A yurt on the edge of China

It turns out hanging around at 3600m gives you a headache and means you don’t sleep very well. That, and the fact that the stove in our yurt ran out of fuel about 2am, made for a bit of a chilly and uncomfortable night.

Lake Karakul on the Karakoram Highway didn’t really live up to expectations: The lake itself and the snowy mountains behind were picturesque, but the only yurt still pitched at this time of year that wasn’t a concrete pretend version was 6 feet from the main road and a few metres from a hotel playing loud dance music. Nevertheless, this would have to do as our ‘yurt experience’. Perhaps by way of protest, but more likely due to some ‘dodgy tofu’, Claire was secretly sick in the nomad’s washing up bowl.

Cold and groggy in the morning, we crawled out from piles of blankets and stood hopefully on the road outside, waiting for a bus, car or friendly truck driver. We were heading to Tashkurgan, the last Chinese town before the Pakistan border and the infamous Khunjerab Pass. Khunjerab means ‘valley of blood’ and it’s the highest road in the world.

Eventually a truck stopped and drove us 20 minutes up the road until it turned off to a quarry. Now with no yurt, building or traffic between us and the distant horizon we began to wonder if we would have been better staying put. It was 85km to Taskurgan and about 15km back to the nearest human habitation – a long walk with a backpack and a biting head wind.

Like all episodes of ‘Ice Road Truckers’ however, the impending disaster and certain death was never realised. With two further lifts we were in Tashkurgan before dark – relieved that we seemed to be in an crap Channel 5 documentary where nothing really happens.

Similar to much of the China we’d seen, Tashkurgan was half building site and there seemed to be more construction going on than was warranted by the size of the current population. We asked around for buses to Pakistan, got told to come back tomorrow, had a heated argument over what time it was (not such a simple question in a place where so many time zones converge), stuffed ourselves with rice and more tofu and went to bed.

Tomorrow we’d attempt The Pass.

Kashgar, China

We have a chinese stamp in our passport but it feels like cheating because Kashgar is very different to the rest of China and we were only there for 5 days.

Famed by the Silk Road, Kashgar is an eclectic mix of traditional Uighur culture and modern Han Chinese enterprise. The city contains epic underground shopping centres and a great big bazaar; both are noisy, busy and brimming with people. Women wearing headscarves zip across the city on electric scooters. Street cleaners play tinny versions of ‘we wish you a merry Christmas’. Women form part of manual labour workforce, identifiable by the bonnets attached to their hard hats.

Most people in Kashgar are Uighur, related more to the Tajiks than Han Chinese. Muslim by religion with a strong social identity, the Uighur and Chinese government frequently find themselves at odds. The police presence and street ‘home guard’ stations (often manned by women sleeping on their riot shields) suggested a simmering tension.

In the quest to ‘conserve’ Uighur culture, the government has torn down much of the old town and rebuilt it, complete with ‘approved’ trade shops, special ‘tourist toilets’ and the odd sign in jumbled english.
Whilst the Uighur architecture and hand trade remains, it was a bit galling to sip tea in the ‘ancient tea house’ that was entirely rebuilt in 2013.

This all sounds very negative, so its important to say that Kashgar is beautiful, a fun city to hang out where we felt safe as houses. If you want to visit, go soon.

We spent our days drinking tea in the courtyard of our hostel, eating well and planning for the big adventure – the highest road in the world – the Karakoram Highway into Pakistan.

We left Kashgar on 26th October. Due to internet censorship in China we couldn’t access the blog so we are a bit behind with our posts.

Trucking off to China

I reached out from under a pile of blankets and turned off my alarm. There were still stars visible through the window and we could see our breath inside. It was 6am in Sary Tash, Kyrgyzstan and today we were going to China.

Sary Tash is not much more than a road junction – one way leading to Tajikistan, one to China and one back into Kyrgyzstan. There are a few houses and a shop selling biscuits, sausage and vodka. A few people have spare rooms they let to tourists and all the toilets are cold, outside holes. The most remarkable thing about the place is its wildness – high in the mountains with snow covered peaks in the middle distance, some of which are over 7000m high. There is no public transport or taxis to the border so we stood on the road, stamping our feet to keep warm until we managed to flag down a truck. In Kyrgyzstan all cars are potential taxis, so hitching for free is not really a thing. However, when we tried to agree a price, the driver just waved us in and we perched on his bed at the back of the cab along with two other blokes. No one spoke English but we spent an hour watching videos on a phone of people falling over in funny ways.

