The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

As earlier mentioned, a week last Friday was my 30th birthday. I had spent the past few months insisting to Astrid that I did not want to celebrate this in any special way, but in the end it did seem like a nice idea to do something on the day. I don’t like such celebrations very much, but there is nothing wrong with spending a day according to your own wishes.

The list of interesting things to do in Almaty was getting rather short by this point – I had already been round most of the museums, markets, and parks that the town has to offer. So we decided to head out of town, up into the mountains, towards the Ile-Alatau National Park and the “Bolshoe Almatinskoe Ozira” (Big Almaty Lake), 2500m above sea level and squeezed in between some impressive mountains and beautiful scenery.

To get there, we employed the practice most common here, which is to stick your arm out next to a busy road and wait for someone to pick you up. Everyone is a taxi, it would seem. This did appear to be the case, as it only took about five seconds for someone to stop. Unfortunately the guy driving was not as knowledgeable about the route as he had at first appeared to be, leading to some confusion and eventually a stop and much wandering around inside a seemingly random office building to ask for directions. But we got there in the end, and it was certainly worth it.

The area around the lake was very beautiful, and refreshingly cool due to its high altitude and the shadow of the mountains. Unfortunately, in a turn of events which had an air of familiarity about it, we were stopped from actually approaching the lake itself by some park guards. They asked to see our passports, but when we said that we did not have them with us, they left us alone – although under observation. I guess they need to look like they are doing something useful.

Even higher up the mountainside, we came across the Tian Sian Astronomical observatory – or at least what is left of it. Various rusting telescopes, satellite dishes, and other fantastical pieces of equipment lay dotted around the hillside, providing simultaneously a sad reflection on past Soviet glories, and a bizarre setting which appeared as if it should be the mountain base for a James Bond villain or for Dr. Evil out of Austen Powers. Very touching were the curtains in the (remaining) windows, which were suitably patterned with little stars, moons, and planets. Perhaps this is the Russian sense of humour.

The following Thursday, we were finally able to collect our passports, with one-month tourist visa, from the Kyrgyz consulate. Although this had taken ten days, the actual preparation of the (handwritten) visas took place there and then in about five minutes. Quite perplexing and frustrating, since it appears that they just let the passports sit around for the rest of the time gathering dust.

We immediately said our goodbyes to our German/Swiss housemates, and set off along the busy road to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The three-day journey began with a horrible few hours choking our way through the pollution of the rush-our traffic on the road out of Almaty, followed by a peaceful trek along the main road west.

So on Sunday morning, almost three months after crossing the border in much elation, it was time to finally leave Kazakhstan. It has been a remarkable experience, mostly pleasant although certainly not always, but in any case a journey which has left a profound impression on me. The rest of the trip will have to do a lot to match it.

The border crossing to Kyrgyzstan was the quickest and easiest since leaving the EU, meaning that we would reach Bishkek by mid-afternoon. In contrast to our earlier city stops, I had booked us somewhere to stay in advance this time – in a yurt, no less. It stands in the garden behind the “Nomad’s Home” guest house, fully equipped with electric lighting and with easy access to the bathroom and shower around the corner. So not quite the authentic nomadic experience, but close enough. The yurt is a very important symbol of cultural identity in Kyrgyzstan, and the distinctive wooden roof centre-piece even appears on the national flag.

Of course the yurt is not exclusively Kyrgyz, and at this point it is quite hard to spot very many cultural differences from Kazakhstan. Bishkek seems to be not so very different from Kazakh cities, aside from being slightly more disorganised, cheaper, and with even more aggressive drivers. But these are early days.

That’s not to say that Bishkek does not have some nicer sides. The weather is good, and the centre of the city is one fantastic and monumental Soviet architectural relic – all marble, fountains, and dramatic war memorials. However, the very best thing has to be the fresh нан (“nan” – flat bread) baked in a clay oven at the market just around the corner. The sweaty man who works the oven takes your money and hands it to a colleague through a tiny window, who in turn hands back a freshly-rolled нан to be baked.  You may then pick your bread yourself from the steaming pile on top of the oven. It smells amazing and tastes just as good.

