Entering Central Asia

Roadside Camel, Kazakhstan
Originally uploaded by rtw2007.

We left Volgograd having successfully fixed our water system with the vital red right angle, so we headed south with a lot more confidence given that we now can now access our drinking water tank again. Volgograd was the last realistic point at which we could choose to bail out of this trip and turn back: anywhere after that would require us to get new visas and lots of paperwork for the van to retrace our steps. Suddenly the lack of options seems quite scary, but it is now full steam ahead.

The road south from Volgograd was the easiest road in Russia so far: really quiet and a decent road surface. We were, though, stopped by the traffic police three times in one day, which gets quite trying, though thankfully we didn’t have to pay any bribes this time. The first time we were pulled over, the policeman waved us in with his stripy baton just so that he could ask us to give “Pavel” a lift to work. Pavel the mystery man spoke no English, so we still have no idea who he was, but he sat in our van for 80km, before quietly pointing at the roadside and getting out. All very random.

After a long drive, we rolled into the Caspian Sea port of Astrakhan and found our hotel on the river front of the Volga. It looked like a building site on the outside and inside our room was the usual tired Soviet affair. We explored the town, including yet another Lenin Square (the last of out trip, perhaps?) and the Kremlin, which is a beautiful white washed walled castle with a couple of impressive churches. We spent the evening in the stifling heat at a bar drinking cold beer and eating hot Shashlik kebab. The population in Astrakhan looks a lot more Kazakh – having seen nothing but white skin for most of this trip, it was really noticeable in Volgograd and Astrakhan that we are now at last moving towards different ethnic groups in Central Asia.

After the usual rubbish signposting, which meant that we struggled to find our way out of Astrakhan, we eventually got onto the right road. This may as well have been called “the road to nowhere”, with few vehicles; few buildings; and a slightly scary floating pontoon bridge across the river. When we eventually arrived at the Russian border post, we exited the country relatively easily and mistakenly thought that this meant that we were near to entering Kazakhstan. However, after 8km of dirt roads, we came across a queue for a rickety ferry crossing in the shadow of a new bridge construction. We paid our roubles and nervously drove our van onto a floating raft with no sides, before being towed precariously by a Kazakh tug along a chain to the other side of the river and into our next new country (and our first ‘Stan).

Entering Kazakhstan proved to be far more long-winded than exiting Russia. We were sent from hut to hut to hand in documents, collect forms and get things stamped. All without any English-speaking officials and without anyone having much idea of how to deal with strange foreign tourists. After exiting the compound a couple of hours later, we then had to sit in a café to wait for a large, fat man with gold teeth wearing a white string vest to finish his lunch, so that he could then come out to his sweltering hut to sell us a $7 insurance policy. Which he promptly dripped sweat all over, thus smudging the official stamp. Lovely.

Having secured all the necessary documents, we headed off across the steppe and into the great unknown…… well almost; there was of course the compulsory police checkpoint, vehicle search and half-hearted request for a bribe just 800m up the road to deal with first (ie less than five minutes after everything had already been checked 3 times at the border).

The contrast as we started our journey was huge, from "normal-looking" breeze block houses in Russia to mud-huts and single storey wattle and daub houses in Kazakhstan. There were lots of camels wandering by the roadside; horses wading in the river delta; and cows standing nonchalantly in the middle of the road, oblivious to the occasional passing car. The driving wasn’t too bad, though, and after a few hours of bumping along and swerving around the odd pot-hole or ten, we rolled into Atyrau – "Oil Town Kazakhstan".

Atyrau is like a cross between Milton Keynes and Houston, which looks like it has just been dropped right in the middle of the Kazakh steppe. It is full of Western businessmen and big cars – all rather incongruous with the previous 250km of deserted prairie. The town straddles the Volga river, which is the division between Europe and Asia, so on our first night we wandered across the river (via the irritatingly unromantic concrete road bridge) and enjoyed dinner and a couple of beers in Asia – all before popping back into Europe to sleep. It’s tiring, this inter-continental travel lark!!