According to tradition a lot of Norwegians spend the Easter holidays in a cabin somewhere. But we’ve never really been sticklers for tradition and that’s why the first day of Easter holidays this year saw Oyv and me arriving in Almaty, Kazakhstan, at five am. Over the next couple of weeks we crossed a few borders, roadtripped Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway – but all that’s another story in itself.
So back to Kazakhstan, for the moment. My experience in Kazakhstan last year was limited to Aktau – a flat and dusty city in the middle of nowhere. To be precise Aktau is on the edge of nowhere, perched on the shores of the Caspian Sea way out west with nothing much else around. It’s a faraway place that feels distant and remote. But as it turns out, a lot of places in Kazakhstan inspire that sort of feeling.
On the other hand (and on the other side of Kazakhstan) Almaty is living breathing green space, and seems almost encircled by beautiful snowy mountains.
It’s like a city inside a forest – big, mature trees line the boulevards and the parks are slightly unkempt, long-grassy and wild.
We went up to the lookout at Kok Tobe. For some reason there is a statue of the Beatles on top of the hill.
It makes a nice break from the usual statuary around here – communist former heads of state or patriotic monuments to military prowess.
In the afternoon we strolled past Zenkov Cathedral. During Soviet times the cathedral was used for concerts. In 1995 it was returned to the Orthodox Church and now it hosts the inevitable mini-carnival out front – toy train, cotton candy, kids driving rented PowerWheels jeeps – fun for the whole (Russian) family.
But we passed the cathedral again at dusk on our way to dinner (which was delicious by the way, Almaty also has great restaurants). The quiet in the park and the mellow lighting combined to make it absolutely beautiful.
There’s also a huge bath house with hamman, steam rooms, saunas, and heated floors on offer. If you buy your own bunch of dried leaves and herbs on the way in, you can hire an attendant in the insanely hot Russian sauna to beat you with it (or you can just beat yourself) to improve your circulation.
Since we were headed for Tajikistan – and with Uzbekistan to nip through in between – it wasn’t long until we boarded a night train bound for Turkistan, a city in Kazakhstan’s far south.
We settled into our compartment and just as I had hoped, the little old lady we were sharing with had brought an enormous hamper of homemade food, plus a butcher knife rolled up in a tea towel. She produced a cylindrical length of meat and sliced it up for us all. It was fatty and salty and delicious. ‘It’s sheep, stuffed into its own stomach’ said her grandson who had dropped by from another compartment. No worries, we’d assumed it was horse.
It was early when we got off the train in Turkistan, and the town was dead quiet (that’s normal at any time of day in Turkistan, as far as we could tell). There was no one at reception in the hotel we randomly picked and no sign that the whole place hadn’t in fact been abandoned so we lay down on a sofa in the hall and went to sleep, confident that a receptionist would turn up eventually (she did).
Turkistan is Kazakhstan’s most important pilgrimage site. There’s a mausoleum belonging to a revered Sufi mystic teacher and poet who died here around 1166.
Pilgrims were already flocking to his grave when Timur, that famous Asian conqueror, came along in the late 1300s and commissioned the monument that stands today.
If the tomb looks familiar to any silk-road-tripping visitors, that’s probably because Timur had a hand in the much-more-famous mosques and medressas at Samarkand.
While we were at it we visited the nearby ruins at Sauran.
Only traces of the fortress and foundations are visible today, but in the 1300s Sauran was a prominent Silk Road city and the capital of the Mongol White Horde.
Standing on the top it’s easy to imagine a mongol horde sweeping across the plain.
It’s easy to imagine that because so much of Kazakhstan is flat, endless steppe, little villages separated by emptiness. ‘What do they do here?’ I wondered aloud when we drove past yet another lost-looking village. ‘Pray?’ Oyv suggested, as a turquoise dome-capped mosque flashed by.
Later on, after our roadtrip in Tajikistan, Oyv went home and I was back to see some more of Kazakhstan. I decided to check out Semipalatinsk, 17 hours north of Almaty…on the fast train.
Settling into my bunk on the train I tried to get to know my compartment mates, two Kazakh guys and a Russian wearing a suit made entirely of denim, but language was an issue. From his tone of voice, together with exaggerated shoulder-and-eyebrow raising plus the repeated use of the name of my destination, I gathered that Denim Suit was asking me ‘Why Semipalatinsk?’.
‘Good question’, I thought. I’d already heard it once or twice, only applied as a sweeping statement to the whole country. But it’s hard to convey the idea of just going somewhere for no particular reason at all other than that it’s there, so I just said ‘Why not?’.
I thought about it some more (I had plenty of time). Semipalatinsk, a small city best known for its proximity to the nearby Polygon – that is, the Soviet Union’s main nuclear weapons-testing site for 40 years. Testing stopped in 1989 and the site closed for good in 1991. The city’s since been renamed to Semey in an attempt to shake off the negative associations, but the after-effects of exploding around 450 nuclear bombs without notice or protection inevitably linger.
And Denim Suit was not alone in his disbelief as to my choice of destinations. Semey is the sort of place where the very first local I spoke to (who could speak any English at all) said ‘Why you come here? We have other nice town, Astana.’ Even as I sit in a restaurant writing this, a girl has leaned over from the next table to ask why I came, and suggest that I head for Astana. I didn’t say that I’d spent 17 hours on the train getting here.
As you’d expect, there are somber reminders of the town’s past. The ‘Stronger than Death’ memorial to victims of the testing depicts a mother sheltering her child under a mushroom cloud.
There’s a very disturbing collection of horribly deformed fetuses at the medical school (I was led by Lonely Planet to believe that this was an ordinary museum, open to the public. It’s not. My attempt to access it ended up involving two security guards, a copy of my passport, and four faculty members. But then they rustled up an English-speaking student for me, and it was all good).
There’s an otherwise perfectly normal leafy park where students hang out – with an alley of forlorn Communist statues, mostly Lenins, parading up to the tallest Lenin in Kazakhstan.
He’s huge, you can see him dramatically gesticulating over the treetops on the way into town.
There are actually plenty of nice things about visiting Semey. It’s not that big; it’s definitely not touristy. There are green parks filled with families; the medical university is one of the most important in the country. I was here on Victory Day, the day commemorating the end of the Great Patriotic War as Russia likes to call World War II.
Everyone was out celebrating – I could barely walk through a square without being mown down by cotton-candy fueled kids driving rented PowerWheels.
Abay Kunanbaev, a national poet and Kazakh hero called Semey home. As a major literary figure he wasn’t alone, either: Fyodor Dostoevsky spent two years in exile here, for too much revolutionary thinking back in Saint Petersburg. Now his house is a museum. I’d downloaded Dostoevsky’s complete works to my Kindle but even a Kazakh train trip isn’t long enough for that.
And there’s another pretty little candy-coloured church.
Back at the train station again, I was bound for Kazakhstan’s remote northern capital. I boarded along with residents of Semey who I guessed were longing to visit Astana. A fellow passenger asked me, via a translator app, ‘Why Semey?’ The question was starting to confuse me – but at least, we were already on the train to Astana.
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Want to know how we pulled this trip off? Take a look at our trip itinerary for our route and important practical details.
For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Kazakhstan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.
