5. 22 June to 4 July 2011 - The Drive Across Kazakhstan

"Good luck" was the message from the last Russian official after the last check of our passports, when we crossed the bridge over the last waterway of the Volga River Delta between the Russian and Kazakhstan borders. After a two hour border crossing, our long drive across Kazakhstan had begun.

It was to be a 3800 km drive across a vast landscape of either flat grassy steppes or arid desert, with little to see on the way except for the opportunity to understand the Kazakhstan lifestyle as a whole, both urban and rural, and appreciate the vast gap between the two.

Rural life appears rough and hard, with small herds of camels, cattle, sheep or goats supporting the scattering of settlements along the way. Whether these settlements are large or small, there is a sense of chaos, with dusty roads, dilapidated dwellings and shop fronts, busy local markets, and speeding old battered cars negotiating the bad roads and lanes. Ladas - tough little units - and old Mercedes predominate, with the occasional up-market 4WD.

In contrast the cities, both large and small, support a lifestyle common to most cities, perhaps with a greater prevalence of unattractive apartment blocks, but still with the bustling traffic, department stores, supermarkets and plenty of advertising of mobile phones and designer clothing brands. The city dwellers commute to work every day whether by public transport or by car, enduring traffic lights and traffic jams. And in the resource-wealthy towns and cities, the huge ex-pat population (7000 in Aktobe alone) are driven around in company cars with local drivers. Big hotels also cater rather expensively for this passing parade of business executives from all over the world. And of course there is always evidence of the less fortunate surviving this mayhem as best they can.

Our first city was Atyrau after a bumpy bitumen road which followed the northern shore of the Caspian Sea, though not once did we catch a glimpse. Unbelievably we found two overland trucks camped in a vacant block in front of apartments in the middle of the city, and we camped there too. They were all from the UK, and over the next couple of days we enjoyed their company, which resulted in a suggestion that we join them on a 3 month drive through western China and Tibet. Two other couples who were sharing the guide, which is compulsory through China, had withdrawn from the trip. We couldn't imagine ever having such an opportunity again, so after some overnight thought, we decided to change our plans dramatically, and no longer drive through Mongolia and Russia, but to enter China from Kyrgyzstan, drive through China to Laos, and then ship the car home from somewhere in South-East Asia. We wanted some assurance they were definitely happy we were joining the group - their answer: "We'll let you know in Laos." Fair enough we thought.

So....HUGE change of plans!! But as Benjy said, the best plans happen out of the blue. Benjy was another overlander from the UK whom we met on the same day on the vacant block. He pulled up for a chat and he is doing a Cornwall to Cape Horn adventure, despite a congenital disease. He is inspirational and an amazing young man who had been in Atyrau for some time, working on building a river hovercraft with friends he had met there on arrival. Through him we met Marlon from the Philippines, another interesting fellow who has done contract work in Atyrau for the past ten years, and he very kindly helped us with our Kazakhstan registration.

In Atyrau we tasted our first shashlik, skewered lumps of meat (and sometimes fat as well) cooked over coals and served with sliced raw onion - quite delicious - and it became our favourite food in Kazakhstan. However at one cafe where we camped along the way, we thought we had ordered shashlik, but we were served something which looked nothing like it at all. It was a thinly sliced large sausage meat of some sort. We tasted it tentatively, seemed OK, but worked out later it wasn't shashlik we had ordered, but 'shuzhuk' - a type of horsemeat sausage!! Sorry all you horse-lovers out there, but we didn't know! It tasted a bit like bacon - maybe that was why it came with two fried eggs, which we also didn't realise we had ordered.. The eggs were the suggestion of a friendly fellow cafe customer who recommended it to the waiter for us, when we were struggling with the menu - all in Russian. But he only spoke Russian himself, so all in all a rather interesting meal. The eggs and meat were each served on bread and butter plates, with just a fork, which has been the case quite often.

After Atyrau, we travelled north to Uralsk, then east to Aktobe and south to Aralsk and finally down to Almaty in the south-eastern corner. We had a couple of great nights on the edge of a wheat paddock between Uralsk and Aktobe, where there was some very arable black soil country, before the arid landscape began. We were completely hidden from the road by a thick line of trees, and nothing in sight except a beautiful green wheat crop. But on the second night it started to rain. We heard every drop as we imagined the fun we might have getting out the following morning with mud clinging to everything. But although it sounded like substantial rain on our canvas roof, we had no trouble getting back out on to the road the next morning.