When the driver refused any cash at the first border post we gave him some Kazakh chocolate and bid fairwell. The truck would have to wait in a long queue but we could walk.

Having been stamped out of Kyrgyzstan we joined another truck. There was now a lot of traffic and things got more frantic – the line of trucks seemed to be racing to be first in the queue at Chinese customs. Every so often there was a redundant looking checkpoint where we and all the drivers had to jump out and sprint over to show our passports. At one of these there was a wait and the driver of the lorry in front appeared in our cab to practice his English.

Having had our bags X-rayed and rummaged through at Chinese customs, we were bundled into a taxi with a Portuguese couple and sent 140km to the ‘actual’ border post where we’d get a stamp in our passports and be released into China.

The road had signs in Mandarin, what looked like Arabic and English with warnings such as “Longdownwardslopeaehad!” We had to slow down for the occasional camel, but there was no sign of the 1.3 billion people we were expecting. Inevitably, when we got to the ‘actual’ border post it was closed. The taxi driver got a mat out, lay on the road and went to sleep.

By now we were at lower altitude and it was warm and sunny, so waiting two hours for the border guards to have lunch wasn’t too much of a hardship. Eventually, we had our bags checked again, queued three more times to show our passports and then we were free in China.

That evening in Kashgar, my expectations of a decidedly un-vegetarian China were shattered as we stuffed ourselves with the best tofu and fried rice we’d ever tasted.

Kyrgyzstan; what a beauty.

A country that perhaps doesn’t feature very highly on the ‘must visit’ list, we’d strongly recommend anyone with a thirst for Central Asia to start here!!

One of the smallest and most accesible of the ‘stans’, Kyrgyzstan has felt very easy compared to the endless miles of Kazakhstan.

Without wishing to do a disservice to Kazakhstan, the country of beautiful steppes and bonkers architecture, here we have found MAPS and ACCESSIBLE transport meaning we don’t spent our days lost or in transit.

Bishkek (the capital) has wide, soviet-style streets lined with poplar trees turning yellow in the autumn. You can walk from east to west in under an hour. It’s got the biggest bazaar in Central Asia offering up anything you ever dreamed of (or in some cases, things you wish you’d NEVER seen). We’ve wallowed in proper coffee and soaked up the sunshine. It’s been bliss.

The mashrutka minibuses here offer bone-rattling rides like all others we’ve patronised, though the krgyz throw in rows of germy, runny-nosed children who paw with your hair and sneeze in your face. Nice.

After 6 hours of this treatment, we arrived at Issy Kul (“hot lake”) the pearl of Kyrgyzstan for a long weekend. At over 1600m, the lake is rimmed with snow-capped mountains and is the second largest alpine lake in the world. Cool eh? A brief swim confirmed the water was anything but HOT.

We stayed in a village called Tosor which sits at the waters edge. Described as ‘uncommercial’ in the book (glorious understatement) there was only us and some horses on the beach to lap up the view. We ate apples from the orchard and drank freshly churned yoghurt – delish!

We’re back in Bishkek now, preparing for our final few days in Kyrgyzstan which will mainly be spent making our way to the chinese border. In Kashgar, we’ll find out if the Karakoram highway to Pakistan is open for travel – all info so far suggests we’re good to go.

2 countries, 3 border crossings and the Himalayas separate us from India. If you look at the map its the width of a finger. We’re leaving behind our passable navigation of the cyrillic alphabet and pigeon rootsky.

Sad to say goodbye to the stans, we feel we owe them more than what we’ve written on this blog. We’ll miss gold toothy smiles, suspicious meat products (there’s a challenge china), russian tv (which so obviously takes the piss out of the americans at every opportunity) and most of all the relaxed and friendly people we’ve met. No problem to great in helping the british idiots who can’t find their way out of a paper bag (some days).

We’re also sad as this is perhaps our final goodbye to Quentin, our cheerful french friend who we have bumped into regularly since Gul. Hopefully we’ll meet again but tonight we’re off out to celebrate our last supper with some kyrgz beer and an Indian – of course.

