More from Little Miss Tour Guide

Another extract from the travel log of my tour guide girlfriend:

Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan

As we wait for the train to leave Almaty Railway Station the
temperature continues to rise in the carriage, and whilst it is
boiling hot at seated level, it’s an absolute furnace near the ceiling
for those in the top bunks. I sympathise but have enough to deal with
myself – not only am I right at the other end of the carriage from the
rest of the group, but to add insult to injury I was going to be
sharing a cabin with three men. Two of the men were of Asian
appearance and one Caucasian, but they are all Kazakhs and don’t speak
any English. Still, at least I am on the bottom bunk, I don’t know
that I could have got up to the top one without a step!!

The men are obviously curious as to what a single white female
tourist is doing in their cabin, headed to a remote area of Kazakhstan
that is well off the regular tourist path. To explain, I whip out the
travel brochure and they pore over the pages, flicking back and
forth between the pictures and the map. This must be an expensive
trip, they conclude, making the universal gesture for money by rubbing
their thumb and fingers together and raising their eyebrows. It’s
easier to agree than try to explain my job. One of the men finds a
picture of a Muslim woman in the brochure and points to it, then
points at me and makes a gesture to show only his eyes left exposed.
I guess he is telling me that I will have to wear the Islamic
clothing, and so I put on a woebegone expression and nod in agreement.
I point to my bag and then make a circle around my face to tell him I
already have a hijab, and he laughs kindly at me.

Before the train has even left the station the Asian men are having a
cup of tea and an apple each. They kindly offer me some but I
decline, showing them that I have my own apple. One man makes his
green tea more flavoursome by vigorously pulling his tea bag in large
circles around the top of his mug, almost as if he is taking it on
exercise laps. How he can enjoy a hot drink when the temperature
inside the carriage is pushing 40 degrees is beyond me.

The train eventually begins to rattle along the tracks and we settle
down for the night. We are due to arrive in Shymkent early in the
morning and will be leaving Kazakhstan as we cross the border into
Uzbekistan. Given that we were only going to be in Kazakhstan for
such a short period of time, and given how difficult it had been to
get my visa from the Kazakh embassy in Beijing, I had made a vow to
try not to spend a single cent of my money in this country. I had
planned to arrive, look and depart without leaving any tourist dollars
to show for it. And as the train headed towards southern Kazakhstan,
it appeared that I would be successful in my mini-protest. Not a
single cent spent! A new record!

Arriving at Shymkent, we piled off the train and quickly found our
driver, who spoke not a word of English. Thank goodness for the
Sundowners sign he was dutifully holding up or we could have been
wandering around the southern reaches of Kazakhstan for days. We
discovered we were to be travelling in a small van which would have
comfortably held four people and their luggage. We fit 9 people and
luggage into it, but certainly not comfortably! I took the passenger
seat, which was to prove both fortuitous in terms of space and
potentially fatal in terms of survival rates if the van was to collide
with anything… but more on that in a minute. This driver was to take
us to the Kazakh/Uzbek border and the plan was that we would walk
through the border and be collected by a driver on the other side.

We set off through Shymkent and it rapidly became obvious that the
driver was hell bent on getting us to the Uzbekistan border asap. With
a speed limit posted at 60km/hr, the driver was managing close to
90km/hr through the town itself, and when we reached the flatter,
longer stretches of road out of the towns, the speed would creep up to
well over 120km/hr. I should just mention, however, that the vehicle
we were travelling in was not a custom built racing car,
aerodynamically designed to cope with high speeds. No, this vehicle
was an old white van which had definitely seen better days. The
windscreen was cracked from one side to the other and also had several
interesting spirals radiating out from various stone chips. I was
terrified of needing to sneeze in case the whole windscreen fell out.

