Something got lost in translation and they seemed intent on returning the used oil to the Scarlet 4x4’s engine. Friends with a few more English words than our Russian were called, but it eventually took drawings of Land Rovers, oil cans and waste paper baskets for them to get the picture.
The oil was then passed around like fine wine, rubbed between fingers, sniffed appreciatively (maybe even licked a little bit?) quickly making it’s way to the nearest Ladas sump before you could say “reduce, reuse, recycle”….
The first 130km’s out of town were on good black top, and then following a sign for Aktobe (confirmed by the dictatorial Garmins voice) we turned left – and into the Somme after a particularly heavy bombardment.
We pushed on through the blasted lunar landscape, through and over massive earthworks, guessing that the Aktobe sign had been put up a little prematurely before the road had been built. Evidence of embryonic civil engineering projects, partial bridges and flyovers were all around us. Kazakhs with a little more knowledge than us probably stuck to the old route, wherever that was?
Lorry drivers assured us that we were on the right route so we pushed on, blissfully unaware that this was the start of five, twelve-hour days of hard, hard driving.
A note on Kazakh roads:
Firstly, Kazakhstan is the size of Western Europe.
Plonked in the Atlantic it would bridge the gap between Europe and America. The roads vary enormously.
There are hundreds of kilometers of smooth four-lane blacktop, with lovely white lines, barriers, overhead signage, exit ramps and all the other paraphernalia of a modern motorway.
Sure, people use any lane to travel in any direction, as do many wandering farm animals, but these roads are genuinely superb.
We also have to mention the hundreds of laborers you see building these roads. In desperately hot conditions they are laying even hotter tarmac, or assembling thousands of kilometers of safety barriers by hand. Kazakhstan is a relatively young nation, in only it’s third decade of independence, and we found it hard to fault their amazing progress at improving the road network, and the incredible effort going into it.
Every year travelling this country will get easier and easier – so credit where it’s blummin’ well due – eh?! We did not bother to record mileages and locations of good and bad sections, because in a few months the information would probably be wrong?
Where the route was sand and dust tracks through the Steppe it was kinda fun, with the tyres let down 25% for a soft mushy ride. But the dust thrown up by both ourselves and other road users quickly penetrated the Land Rovers worse than useless door seals and had us and vehicle contents covered in fine grit and dust.
But what I hated (hated with a passion you can only dream of) was the old tarmac roads, ridged, holed, corrugated, dangerously cambered.
Our suspension and chassis was receiving the same hammering as Cheryls’ confidence and my patience. Mind numbing, energy sapping 45 degree heat did nothing to improve the situation either.
It’s not as if we are complete novices at this stuff either – we have both had three forays into the Sahara by vehicle but it was Cheryl who realised the major difference between North Africa and here:
When we have been to the Sahara we have travelled in Winter (although the temperatures are comparable), the big difference is dawn and dusk times.
Six-thirty sun-up and watching it go down again with your beverage of choice by six pm.
Here dawn was at five, it was bloody hot by seven am and stayed that way until gone seven pm. The temperature reduced to something approaching tolerable by eight thirty pm…and then a whole hour to enjoy the day before dusk.
So whereas we were used in Africa to later starts and pulling over and setting up camp by five or six pm, here it was not possible. The cab provided the only shade with some breeze (provided by motion). And so we drove all day…
These roads were the worst we have encountered to date. Cambers designed to tip vehicles down twenty foot banks, shattered surfaces and persistent, penetrating dust. It was exhausting, concentration had to be constant, or risk untold damage to our ride.
The town has 5 major roads in / out and we could only find 4 of them.
All of them were marked on every map we possessed, but the one we needed could not be found in satnav or on the ground.
We even drove across the town dump in an effort to find the route but to no avail. An hours fruitless, sweaty searching circling the town, and sending the beggar into fits of demonstrative pleading every time we passed him, we gave up. The only alternative was to head North to rejoin the main highway and lose some advantage of our shortcut – adding half a day to our purgatory.
This was a flat, smoooooooth, PERFECT expanse of tarmac that ran ALL day as we covered the previous two days distance in a matter of hours.
The road Gods giveth and the road Gods taketh away…
Tourist signage is an alien concept.
Satnav was useless, its map based on long gone sea levels so wanted to guide us 100’s of kms on a vast detour.
So, for the second time in 24 hours we admitted navigational defeat and gave up.
We also proved to be a magnet for the deranged of Aral. I had to be physically removed from the grasp of one nutter, who enjoyed shouting my name over and over whilst my hand was caught in his vice like grip.
Another guy made out he knew the way to the ships graveyard, so I gave him my frankly quite awesome drawing of broken ships and asked him to draw a map. Much squinting and mumbling later and we were rewarded with some childish scrawled zig-zags and demands for cigarettes.
In an effort to be fair to Aral we later counted how many people we had interacted with; nine were civil, friendly, helpful even, two were barking at the moon, but the one who sticks in the memory most is the Kafe owner who point blank refused to acknowledge or serve us, despite the English “Good Food” banner outside.
We can only guess that maybe she thought we were Russian?
(I often get told I “look Russian” and there is still some Kazakh / Russian animosity in some areas?)
We elected to stay long enough to cool down in her air-con and then I childishly left the door open as we left, regretting not loosening all the tops on her salt-cellars.