We would see many more of the intriguing cemeteries along the road, each grave individually surrounded by, at the very least, a metre-high brick enclosure, or at the very most, an elaborate domed shrine of sparkling gold, silver or blue - or sometimes just a lonely grave by the side of the road - all crowned by the new moon symbol of Islam. This was our first section of the famed Silk Route, and many of these settlements prospered in the past from the trade between Europe and China, but today it is a different story, lacking some of the glamour associated with this history.

Apart from this bush camp, our campsites were generally in the grounds of rough but friendly cafes, where trucks also pull up for the night. Our routine was to buy either a drink or a meal at the cafe, and then ask if we could camp there overnight. One request for a beer resulted in a young boy opening a trap door just inside the entrance and diving down to eventually emerge, after two or three attempts, with bottles of beer that received the nod of approval from the cafe owner.

Of course we didn't know where the next suitable looking cafe might be, and sometimes we stopped quite late, though it was still light. These cafes felt more comfortable than trying to find a camp along the road, especially when there was nowhere to pull off and be out of sight. Some days if we could find a suitable spot, we would stop about lunch time and head off the road for some distance to have a shower, so that when we pulled up at night, it was just a meal and then bed.

The long driving days were made more challenging by the fact that a bitumen road is under construction between Western Europe and China going through Kazakhstan, funded by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and contracted by various different countries along the way, such as Italy, Turkey and Azerbaijan. This meant that at least 50% of the road was a dusty, incredibly rough side-track, and really hard going.

But despite the challenges, we managed. And really did see some amazing and interesting things along the way. Aral (or Aralsk) was an interesting though rather depressing town. It used to be a major fishing port on the shores of the Aral Sea, which in 1960 was the world's fourth largest inland sea. An environmental and social disaster was caused by the diversion of the waters of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya Rivers for cotton production in the 1960s, which drastically reduced the amount of water flowing into the Aral Sea. By 2004 it was a quarter of its original size, and at one point the sea had receded some 100km from the town.

At the Silk Road town of Turkestan, we visited Kazakhstan's most impressive monument, the Mausoleum of Khodja Ahmed Yassaui, born in the 12th Century and leader of an Islam based around a mystic Sufi tradition. Turkestan remains a major pilgrimage centre - three pilgrimages here are considered to equate to one to Mecca.

We got lost in Taraz, another Silk Road town, but found a fabulous market and bought the best bread of the entire trip so far - and one of Kazakhstan's beautiful, tasty watermelons. We had passed many a truck overloaded with them.

We also had a few laughs along the way. One of the cafes where we camped had an enclosed courtyard. We were happy to camp outside, but the lady we had spoken to insisted we camp inside. So we drove in, very cramped, chairs and tables very close to us, and not much room to open up. And suddenly we had an audience of 12-15 road workers who were staying in bunk accommodation in the enclosure, and we were the evening's entertainment. They were talking and laughing and watching our every move as we set up camp. Brian said to them, pointing to the camper, "Dom" - Russian for 'house' - and that brought the house down - so to speak - a huge joke!! We talked for a while, only one could speak English (he later asked Brian could he get him a job in Australia) but we soon retreated inside, needing a spell after a long day.

Another day, as we were getting closer to Almaty, the landscape was quite scenic with some greenery and trees at last and some cropping, and the Kyrgyz Alatau Mountains in the background, which form the border with Kyrgyzstan. We found a great place for lunch, hidden once again behind a line of trees on a track beside a ripening wheat crop. The tomato, ham, cheese, cucumber and our beautiful bread from Taraz were all cut up ready for lunch, and we were enjoying a bottle of Pepsi, when suddenly we noticed a horseman jig jogging towards us on his little pony. We said hello, showed him Australia on our fridge magnetic map (it's been a very handy map to explain where we are from - bought in Stanford's London) and he said a few things we didn't understand, his eyes never moving from the food in the doorway of our 'Dom'. I offered him a large piece of cheese, but no, it was the bread he fancied, and of course the Pepsi, so after filling our glasses again, we gave him the bottle and a large chunk of our bread, and off he jig-jogged again, eating the bread and putting the bottle in his pocked, happy as could be! We were thankful we weren't having a shower at the time!!!

Next is Almaty, the last city we will visit in Kazakhstan. From there a drive out to Charyn Canyon on our way to Kyrgyzstan, where we will meet our group in Bishkek, before we leave for China in the first week of August. Very exciting!