As we began to rocket through the countryside at speeds I have
previously only managed to obtain whilst under lights and sirens in an
ambulance, I surreptitiously reached for my seat belt and was rather
disconcerted to discover that although the seat belt was in the usual
place, the buckle was not. More specifically, the buckle was
completely absent. I allowed the belt to roll back up and instead had
to satisfy myself with gripping the arm rest hard enough to leave
fingerprints permanently etched into the plastic. On the dashboard
was a curious black box which I initially assumed to be a radar
detector, and certainly the speeds this driver seemed to enjoy would
warrant some sort of warning device. Upon reflection, however, I
couldn’t be sure that it was not a black box recorder from an
aircraft, because if a recorder was required once a certain speed was
reached, then surely this van now qualified as a low flying aircraft
and the black box could be there to allow investigators to understand
better the final minutes before the vehicle was completely immolated
in a high speed impact. I took small consolation from the fact that
should we crash into anything there was every chance I might be found
still alive several kilometres from the crash site, propelled into
flight by a fragile windscreen, high speeds, and the complete absence
of a seat belt.

To make the journey even more interesting, the roads in southern
Kazakhstan leave a little to be desired. Many patches over potholes
gave the roads a dappled appearance, but most lethal were the
occasional dips in the road that were virtually invisible to the naked
eye. When one of these ditches was hit at over 120km/hr, the van
would leave the road for a moment before crashing back to earth with a
bone shattering smash followed by several wallowing bounces. The
driver, who was further flaunting death by driving with only one hand
on the wheel at any given time, would be forced to desperately grab
the wheel with both hands to stop the vehicle slewing off to one side,
and as he wrestled with control of the vehicle my single cohesive
thought was that maybe donning a sports bra could have benefited me
prior to the commencement of the trip.

The van plunged onwards at remarkable speeds and I realised that the 3
½ hour drive to the border was probably going to take a little less
than that at the current velocity. Nonetheless, inside the human body
the release of adrenaline fuelled by fear for one’s life cannot last
forever. After close to an hour of flinching as cows and goats stepped
perilously close to the edge of the road where our vehicle would often
stray after hitting a dip and watching as the countryside whirled past
in a blur of beautiful green hills and livestock, I began to resign
myself to the outcome of the drive whatever it might be. In my
wildest imaginings I’d never thought I might die in a high speed
accident (possibly involving a bovine) on some of the most isolated
roads in Kazakhstan and I took comfort from the thought that surely
not many tourists perish in this fashion. The hypnotic motion of the
wallowing van began to lull me to sleep.

This, of course, was a mistake on my behalf. As my rigid muscles
began to relax in sleep, I lost my main protection from the sudden
decelerations that occurred when the driver spotted a dip in the road
far too late to actually do anything about it. The absence of a seat
belt meant that there was now nothing to prevent my forward momentum
in the event of sudden braking. And brake we did. Being asleep, I
have no idea when the cow stepped onto the road, only that the driver
felt that stomping on the brakes would be the best way to avoid
producing a surplus of hamburger meat. In what I hope was a graceful
manoeuvre but I rather suspect was anything but, I toppled forwards in
my seat, waking only when my head struck the windscreen. Two things
immediately crossed my confused thought processes. The first was
wondering why a cow was staring at me from less than a metre away and
the second was amazement that the windscreen hadn’t fallen out.

The horror my group members felt at my sudden demise was apparently
not shared by the driver of the van, who cursed fluently at the cow,
the shepherd and possibly the sky before jamming the accelerator down
to the floor the second the bemused animal stepped out of the path of
our vehicle. I was flung unceremoniously back into my seat by the G
forces as we took off down the road again, and a moment’s silence
reigned before one of my group members tentatively suggested that
maybe I should put a seat belt on. As if I hadn’t already thought of
that!

Resolving not to allow myself to fall asleep again, I kept myself
amused counting donkeys as we continued on to the Uzbekistan border.
Only once did the driver actually voluntarily allow the van to slow,
and that was when the radar detector emitted a piercing series of
shrieks to warn of a Police presence ahead. In a breath-taking
display of model citizenship, the driver immediately brought the
vehicle to about 40km/hr, the sudden deceleration feeling strangely
disorienting after so long moving at high speed. To add to the
picture of a law abiding road user, the driver also pulled his seat
belt down and tucked the buckle under his thigh, giving the impression
that he was actually safely buckled into his seat. The instant we
were past the Police stop, he lifted his right leg slightly and the
seat belt slithered happily back to its retracted position. Frankly,
it was with a not inconsiderable amount of relief that we arrived
intact at the border post, and indeed the 3 ½ hour journey had taken
us only 2 ½ hours. Needless to say, we didn’t give the driver a tip.