Big skies and space age cities

There’s not much reason to save space in Kazakhstan. It’s the size of a small continent and has fewer inhabitants than many people have Facebook friends. Things are large and the distances between things are even larger. Crossing the street involves trekking over 9 lanes of traffic with cars the size of terraced houses. Town war memorials incorporate full size aeroplanes. It’s no surprise then that we’ve been on some long train rides. Aktau, where the now infamous Professor Gul deposited us, was 44 hours from the capital Astana, which is 12 hours from Almaty where we now are. As the crow flies we’re nearer North India than we are to the capital of Kazakhstan.

At the same latitude as Tonbridge, Astana was the most northerly point of our whole route. Until recently it was a small town known mostly for its fiercely cold winters. That was before President Nazarbayev decided to move the capital there and make it enormous (obviously). Having paid Tony Blair an alledged $13 million a year to help clear up a few inconvenient issues with human rights, he still had a bit of cash left over from Kazakhstan’s generous state owned oil reserves to hire Norman Foster to design him a few mental looking buildings.

The city centre is arranged symmetrically around Nazarbayev’s house. A view of the immaculately clean city can be had from the top of a 97 meter tall tower with a glass orb on top of it. Here, you can place your hand in a print of Nazarbayev’s own (hewn from a gold block) and gaze due east to his palace, which is framed by two golden skyscrapers. He and Tony remain committed to democracy.

Despite the orderliness of the town planning and the helpfulness of the reserved but extraordinarily kind Kazakhs, many things in Kazakhstan are impossible to find. We have spent a large proportion of the last 12 days looking for hostels, cafes and supposed tourist attractions which have either closed, moved, disappeared, or in the case of one hostel, burnt down the previous day. Such things are always misplaced when it is most cold, we are most hungry or most bursting for a wee.

As we leave Kazakhstan and head south into Kyrgyzstan tomorrow our only regret may be that we didn’t spend any time in the spaces between the cities. Inaccessible, full of camels and devoid of vegetarian food they might be, but we’ll have to be content with glimpses of the awesome emptiness from a warm cosy train.

The journey that wouldn’t end.

29 and a half hours after we first pitched up at the docks, Professor Gul finally departed for Aktau, Kazakhstan at 11.30pm on Tuesday 30th September.

Our company comprised of 28 railway carriages of soap, an invisible crew and a handful of passengers, including a friendly Frenchman called Quentin and a enthusiastic Azeri called Ali.

Whilst we’d planned our rations for 3 days at sea, we had already eaten 1 days worth at port. We’d just have to take it easy for the rest of the journey. Fortunately, we discovered the galley would feed passengers too. The ‘chef’ served up soup at extortionate prices, complimented by a very loud, phlegmy cough. Claire discovered a toothpick in her first spoonful and coaxed the chef into making omelettes thereafter.

For the next 22 hours, the ship sailed across the Caspian Sea. Buoyed with the hope that we’d dock in Aktau the next day, Quentin, Ed and I relaxed on deck and enjoyed the sunshine.

On Wednesday at 9.30pm, we saw lights and Gul dropped its anchor 10miles off-land. Content that we’d spend the night at sea and dock the next day, we munched through our diminishing stock of nuts.

Our hopes proved false. For the next 2 and a half days, Gul floated within sight of Kazakhstan.

During Gul captivity, we struck up a solid friendship with Quentin who had hitchhiked from Brittany and was heading for Vietnam. The three of us developed a daily routine which involved lots of reading, lots of staring at the sea, afternoon naps followed by a visit to the galley, a mandatory sunset viewing on deck and a few starjumps to keep us active, but not enough to make us hungry.

We shared our remaining rations and grumbles about our ice-cold cabins on the shadowy side of the boat along with ever-growing theories as to the delay (bolstered by acrid smoke we’d seen rising from port). His first time on a ferry, Quentin had surely got his monies worth but we were all desperate to land and eat a good meal.

Down to our last mouldy carrot and 2 plums, we heard the anchor rise at 5am on Friday morning. Ecstatic with hope, we lay buried under our dirty blankets, waiting for the ship to move.