At the Nomad’s Home we have been suddenly flung into the middle of an endless stream of western backpackers and cyclists – Israeli, German, Belgian, Dutch, English, French, Swiss, Italian, Swedish, Argentine, and probably a few more that I have forgotten. It has been nice to be able to swap travel stories and have people marvel at our enormous journey, but to be frank I will be quite glad to get away from it. Of course there were many friendly folks, but unfortunately it’s the annoying ones who stick in the memory. Some travellers can be extremely irritating, especially the know-it-alls who insist on telling you that you don’t want to be taking a particular road, that you must stay in a particular hotel, and that a particular pass is actually 2450m and not 2500m. I can get quite frustrated at Central Asian and Russian ways, but our stay here has been a useful reminder that Europeans can very tiresome too.

The main purpose of our stay here was to arrange the despatch of our passports by courier to my mother in Edinburgh, who will deliver them to the Chinese consulate there before returning them, with visa, (hopefully) to us here. Or more precisely, to Osh, where we will arrive in around eight or nine days time. This is all quite expensive, complicated, and risky, but it appears to be the only way we have of obtaining a Chinese visa at this stage.

Of course, this will leave us without means of identification until we reach Osh. To prevent potential problems with the police, I had sought advice from a very helpful man at the British consulate here. He gave me the name of a translation agency, who for about €10 were able to obtain an officially-certified copy of our passports, with a declaration (in Russian) signed by a lawyer that they were genuine. All beautifully sealed together with red ribbon, making it a nice souvenir if nothing else.

We have both, and Astrid in particular, accumulated quite a collection of items on the road, and so we decided to package them up and send them back to Holland. As had earlier been the case in Kiev, this was a very long and bureaucratic process. We had to bring everything, unpackaged, to the post office, where it was meticulously inspected. After being weighed and jammed into a cardboard box, the assistant then turned to a small desk with a sewing machine. She proceeded to sew a perfectly-sized canvas bag for our parcel, which after being hand-sewn shut was sealed on all sides with hot wax. All ludicrously inefficient, but the result was quite beautiful. Of course, it was also once again necessary to fill in a customs declaration no less than four times.

There was one other important thing to be done in Bishkek. A few days before we left Almaty, I woke up one morning with toothache. Looking in the mirror, I saw that I had quite a large cavity in one of my wisdom teeth. Of course this was very disappointing, especially since I have been very conscientious in forcing myself out of the tent late at night in all weathers to brush my teeth.

The helpful man at the British consulate was also able to give me the address of a good dentist here in Bishkek, to which I paid a visit on Tuesday. Two more visits later, and the tooth has been beautifully drilled and filled – in fact it looks much better than the other (Scottish) fillings in my mouth.

I must admit that I am not very brave in such situations. It was extremely terrifying to be sat in the dentist’s chair with numerous things inserted in my mouth (is it ever not?), with the additional confusion of the dentist and her assistant barking things at each other and at me in Russian. No-one could speak much English, meaning that I could not even ask what they were going to do with me. This would have made the whole experience a lot less frightening.

With not many other reasons to hang around here, we will head off again today for the arduous road south. Within a few days we will reach a mountain pass at around 3500m, followed by another soon after almost as high, and with luck some beautiful scenery to make it all worthwhile. It will certainly test our legs.

During the earlier part of our travels in Kazakhstan, we had not planned to visit Almaty at all, intending instead to head straight for the Chinese border after getting visas in Astana. People generally reacted with some surprise when they heard that we were not doing so, leaving me with the nagging suspicion that we were missing out on something important.

