The next day I manage to get a delicious breakfast, which I am told is Kazakh style. I hope this is a sign of things to come. I jump on the coach from Korgas to Almaty. There are fifteen beds on board. As I start to walk towards the back of the bus I feel a hand wallop my back.
“SHOES!” exclaims the driver.
I have made a stupid etiquette mistake by treading my dirty feet on a beautiful, clean carpet. I apologise and take my shoes off. Again I take a few steps forward and feel the same hand smack me on the shoulder.
“BUY TICKET!” he says firmly.
This is not an etiquette mistake but just simple common sense. To get on a bus one needs a ticket. I pay him the going rate, which works out less than £10. I step forward again to choose a bed, and for a third time the hand descends onto my back, this time more gently.
“This your bed” he laughs. It is right at the front.
After just a mile the coach stops at the obligatory China/Kazakhstan border, where all of us passengers get off and walk across After making it through customs with nothing to declare, I come out the other side and realise there is a potentially long wait for the bus to make it to the other side, as the beaurocrats and officers clear it for inspection. This delay is tolerable though. There are many other people waiting on the other side for their respective buses too, I ask a man how long he thinks it will be, and for some reason he perks up when he discovers I am from England.
“I love to speak English!” he says. As we start a conversation about what we are both doing here, a few more people start chipping in when they realise where I am from. When the conversation moves on from what our plans are, we enter a whole range of discussions, from the usual low key talk about football (surely England’s most prominent export in the World today?), to who the best Russian and Kazakh writers are, to the composition of the House of Lords. When the coach arrives we go our separate ways.
The eight hour (very) bumpy ride from the Chinese/Kazakhstan border to Almaty is made pleasant by the jolliness of the other passengers on the bus. I spend most of the journey talking with three people - a Kazakh woman in her late twenties accompanied by her Russian husband, and Bota, a twenty-eight year old woman who is travelling alone. At a one hour pit stop they treat me to lunch - “you are a guest in this country, we are not, so we must look after you!”
When we get back on the bus I engross myself in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (an ideal book for long journeys). A sentence immediately leaps from the page: “Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.” Indeed.
When the bus arrives in Almaty she tells me that I am more than welcome to stay at her place. But I turn down the offer as I do not want to intrude - she is returning to her husband who she has not seen for a month. “Well at least let me help you find somewhere to stay!” she says. Her husband picks us up from the bus station, and they drive me to the centre of town. “How much do you have to spend?” “Not much” “We can find you a place for fifty US dollars cheapest” “That’s way too much” (I should really have planned ahead for my arrival in Almaty - with the influx of wealth the city has received in recent years it is the one of the most expensive places in the World to find a place to stay.) “Ah okay, we can find you a much cheaper place, but we cannot guarantee your safety” “That’s okay, so long as it is cheap!”
They reiterate that it is no trouble for me to stay with them another night, but I insist that they have done enough already, so they pull the car over and start talking to a lady dressed in a short skirt and high heels, who can apparently take me somewhere for 4000 Kazakh Tenge (£18). I thank them profusely before getting out of the car into the badly lit street.
As I start walking with this lady it becomes clear that she cannot speak a word of English - and my Kazakh and Russian skills are hopeless. With every step we take something does not feel right. Maybe it was the fact that Bota had warned me that the cheaper places are apparently not safe. With this playing in my mind, the woman I am with flags down a car and asks me to get it in. I panic, thinking that she is trying to kidnap me, so I say “Let’s walk instead.”
This results in a twenty minute stroll along dark roads between some housing estates, which is not a pleasant experience. Something went seriously wrong with architecture in the 1950s and 1960s. From the North Peckham Estate in London to the rows of apartments out here, they don’t create a harmonious aura. They were, though, built on the most honourable principle that no human being deserves to be without a home on this Earth. And as we eventually turn into one of these estates, it becomes clear that it one of these blocks which will be keeping me warm tonight.
We go through an entrance and walk up three flights of stairs. She is ahead of me and pacing every step in quite a seductive manner. For a moment I wonder if I have inadvertently landed myself a prostitute. But when she opens the door and gives me the key it becomes clear what the arrangement is. I have the flat to myself, equipped with bathroom, cooker and balcony. What more could one want? She says something in Kazakh and Russian, and then leaves.
I spend the next day wandering around the wide boulevards of Almaty.
By the time I get to the housing estate where I am staying it is dark. I go to a nearby pub/bar to get some food. It is one of those places where any conversation is everyone’s conversation. Thus, after asking for some Kazakh pasties, the whole place asks me in uniform “Where you from?” After explaining my nationality and my plans, a table full of men in their twenties ask me to sit down with them. They get a round of lagers in.
One of the men, Erik, speaks very good English. He translates on behalf of the others, as we knock back pint after pint at quite a speed. When it is my round the landlord, Timu, won’t charge me - “You’re a guest. Be Happy!” After an hour of exchanging anecdotes and jokes, a man called Nardi joins us. His English is almost perfect, yet he apologises for the fact he has not spoken much English since he was fifteen (he is now thirty-two). I ask him why he can speak it so well. “The Soviet Union was educating us so that we could understand all the CIA spies!”
We laugh, although this goes beyond being just a light hearted joke - he, like some of the other people I have met so far in Kazakhstan, has a level of intelligence which is enviable. And he wastes no time showing off his expanse of knowledge. He enlightens me on some of the specific details about Alexander The Great and Genghis Khan, and gives a long explanation about how Central Asia has been carved up by various empires over the last two thousand years. As well as historical knowledge, he informs me more about Almaty today. Just as Boda had done the day before, he explains how diverse Almaty is. If this room is taken as a sample, than he is not wrong, there are all sorts: Russian, Kazakh, Turkish and Nardi himself is Uyghur.
Saying goodbye to people is always hard, as most human beings will testify. And for some reason alcohol can make grown men very emotional. We both know deep down that we will probably never meet again. Yet, there is warmth rather than melancholy. They give me their telephone numbers and tell me if I have any problems during my time in Kazakhstan, to give them a call.
The next day the woman who owns the flat I am staying in arrives at midday with a female friend to collect the keys off me before I leave. I am all packed and ready to move on, but they insist I stay and have a cup of tea with them. Due to the language barrier we spend the next half an hour playing a kind of charades, although in this version all of us are miming. This is very fun for all concerned, probably because of the setting - I’m not sure if I did this in a police station they would find it quite so amusing.
