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.
Scamps on a train 