Well, as I have explained earlier, events beyond our control put paid to our earlier plans and set us on the road south after all. I must say that on reflection, I am quite glad about this; Almaty is a fine place to spend some time, and is much nicer in many ways than Astana.

Firstly, it is much larger and feels much more like a real capital than the northern upstart which has usurped it in this role. Secondly, it much more international. We met absolutely no-one from beyond the former USSR in Astana, whereas on the very day we arrived in Almaty, we ran into a German couple who are also cycling to China – and quite surprisingly, on a tandem.

Not only this, but we spent an evening earlier in the week with a group of Dutch expats. We had been in contact with one of them as she had earlier worked at the same farmers’ market in Amsterdam as Astrid. We ate in a Korean restaurant, and drank Heineken; I could almost imagine we were somewhere on the Zeedijk in Amsterdam.

Through the German pair who we met earlier, we got into contact with some more Germans (and one Swiss) with whom we are now sharing a very strange flat in a микрорайон (“meekro-rayon”) – something like a Scottish housing scheme, but with better weather than the Gorbals.

Talking of weather, this has been quite strange, and certainly different from what we have otherwise experienced in Kazakhstan. It is usually very warm and sunny, but every few days there come sudden light showers of rain which can go on for ages without really turning into a downpour. And now and then there has even been thunder and lightning. I suppose this might all be due to the range of enormous mountains to the south of the city, the Tian-Sian, which tower into the sky quite dramatically. Even now, in August, they are white with snow.

And most surprisingly of all, it is now chucking it down buckets outside, all of a sudden. I had just stepped out of an Internet café where I had spent several tedious and headache-inducing hours trying to sort out our never-ending visa problems, when I realised that I would not be able to walk more than a few metres without being soaked to the skin. Thankfully, there happened to be a posh and swanky European-style beer bar next door, to which I immediately made a frantic dash. The reward for this is a half litre of their own home-brewed unfiltered beer, with jazz playing on the stereo and German football on the television.

The apartment is much cheaper than a hotel, and feels much more like a home from home. It has been decorated in a very interesting way, with home-made cloud-pattern wallpaper in the kitchen, plastic chandeliers, mismatched Soviet furniture, curious paint effects on the ceiling, sticky-backed-plastic cut-outs of fruit and vegetables on the fridge, and indeed a different decorative effect on just about every exposed surface. It is quite an assault on the eyes, but it is comfortable and quiet, aside from the pigeons which keep scrambling around on the plastic roof above the balcony next to our room. As long as they don’t make a mess on the washing which I have drying there, that is okay with me.

A few days ago, something very unfortunate happened – I got robbed. I had very stupidly cycled off without my bag after stopping outside a café for something to drink, and when I returned less than five minutes later it was gone. Also gone was the toothless woman with child who had been begging on the other side of the pavement, immediately raising my suspicions.

I asked for some help from the staff at the café, and very soon two guys were walking around the block with me. We came across the beggar woman, who of course denied having anything to do with it.

One of the guys soon had some policemen on the scene, who then drove away the woman. Around twenty minutes later they returned minus the woman, but with my bag. My immediate joy at this was very quickly dampened when it became clear that my camera, mobile phone, and about 15000 Tenge (around €75) was gone. There was little I could do but thank the policemen and the guys from the café, and accept that I would not get the rest back.

Of course I have no idea if the woman has my stuff, or if the police took it or even made a deal with her, but in the end it doesn’t make any difference to me – I have lost a lot of money and expensive stuff, and worst of all, almost all of my photos from Kazakhstan besides the low-resolution ones on this website (which is better than nothing). I am naturally very upset about all this, but it could have been much worse.

What is most upsetting is that is partly my own fault for going off without the bag in the first place. Throughout my whole life I have been doing stupid things like this – it is just something I am very bad at, a sort of behavioural handicap. I am aware of this and have been very paranoid the whole trip, always checking everything multiple times in an almost obsessive-compulsive manner, and yet it only needs one slip up to happen and this occurs. Of course if I had left my bag next to the road in the steppe, it would probably still be there a week later. But this is not the steppe.

