16 December

Right, so, after 5 University applications, I have some more time to write this!

34hours on the train took us almost a 1/3 of the way back towards Almaty, with the destination being Aralsk. This was a former major harbour on the northern coast of the Aral sea. With the much publicised shrinkage of the sea, the harbour is now dry. And full of snow at the moment. Indeed, there was so much snow, that the proposed trip out to sea the current sea level, and the ships stranded in the desert had to be abandoned. And it meant about 12hours in total of sitting around at the train station. Between timetables and lack of tickets, we were unlucky indeed!

Next stop was Turkestan, one of the main reasons why I accepted the Peace Corps Kazakhstan offer, and the real purpose for the whole trip! In the town is the Shrine to Yasavi, the 2nd holiest building in Sufi Islam, and an amazing example of Timur's architecture. It truely is an impressive building, made even more so, by the fact that it was never finished, so it still has the scaffolding in place. Typically though, the main hall was closed for refurbishment, and will remain so for another 2 years. The outside was still great though.

This is where our group split up. The others all wanted to head back to Almaty quicker, and visit their first host families. I had been unable to get hold of mine, so decided to see an extra city on the way.

So I headed off to Shymkent, a city that I had hoped to visit next spring for its special festival. In December, it was less interesting, but its War Memorial is certainly the grandest I have seen in Kazakhstan, it was huge, and shared similar ideas with the Vietnam memorial in Washington. I managed to get some help in finding a cheap hotel from some university students who studied English, and the museum was interesting enough, but it was the village of Sayram that I was most interested in seeing, with its Silk Road heritage. I wasn't dissapointed, as the few sights that remained were interesting, and the town is now 90% Uzbek in population, so it was great to meet a different ethnic group.

After a busy day, and LOTS of walking, I set off to Taraz, the last stop on the trip, and the subject of the next update. Sorry!