As the ship moored up we vacated our cabins and gathered with the other passengers in the saloon to collect our passports. The Kazakh customs officers boarded the ship and proceeded to eat and chat in the galley for the next 7 hours. Not allowed to leave the saloon, we all waited, exasperated, cold and hungry. At 1pm we eventually passed through customs and looked for a lift into Aktau. After a false start in a car with a flat tyre, we raced into Aktau to devour our first full meal in 5 days.

Professor Gul and the Russian Peril

We shuffled across the dockyard, bent double into the wind and squinting through the dust cloud blasting our faces. The only things that seemed to be stopping us being blown out into the Caspian Sea were the bags of shopping and flaggan of water that we’d brought along for the voyage. Although the crossing from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan usually takes about 24 hours, cargo ships sometimes have to wait off the Kazakh coast for up to 3 days before docking. There is no guarantee that the galley will serve food to passengers during this time.

We’d been dropped at the docks by the owner of our hostel who’d confidentally told us we could sail to Aktau in Kazakhstan from here. On zigzagging the yard asking several people where the ticket office was, a disturbing consistency was emerging. People were gesticulating back towards the centre of Baku where we’d just driven from. Worse still, we had 20 minutes until the elusive office was due to close.

Eventually an expressionless customers officer took pity on us and phoned a taxi. For a few minutes everything seemed to be working as intended: We reached the ticket office in time, bought tickets and were told to walk down to the quay and look for a ship called Professor Gul. Someone in a hat took a cursory glance at our passports and visas and we spotted the good ship moored up not far away.

There seemed no obvious place to go for further passport formalities but we were soon acosted by a gaggle of dock workers led by an aggressive looking guy in his 60s who barked at us in what turned out to be Russian.

Dressed in oily half-mast tracksuit bottoms with his shirt tied in a knot at his waist like a 90s school-girl, he demanded that we follow him into the bowels of a nearby ship mounted with a huge crane. Trying to suppress imaginings of Tarantino-esque horrors that may occur below deck, we followed, wondering if this was official procedure or just an intimidating tea break.

We were seated around a table in a filthy, windowless galley and I was told to make coffee in a rusty kettle whilst Claire was shouted at in Russian. We were eventually partially comforted when the Russian (by now known as Vladimir) phoned his English speaking daughter who explained to Claire that her father was a “good man” who had been in the Russian army and a boxer in his youth.

With little else to do until Professor Gul was due to leave 4 hours later, we sat and drank coffee whilst Vladimir downed shots of vodka with increasing rapdity and exhibited us to other dock workers who occassionally flitted in and out of the ship. The wind was still picking up outside and it howled across the skylights in the galley.

When Vladimir grabbed Claire’s hands and started licking her palms, then put one of his younger colleagues in a headlock whilst brandishing a kitchen knife, we decided it was time to leave. We bid fairwell and climbed on to the deck. On crossing the rickety gang plank back to the quay, we were relieved to find we hadn’t been followed.

We had been told that the ship would only leave when it was full of cargo (there is no timetable), but as we proceeded towards Professor Gul it became apparent she was moored about 50 yards off the quay and was only accessible via a narrow gang plank from another ship. It was now dark and there were no signs of life. We had been told the ship was expected to leave in an hour. That looked unlikely.

With no one around to ask who didn’t terrify us, we proceeded up the gang plank of the ship neighbouring the good professor and knocked on the rickety door of an office. Two guys popped out. One held a half empty bottle of vodka and neither spoke a word of English. However, their eyes looked slightly more sane and sober than some we’d met, so we tried to explain we wanted to board the ship to Aktau.

“Nyet!” They crossed their arms to simulate a no entry sign and one of them launched into a elaborate mime which we took to be an interpretation of the boarding procedure. After some scribbling of numbers on scraps of paper we had ascertained that there would be an event at 1am, another at 2.50am and a final Thing would occur at 5 or perhaps 6am. It wasn’t clear what, if any, action was required on our part.

By this time our friend Vladimir had arrived on board. He did not seem in a very friendly or sober mood and immediately launched into a heated argument with our new guides which resulted in the door of the office being shut in his face as he tried to put his fist through it. Immediately realising the importance of being on the correct side of the rickety door, we made a fairly passionate appeal to the saner eyed fellows to let us in with them. This they did, and we cowered in one corner of the office whilst another of the blokes sat with his chair against the door and blows rained down on it from outside. “Bad and crazy Russian man” we were told. We were inclined to agree.