I was determined not to spend any time sulking about this, and so the very same afternoon we set off to do some very touristy things. We took the cable-car which runs to the the top of the Kök-Töbe hill, giving spectacular views over the city, passed the wooden cathedral (which actually looks like stone) in Panfilov park, before heading for the Arasan baths. This spectacular piece of Soviet architecture houses Russian, Turkish, and Finnish saunas. Of course it is segregated, meaning I found myself surrounded by countless naked and semi-naked Kazakh and Russian blokes. All very comradely. The Russian sauna was, well, refreshing, in an extreme sort of way. It is much hotter than a European sauna, in fact so hot that I could not stand more than a few minutes at a time. For a bit extra you can get yourself beaten all over with birch leaves, the idea being presumably to beat all the toxins out of the body. After all this, it was thankfully possible to dive into a pool of mercifully-cold water, and recover ready for the next round. After all this you can retire to the common area, order a beer, and come to your senses.

I must say I thoroughly enjoyed all this, and did indeed feel very refreshed afterwards. I can even see the point of the segregation – when relaxing in the pool, lost in a reverie, it would be quite distracting to have a naked lassie walk right past you. I do get the feeling that all the blokes get the chance loosen up a bit in such an all-male environment. Except if you’re gay, I suppose (but then there’s a different kind of sauna).

Earlier in the week, I paid a visit to the State Museum of Arts, the first proper art museum I have come across on the whole trip. Unlike in Kiev, this one was not only where it was supposed to be, and open, but actually contained what it was supposed to contain.

It has a very interesting collection, all from artists I had never heard of, and features work from the beginning of the Soviet era (mostly Socialist Realist) up to the present day. It was very satisfying to see painted scenes of Kazakh life and landscapes, and to be able to relate this to the experience of our travels in this country. Certain cultural symbols recur again and again – the yurt (nomadic tent), kumyz (fermented horses’ milk), herders, and kokpar (a ferocious sport resembling polo but with a dead goat instead of ball and sticks). I do feel that I have learned a lot about Kazakhstan in these past few months, which is not too hard given that I previously knew next to nothing. I am quite fascinated by this country, for reasons that I have probably already mentioned – for whilst it sits surrounded by Russia, Europe, China, and the Islamic world, and has clearly been influenced strongly and in equal measure by all four, it retains its own distinct identity, quite unique and independent of anyone else.

Being robbed is unfortunately not the only piece of bad news. We discovered yesterday morning that the company we had earlier contacted were not able to secure us a visa for China, for some nonsense reason related to Swine Flu or suchlike.

This has put us in a very difficult position, given that we are running out of options. We are also running out of time on our Kazakh visa; we have to leave the country by the end of the month. What we have done as a first step is to apply for a 1-month visa for Kyrgyzstan, the little mountainous country just to the south of where we currently are. This will give us a bit of breathing space time wise, one more embassy to try, and of course a whole load of interesting adventures along the way, I would hope. It also gives us the chance to arrange an invitation for a business visa, which should make things a lot easier when the time comes.

But while we are waiting for the Kyrgyz visa, we have about another week and a half to spend in Almaty. There is nothing to be done about this except to try to forget China for the moment, relax, and hope that our luck will change soon. Meanwhile, I have bought a new digital camera to cheer myself up a bit.

And one other thing. On Friday, I will turn thirty. I had really hoped that we would be in China by then, but that was not to be. If all our visa problems get sorted soon, that would be a very nice birthday present indeed. Better late than never.

Before reaching Almaty, we decided to try one last off-road adventure. I had heard about something called the “singing sand dune”, which is pretty much as the name suggests. It is a huge mound of sand which produces strange noises. Or at least that is what I have read, since we have unfortunately not actually succeeded in seeing, or indeed hearing, it.

