When we left Astana last Saturday (today being Friday) we
intended to take a small detour to a national park near a town called
Korgalzhin where we were hoping to come across some spectacular animals and
birdlife, specifically flamingos. We’d be going about 150km out of our way,
then we’d double back and join up with the main road back to Almaty, arriving
back by Wednesday to get our Uzbek LOIs and sort out our visas.
We arrived in the dilapidated, slightly ghosty and very
ex-Soviet small town of Korgalzhin, and weren’t quite sure how to find the
park. So we decided to try the very abandoned looking visitor centre we passed
on the way in, and much to our surprise it wasn’t only open and inhabited, but
there were actually other Western tourists there. Much to the disappointment of
the lady in the centre who had been about to get her first business in probably
quite a while, we offered the Dutch/Belgian couple a lift which they gratefully
accepted, and declined the idea of a very overpriced tour guide. Squeezing six
into the car, we intended to go and find some flamingos, camp the night
somewhere in the park, and then drive them to the large town of Karaganda the
next day where we could continue separately on our travels.
We didn’t find any flamingos though, but we had fun just
driving around the very flat, dry, sparse land, inhabited with an extraordinary
amount of wildlife, and ended up kidnapping Josje and Remco for the next six
days.
This was the first time we felt we had really gotten off the
beaten track; not just the tourist track but the track full stop. It’s the
first time since Australia that we’ve gone for several hours without passing a
single sign of life. It was hard to tell whether we were still on the road
because there was little difference between that and the tracks crisscrossing
across the land, and we were barely able to do more than 30 km/h for most of it.
The road signs that we did come across were obviously ancient and were often
undecipherable. It didn’t help that both of our compasses decided to go mental
and we had to rely on our instincts and the extremely broken interactions with
the very few people that we did come across. We emptied our petrol jerry can
twice (only having used it once before during the whole trip), finding a
dilapidated but in-use petrol station just in time on several occasions.
For water we relied on pumps in the villages we went
through, utilising our 10L container for the first time and saving as much as
possible. Most days we would only have one opportunity to get water and buy
food supplies. On one occasion we couldn’t find water anywhere and resorted to
asking a very helpful old Azerbaijani/Belarusian couple in a very derelict
looking four-house village, who explained (we think) in hand gestures and finger
pointing that they don’t have a nearby water source and have to get it imported
by a truck. Considering the probable state of their finances and the
inaccessibility of such a necessity we didn’t expect them to be able to help
us, but they generously insisted on giving us three cupfuls (about a litre) and
a handful of very sticky apricot sweeties.
The roads were so rough and so unmarked that it started
feeling like we would never get out of the wilderness and make it back to
Almaty. Needless to say though we reached the outskirts of the city and
breathed a small sigh of relief, but even then it wasn’t all smooth sailing. We
all needed a pee break before we really got into the city and it would become
inappropriate to do so at the side of the road, so we pulled over in a nice
leafy area and everyone dispersed to take care of their own business.
Unfortunately I decided to be subtle and make my way into the foliage away from
peeking passersby, and on the way I found myself stuck by the head to a very
vicious tree. Ben, Tunkles, Denner and Remco were all preoccupied taking care
of their own business, but fortunately Josje responded to my anxious calling
and came to my rescue. In the couple of minutes it took for me to get my head
stuck, realise, call out and for her to respond, the tree got more and more
stuck to my head like some fictional strangling plant. Unable to get the alarmingly
sticky balls of spiky tree out of my hair, she expertly dismantled the tree so
that I could remove myself from it and continue with my business. I spent the
next few hours struggling to free myself from the myriad of probably poisonous
balls of tree that had relentlessly tangled themselves all through my hair, and
will never again take tree free hair for granted.
It is nice to be back in Almaty, where we feel (possibly
weirdly too much) very at home. We rang up our landlord from our last stint
here (well our friend Gulmira rang on our behalf as the landlord speaks less
English than I do Russian) and arranged our old apartment. We parked Trevor in
the car park where the guys shake our hands and treat us like old friends,
visited our favourite kebab shop in the central market and returned to McBurger
- our favourite wi-fi hotspot.
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