, depressing looking people? Welcome to my own personal hell for the next ten days. Words cannot describe the absolutely boredom and depression that I suffered on the days that I wasn't trying to sleep off a hangover.
It's hard to recollect the day to day events that happened during my ten days in Bishkek. I drank beer sometimes, I ate shashlyk and plov everyday, I slept, I watched Iranian sex-lines on the TV because it was either that or the God Channel (that's actually no joke). I read my Wallander books, which I finished in a hurry. I walked the city and admired the beauty of the local girls. I went out for Beshbarmak with the hotel's receptionist, and attempted to teach him some English. But most of all, I dreamed of returning to Kazakhstan, моя земля.
Bishkek is not a big city. Maybe if compared to Karaganda one might consider it big, but compared to Almaty, that I had visited before, it was a small city. It didn't take me long to see all that Bishkek had to offer: a mere three days and I had seen every single corner of the city centre, and I had no real desire to venture out into the suburbs. I saw the government buildings, I saw TSuM, I saw the grey and depressing life that surrounded me. Maybe my view of Bishkek had been tainted by the fact that I had been forced to leave Kazakhstan, but still not even the wonders of the Osh Bazaar and all of its cheap jeans and shashlyk could put me into a positive frame of mind. Я хочу домой, I kept telling myself, but it just never seemed to come.
On the ninth day, on what I thought would be the day I could return home, I intrepidly called a taxi to get to the Kazakh embassy and finally submit my supposedly ready visa application. I went there, filled in all of the information and was told "завтра" by the wonderfully polite man behind the desk. Not particularly wanting to spend another day in Bishkek, I phoned my office back in Almaty but was told there was no choice: for better or for worse I was stuck in Kyrgyzstan for yet another day. I returned to the hotel and waited anxiously.
The next day came and I said goodbye to the bargirl in my hotel for the second time. I had actually attempted to have a conversation in Russian with her, and numerous other people in Kyrgyzstan with some varying degrees of success, and at one point I was enlisted into translating a German customer's overly elaborate English into some kind of simple Russian so that she could understand. ("Could you possibly provide me with a business card so that the driver can find the hotel the next time we come back to Kyrgyzstan" became "он хочет адрес" or "he wants the address", for those of you who don't understand Russian). Regardless, I left the hotel and headed to the Kazakh embassy again, this time to collect my passport and visa. The taxi driver of course engaged me in conversation about any number of subjects, and I did my best to talk with him in Russian. He actually turned out to be a great guy who I had a lot of fun with just talking about random shit.
I spent about 30 minutes waiting outside the embassy for the damn place to open. It was 6:30 in the evening and the weather had turned pretty cold, so the wait was hardly pleasant. When I was finally able to collect my visa, I grabbed my passport from the immigration guys hands, ran out into the cold night, jumped into the taxi of my new friend, and shouted "border!" three times in Russian. He looked at me kind of confused and asked me "which?" Naturally I said the Kazakh border. Within a few minutes we were rolling our way out of the city of Bishkek and towards the Kyrgyz-Kazakh border. I had never been happier in my life.
Before I left, someone offered me to view this trip as a holiday, but I preferred to think of it as a convalescence away from my stressful life and growing alcoholism. When I was there, my view of the trip changed; now I preferred to imagine it as some kind of business trip with an excessive amount of eating and sleeping. But when I crossed the border back into Kazakhstan, I realised what this trip had been all along: an exile. I was a foreigner, not allowed to return to the land I so desperately sought to. I could not return there, I couldn't even go back to England or anywhere else; the company had only given me enough money to live there. I had been trapped in my own bureaucratic nightmare: nowhere to go and nothing to do. It was well and truly the least fun I have had so far on my adventure in Central Asia.
Upon my return to Almaty, I was shoved unceremoniously into a nasty apartment for the evening. The next day I got a taxi straight from my apartment to the train station; I had hoped to stay another day in Almaty and do some more exploring, but the powers that be declared I would be going home the same day. So, I piled into yet another taxi, and began the journey back to Karaganda; back to home. In the train station I was stopped by a police officer and taken into a back room where he searched my belongings and enquired into my identity. When I told them I was English, they all laughed. Why? I enquired. The police officer who had stopped me told me he thought I was Ukrainian. Ok, I thought. One of the plain clothes officers started chatting to me in English and we actually had a pleasant conversation. If this had happened in England, I probably would have felt violated; in Kazakhstan it was all part of the adventure.
The train journey back was another adventure. I shared a cabin with two middle aged guys, one Russian and one Kazakh, both of who spent most of the journey trying to romance the cabin of middle aged Russian women next door. My other cabin-buddy was a young man named Kirill, who spoke English really well, probably one of the better English speakers I have met in Kazakhstan. We talked about random stuff, watched a few movies, and just generally shot the shit. It was really nice after speaking nothing but Russian for 10 days to have a good conversation in English.
17 hours later I returned to Karaganda. It was -38 degrees outside and I had no thermal underwear. My legs felt numb for days afterwards.
What conclusions can I make about The Great Journey South? Well, as much as I talk negatively about the whole ordeal there are still some positives that I can muster. I got to see the Almaty office of StudyInn and all of the wonderful people who work there, and I got to see the city itself. Even in Bishkek I met some wonderful, friendly, open people: the receptionist of the first hotel, the bargirl in the second hotel, the taxi drivers, the shashlyk waitresses. The random girl on the third floor of TSuM who was trying to sell me knock-off CDs by flirting with me in English. The waitresses at my local cafe who I became very friendly with; they were all wonderful people who I won't ever forget.
But most of all, I learnt something about myself when I was in Bishkek. I yearned every day to be back in Kazakhstan. Whenever I spoke about it to people I met I would always refer to it as "home". Whenever anyone would ask me where I was from I would always answer "я из Караганды" proudly. I am not Kazakh, nor am I Russian, but in Kazakhstan I will always feel at home. Even if I still can't get used to the basket by the toilet.