Disinclined to attempt an escape through the now gale force winds that lashed the ship and run the risk of meeting Happy Vlad again in the dark, we decided to see how long we’d be welcome in the office. Perhaps if we waited long enough we’d learn what the first Thing would be at 1am.

The sane eyed fellows eventually dropped their guard on the door which resulted in a revisit from Vlad. In scenes reminiscent of “Here’s Jonny” in The Shining, he burst through the door without warning and advanced over to where I was sitting, rolling up his sleaves and clenching his fists. When his face was inches from mine he burst into peals of manic laughter. He then turned to Claire and proceeded to try and chat her up in Russian whilst she looked the other way. The sane-eyed blokes largely ignored all this and were now looking bored. Perhaps Vlad did this every night.

Vlad eventually disappeared for good and we were left in the office with one Azeri guy who had stayed pretty calm thoughout the whole debacle. He pulled two chairs together in a very uncomfortable sleeping arrangement for himself and refused to move when Claire and I tried to get him to sleep on the sofa were were sitting on.

We dozed off occassionally as we waited for the scheduled Things to happen. I occassionally braved the gale and possible appearance of Vlad to check that Professor Gul had not sailed without us. She hadn’t. By 6am she still hadn’t. None of the Things seemed to have happened either.

Dawn broke and the ferry looked as still and empty as it had 8 hours previously when it had first been scheduled to leave. We decided to call it a night, go back to our hostel and ask the landlady to phone the ticket office to see if there was a revised departure time.

Waking up groggy in our hostel bunks at 10am we were immediately told to pack and go – the ferry would sail at midday. “You look tired” the landlady told Claire.

Panicking, we gathered our things and got another taxi to rush us to the port. This time we made sure to avoid the boat with the crane on it and we managed to get through what seemed to be an official customs procedure. Professor Gul had moved and now had a railway track running into her cargo hold where a load of trains and containers were visible. We got exit stamps in our passports and boarded, paying about 10 quid extra for a clean-ish cabin with a shower, sink and toilet (no toilet seat) and a view of Baku harbour.

Baku harbour was to be the view for the next 11 and a half hours, at which point we fell asleep. Repeated enquiries about our departure time had been answered with a fairly consistent “One, two hours”. We hadn’t moved an inch out of Azerbaijan, but with single entry visas there was no way back – we’d just have to ration our food and wait.

Georgia.2 and Azerbaijan.1

A strong smell of sheep overpowered us as we stepped onto the night train from Tbilisi to Zugdidi from where we’d catch a marshruka (minibus) the rest of the way to Mestia. On greetings our new cabin compatriots, the elder grunted in russian and the younger enthusiastically repeated “me, army Afghanistan, Americans good, bang bang Taliban children”. Ed and I hastily commandeered the upper bunks and bedded down for a night chorus of bone shaking snores and tinny techno music – any attempt of sleep was interrupted by the inhumane smells produced by the elder who tried his best to hide his excretions by continually lighting matches.

5 more hours cornering barely there roads up the mountains, we arrived in the plateau village of Mestia. The svaneti mountain range forms a natural border beteren Georgia and Russia. Never have we seen mountains so grand and impassable. Clear skies afforded us views of lush green valleys and snow covered mountain tops. Ill-prepared for the low temperatures (2 degrees and -4 in the wind), we trekked to the chalaadi glacier and explored local paths in our summer sandals, wearing every item of clothing we owned.

After 3 bone chilling days, we took an 11hr marshruka ride back to Tbilisi to prepare for our next train journey to Baku, Azerbaijan.

Bolstered by the good coffee served at ‘KGB still watching you’ (our favourite spot in Tbilisi) we boarded an immaculate train and to our delight we had a cabin to ourselves!! The quiet was soon disturbed by a fierce looking but kindly conductor who repeatedly jumped into our couchette shouting ‘bonjour’ or ‘quest que ce’. She quickly enlisted a chatty iranian man to translate between us. Whilst grateful for his assistance, to our dismay he engineered a move into our couchette where we ‘regaled’ us with stories of his life in self-selected asylum as a dental surgeon cum oil dealer and the time he bought a warm coca cola in 2010.

