The “Short” Way Round: Off-Roading on the M32

Following a logging truck on the M32,
Kazakh road (Aqtobe - Aralsk)
Originally uploaded by rtw2007.

We are writing this whilst sitting in the van, in the middle of the Kazakh desert, surrounded by donkeys, chickens, goats, camels and lots of sand. Oh, and the Russian Space centre. Bizarrely, Baygonqir Cosmodrome (from where all of the USSR and Russian space flights have launched) is just on the horizon. We have just had the pleasure of watching the guy whose back garden we are camped in slaughter a rather helpless goat for dinner using a not-quite-sharp-enough knife. Unsurprisingly we’re not feeling too hungry now.

Since the dilemmas in our last blog, we decided to heed the advice of the locals in Atyrau and took the long route to Aqtobe in the north. This looked like being the correct decision on day 1, with 500km of perfect tarmac combined with views of the wide open steppe and camels aplenty. However, on day 2 we were given a ‘sneak preview’ of what the future might hold with a very rough 40km or so (25 miles for those of you still in the ‘60s) which had us crawling at 10km/h around potholes and took almost 2 hours to cover.

We opted to ignore the second piece of advice from the locals; which was a 3000km route via the capital, Astana, in the east. We instead took the direct (330km on our map) ‘M32’ route towards Aralsk in the south. Please note that, as you would expect, ‘M’ stands for Motorway. We started out with some trepidation given the extremely negative local advice and given that there are no villages or even petrol stations marked on the map to break the journey. The first hour lulled us into a false sense of security as the roads were fine, but then we reached the ominous ‘bumpy roads’ sign and the bad stuff began. That was the last decent stretch of road or even road sign for the next 9 hours, during which we covered a mere 220km (average speed over those 9 hours: 24km/h = 16 mph).

The road condition was so bad that even calling it a road is generous. We had pot-holes which weren’t just the size of cars, but the size of VW T5 campervans. Well, almost. The potholes weren’t too bad as you could drive around them. That is we could drive around them, until the flooding started. The flooding wasn’t too bad, though, until the storms started. And the storms weren’t too bad until the mud-slides started. At one point, slewed at 90 degrees to the road; ankle deep in mud in the pouring rain; 250km from the nearest town; and with two Kazakhs shouting at us, we were beginning to wonder whether this whole trip was a good idea.

Luckily (very luckily) our guardian angels appeared in the unlikely form of a heavy articulated Kazakh logging truck. The slightly deranged co-driver wound down his window, shouted at us and indicated that we should follow in his heavily rutted tyre tracks. This we did, for two hours, fearing for our future when watching an articulated truck slewing uncontrollably across the road in front. Our tactics proved to be the right ones, though, as we passed many other vehicles whose drivers were stuck in the mud or who had given up completely. When we emerged at the end of the road in the town of Aralsk, we were both knackered after 14 hours on the worst roads that either of us has ever seen. The fact that the M36 is marked as a major motorway and through route across Asia on signposts and maps is unbelievable (though we are still convinced that it was better than a 3000km diversion – we might not have said that if we hadn’t got through, of course…..).

As a result, what we were looking for in Aralsk was a quiet, peaceful spot to rest our weary heads. Instead what we found was our ‘Kazakh Family’ and a huge dose of Kazakh hospitality. This started when we asked to camp around the back of a shop on the main street (that might sound odd, but in Kazakhstan it seems like a perfectly normal thing to do). The lady who ran the shop agreed, but we were immediately besieged by curious onlookers. An hour later, the shopkeeper’s family turned up and insisted that we drive down the road to park the van in their yard, hidden away behind some heavy gates. We spent the rest of the evening and the next morning entertaining (and being entertained by) their four children. We woke up to find that as well as the six family members, five other people from the village had turned up during the night and slept outside on the family sleeping platform. As you do.

The hospitality here is phenomenal. The family we stayed with all helped to wash the van and offered us food, beds and tea, only hours after having met us. We were in Aralsk for less than 24 hours and were invited to three different family homes. The Kazakhs are almost all, at least in the smaller towns and the countryside (which is almost the whole country), just really curious, very friendly and extremely welcoming.

The next day we left Aralsk via a look at the slightly eerie old harbour, which used to be on the Aral Sea before the Soviets dried it up as part of a grand but fatally flawed scheme to irrigate Turkmenistan. This is a massive ecological disaster: the sea has shrunk incredibly and the local fishing industry as been completely killed off, because what was once sea is now desert. In the port now are rusting ships, abandoned cranes and dilapidated warehouses – as well as a vast grassy, empty flood basin that used to be the sea.

Tune in next time for more Kazakh adventures in a camper van. That’s all for now, folks!