10th December

10^th December

"Its about zoology"

"Thats a big word (for a girl) isnt it?"

"No, actually it isnt," said Tiffany. "Patronising is a big word. Zoology is actually quite short." The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett

So I am back in the UK now, after the Peace Corps programme in Kazakhstan was ended. I will write about that later, I promise. But I have just finished a 2 week trip around the south of the country, and I would prefer to write about that first!

So, firstly, it wouldn’t be an epic Pete trip without a map.

The numbers relate to things we saw, and this first post will cover 1 and 2.

I had kinda planned this trip already, to be the return leg of the Uzbekistan holiday for next summer, so it wasn’t completely from scratch, but it still needed some work.

The basic idea was to see lots of cool stuff. Which should be the basic idea of every trip in my opinion. The main sights were to be Beket Ata , Aktau, the Aral Sea, Turkistan, Shymkent and Taraz. To do all this, I set 11days, as Kazakhstan really is a big country!

With the plan set in my head, it was time to recruit a team! Travelling alone is well and good, but its always fun to travel with others. I ended up with 7 others willing to come along and get a final look at Kazakhstan before our Visa’s expired, which was more than I had counted on and slightly scary. But it worked, so that’s ok.

The biggest part of the journey, and the one that we were all dreading, was the initial 71hour train ride, across almost the whole country, and 3000km of being on 1 single train. My previous train record was 16hours from Serbia to Romania, and I had thought that was too long on a train, so this was even scary for me. The advantage of the Kazakh train though, was the prospect of a bed, and free hot water. Not much to look forward to, but the 5,500tenge (£25) ticket really couldn’t be beaten on price!

To be honest, it wasn’t really that scary at all, and the days seemed to just blur together. I spent a lot of time reading and napping, and looking out of the window at the snowy steppe. Aktau was the destination, a city on the Caspian coast that only came into existence in the 1950’s, due the discovery of oil in the area. It’s a strange city, as the buildings built in the initial expansion are all looking terribly dated, especially when contrasted against all the shiny new ones being put up.

We managed to find an apartment on the internet (thank goodness for Kindles), after discovering that hotels in the city were really rather expensive. So we packed 8 of us into the apartment, which was in a gourgous new block, overlooking the sea, and was very posh indeed. It was also only designed for 2 people, but hey, it was the cheapest option we could find.

There were 2 reasons to visit Aktau, 1 was to visit Beket Ata, a famous cave mosque and a very important pilgrimage destination (more on that later). The other was to swim in the Caspian, and Steven and I managed :D It was FREEZING cold, but certainly worth it.

We arranged for two cars to drive us out to Beket Ata (a 5 hour or so drive, into the desert), stay over at the free (and fantastic) guesthouse, and drive us back in time for the first of our return train rides. It snowed about 15cm that night, and it made the drive really rather difficult, and we had to get out and push the cars up one particularly difficult hill. But it was certainly worth it. The mosques and necropolis that we visited were great, and the people were really happy to see foreign tourists visiting what is such a sacred Kazakh site. We stayed over at the guesthouse, and I was treated to my final Beshbarmak of Kazakhstan, complete with sheep’s head. I was sitting at the head of the table, so couldn’t really refuse when I was given a big piece of cheek, and a handful of brains, but I didn’t throw up, and the conversation was fun. We managed to “sell” two of the girls who came in our group of 8, for the grand price of 4 camels, and that act provided entertainment for the rest of the trip. Speaking of camels, we saw many of them out in the snow, which isn’t the classic image of them, but was great to see them up close.

I don’t know what else to say about the first bit of the trip. Bekat Ata was a great experience, and I would recommend it to anyone visiting the area. The caves are cool, and the whole atmosphere is very reserved and rewarding.

Ill talk about the other parts of the trip later. I will try and get the photos up before TOOO long.