Our only solace from the chatty iranian was a short interview with the Azeri border official in the next couchette who peered over the lid of his tool box (which had a laptop inside it) to take our photo.

Keen to avoid any more stories, on arrival in Baku we scarpered to our hostel and then set out to walk the city ‘bulvard’ along the Caspian Sea shore which we disappointingly discovered was coated with oil.

Our purpose in Baku was the take the ferry across the Caspian Sea. With no set departure time, we wandered about the city skyscrapers and immaculate streets, dodging brand new range rovers as we went. Baku is perhaps the new Dubai. Oil rich and insanely wealthy. The centre of town feels fake in its perfection. Men dressed in sharp suits and bored, pouting women plunder the designer shops. With little time to explore the country, Baku is our only perception of Azerbaijan, although we met some travellers that managed to find the odd swimming spot and mountains the climb.

Oh Georgia.

Oh Georgia. What are we going to say about you?

3 days in the wine region of khaketi drinking home-brew and worse leads us to a sore conclusion. We are either getting old or the georgians really did invent wine (and know how to handle it).

We’ve been in Georgia for a week and don’t 100% feel like we’re at home. Maybe we were spoilt in Turkey, or maybe the appearance of rain has dampened our spirits.

We crossed the border and swanned about Batumi for a couple of days, swimming in the Black Sea and catching free cinema at the Batumi International Film Festival. We then took a very slow, soviet-style train to Tbilisi, where again we mooched.

And then the rain began. With not a jumper between us, we cowered in the dark room we’d found ourselves. After reading about the start of the wine harvest in that well known newspaper “Georgia Today”, we decided we’d be able to handle the rain better if we had a nice view to look at.

Our first night at the infamous Zandaravillishi guesthouse was the initiation to end all. Home brewed wine that resembled scrumpy in taste and colour was served by the jug, quickly chased by a heinous spirit called ChaCha which has an alcohol % closer to ethanol that lager.

In Georgia, its customary that the host gives long and many toasts. After many rounds, the israelis were doing acrobatics and all international politics crises had been averted. We made firm friends with the nicest russians and giggliest ukrainians we’ll ever meet.

The next day we didn’t rise until 1pm. With bruised knees (from the acrobatics we had tried to copy the night before) – we rattled round Signali like ghosts. Glad to report that the next few days, despite the frequent appearance of home-brew, we survived and have now made it back to Tbilisi to tell the tale.

We’ve purged our pores in the sulphurous baths and tonight we head to a place called Mestia in the mountains. Time to breath some clear mountain air and recharge before a long train journey into Azerbaijan.

White rice in a drowning town

The last ten days have been characterised by heat, parched mountain vistas and dust clouds. We had high hopes for something cooler and greener on leaving the north eastern Turkish city of Kars – an ex-Soviet city near the Armenian border.

We boarded our millionth Turkish ‘otobus’ in the direction of the Kackar mountains. We haven’t seen sight nor sound of a train since leaving Bulgaria. The odd railway line has convinced us that they do exist, but when we last enquired about departures we were pointed to a calendar: “Wednesdays and Fridays only, sorry.” Roads, however, are generally four lanes wide and empty, so using them is tempting unless you’re on a bicycle.

We were dropped at a dusty junction on a dam construction site in a gorge. Thick dust clouds blew past as we waited in vain for a promised minibus that would take us 10km to the nearest town. When it failed to turn up, we hitched a ride in a truck and were dropped in Yusufeli, a small town soon to be drowned by the rising dam. For the moment though, a clear, slate-green river rushed down from the pine covered mountains and through the town. Claire even managed to find a plate of rice that hadn’t had miniscule bits of pasta (that she’s alergic to) helpfully added to it. Smiles all round.

The village of Barhal that we were aiming for was another 30km into the mountains, so after enquiring about town and utilising both our Turkish words (one of which is only really useful in a breakfast context), we managed to get on a minibus full of dead chickens heading in what turned out to be the right direction.

‘Karahan Pension’ where we’re staying is pretty close to everything we’ve always been looking for. It’s perched above a river up a dirt track with other-worldly sized mountains crowded around it (even the valley bottom is the height of Ben Nevis) and the views from the veranda are nuts. They even had a small supply of red wine, but we drank it all. I guess you can’t have everything all the time.