I came to dread those diversion signs, begging the road gods for an early Christmas, but more often than not it was Shitmas…
(The fact that I felt the need to take a dozen identical photos of roadsigns is testimony to the mental damage I had suffered...)
The police had me on their (very) long-range radar guns complete with digital images of my transgressions.
One of the cultural aspects of Kazakhstan is the extended handshake, so I found myself in the strange position of receiving a telling off whilst the copper and I held hands. We then hop-scotched together over to the Police Station together and I did colouring in whilst he gave me a bloody good beating in the cells.
On both occasions these guys were polite, courteous and pretty fair, telling me to slow down from 80kph to 60kph in the road works, where there were once or indeed might one day be road-works, junctions, villages (often unmarked), and any occasion of a North wind following a neap tide. I even got a salute…and no fines…
The following day my embryonic criminal career took a sinister turn when I progressed from speeding, to the sociopathic crime of daytime driving without my headlights on. These two policemen were nasty bastards, sneering as they took my passport and V5 and made clear they would not be giving them back until I parted with $100. I even had pictograms of a seven-day stretch in a jail cell drawn in the dust on their car - alongside $100 – obviously the choice was mine…
Whilst all this was going on I ruefully observed all the local cars passing by “sans luminaire”. We hung round and I babbled away in English and then tried some humble universal gestures for “sorry”. I think humiliation / humility was what they were after. Documents were returned and I was sent on my way – more trouble than I was worth.
Speeding – hands up, my bad – and I’m grateful for getting away with a warning. The lights thing IS the rule between towns – but the threats and attempts at providing “un petit sucre” were over the top. I need to toughen up though – I’m sure it will get worse at some point?
This experience put a bit of a downer on the rest of the day, but we were in soon in Turkestan, home to Kazahkstans only real architectural heritage, the Kozha Akhmed Yasaui Mausoleum.
It was stunning and we enjoyed our time there and are very glad we had the opportunity to visit.
We’ll let the pictures do the talking:
Turns out his English was only marginally better than my (non-existant) Kazakh. He was self taught, presumably by watching a few episodes of Mr Bean?
For three hours we were shown:
Every,
Single,
Exhibit.
We tried to skip a few, or increase the pace a bit, but our guide was insistent on pausing by every one to deliver an admittedly enthusiastic and passionate but exhaustive dialogue, it’s just that (bless him) we could not really understand him that well?
We were begging for mercy by the third floor…but had to complete the tour and left, cranially numb and absolutely none the wiser…
Built as a prestige project we guess it once was (and could be again) a great place.
But they have spent less than the price of a coffee on maintenance in the last ten years, turn off all the communal lights – so you navigate the halls in complete darkness.
Let you pay for a room with a/c and then tell you a/c is broken in the whole hotel (no refund).
Then - to rub it in - take your money for breakfast, let you wait in the filthy dining room (in the dark) for 20 minutes before running in to shout “Breakfast finished – Nyet!” and suggesting you go to a supermarket for food (no refunds).
I think the spectacularly unhelpful receptionist must be related to one of those bent coppers….
A short days drive away is the large city of Shymkent.
En-route we stopped to talk to the amazing Rosie, cycling from Berlin to Beijing to attend a book fair, she must have been in her mid 60’s and made us realise that however hard it is to us in a car, cyclists and motorcyclists have a whole other world of highs and lows to deal with.
She did however agree that this part of Kazakhstan was something of a low point in her journey!
We drove through Shymkent very, very, slowly, headlights ablaze.
On one occasion Cheryl even boxed round a Police checkpoint, lest the fugitive aboard be found guilty of navigating with dirty fingernails…
From Shymkent we gained altitude and finally, thankfully lost temperature, en-route to the village of Zhabagyly, the boarding house of Yevgeny Belousov in the Aksu Zhabagyly Nature Reserve.
www.aksuinn.com
N 42.26.296
E 070.28.895
Yevgenys place provides clean, basic en-suite rooms, a communal lounge with Yevgenys own photo albums of the flora and fauna of the park, three meals a day (if you want), a small shop (that sells cold beer AND choco pie - mmmmm Choco Pie), gated secure parking and access to park guides for trekking on foot or by pony.
The first day we opted for a walk in the very impressive Aksu canyon, our female guide shivering in the rain and relative cold – which we loved.
Yevgenys wife Sarah, cooked delicious, plain, healthy and nutritious food for breakfast and dinner and packed a lunch for our excursions.
The park was truly stunning, and beautifully green.
We had just missed tulip season, when the place is apparently descended upon by lots of admiring Dutch.
We were joined by two other tourists, Jack (a Swiss) and his Kazakh girlfriend, Katarina, and over a packed lunch in a mountain hut we both realised how much we had missed conversations with other travellers. These were the first tourists we had seen since Romania. Our self-imposed isolation would soon end though as we took the well-trodden tourist path through Uzbekistan.
Returning to the village of Zhabagyly at sunset, we rode five abreast up the middle of the one street as the sun was setting…
I was desperate for peals of alarm from a church bell and Mexican ladies to rush out of houses to bundle crying babies from front porches before slamming doors and window shutters closed, but had to content myself with deserted streets and bleating goats….
We are mentally prepared for the next round of heat and rough roads. Eastern Kazakhstan looks to be more varied terrain, and we are also prepared to show grumpy Kafe owners “who is rider”.
As for future run-ins with the Rozzers – watch this space….