The dune lies on the northern shore of Lake Qapshaghay, which is not directly on the way to Almaty. What we decided to try and do was to approach it from the north, via the Altyn-Emel mountains, a plan which looked quite sensible on paper but which was anything but in reality.

We began by heading off the main road east of the town of Saryözek, before slowly climbing to a height of over 1400m above sea level via a series of narrow, twisting tracks which lead up into the hills beyond the village of Qoyanqöz. It was here that we encountered the first real mountain-climbing of our trip, heading up steep slopes before hurtling down into deep valleys, only to have to climb all the way back up the other side. We spent a whole day doing this, getting lost along the way, and had covered a distance of only 30km when we finally found our way to Zhuzasu Pass, a steep and narrow cleft in the mountains which would have taken us all the way down to the shore of the lake some 1000m below, and thence to the dune.

But here, halfway down the pass, we were suddenly confronted by a most unexpected and vexatious problem: a locked barrier stood across the narrow dirt track, next to which was a small wooden house. A small, overweight woman emerged from the house and informed us that we could not pass without a permit. She was unable to tell us where we could get such a thing, besides that it was at the “office”, and any thoughts we had of defying her and making a run for it down the pass were dissuaded when she produced a walkie-talkie and began trying to make contact with authorities unknown. As if to offer some sort of consolation, she invited us into her little hut for tea, an offer which we accepted as there seemed to be no point in refusing out of spite. An awkward silence reigned as we sat drinking our tea and shooing away wasps and flies.

It was by then quite late in the day. We therefore decided to set up camp nearby, so as to make clear that we were not going to go away, and try again the morning.

When we awoke, we discovered that her husband and two large sons had returned, totally removing any chance of heading to the dune without permission. No amount of pleading or negotiation would persuade them to let us past, and leaving us with no alternative but to head back up the pass. This was very disheartening, especially since it had taken us two days to get there and would likely take the same amount of time to return to the main road to Almaty.

I guess that after the success of our earlier off-road gambles, it was time for our luck to run out. It is still quite frustrating though after scaling mountains, finding our way along seemingly endless and constantly diverging tracks, and finally being almost in sight of our destination, to be defeated by an old woman with a walkie-talkie.

Still I have no regrets about this little adventure. We saw some beautiful scenery in the mountains, which in themselves gave us some good practice for all the climbing that will have to be done in China. It is very encouraging to know that we are capable of such things.

And in any case, there is something to be learned from failure too. It is all very nice when you take a risk and it pays off, but a different sort of resilience is needed when you are faced with having to admit defeat. Or otherwise put, it is important to recognise which battles are important and which are not. Our priority at this stage is to get a visa for China, a process which would not be helped by run-ins with the authorities here. The singing sand dune will have to wait for another time.

Not long after reaching the top of the pass, we came across some friendly herders who were able to point us in the direction of a dirt track to the village of Qarashoqy. One even rode alongside us for a while to make sure we were heading in the right direction. This alternative route back to the main road meant that as well as avoiding the very demotivating experience of having to completely retrace our earlier steps, the distance to Almaty was reduced by a whole day. Definitely a silver lining to the cloud which we were then under. What followed was another gruelling day of ups and downs over the steppe, not aided by Astrid getting a flat tyre in Qarashoqy – unbelievably her first of the whole trip. Worse was that our pump then fell to pieces, which would have been a disaster had we not been in a village at the time. As it happened, we were talking to the mayor at the same moment, who quickly rounded up a pump for us to use. Yet another person to add to the long list of those who have gone out of their way to help us during the last few months.

The next day we headed at great speed along the busy motorway to Almaty, reaching the outskirts of the city as night fell. On Sunday morning we finally reached the centre, almost three weeks and 1500km after leaving Astana. Needless to say, we were very grateful indeed to be able to check into a hotel, get clean, and fall asleep in the heavenly comfort of a real bed.