Kazakhstan’s wild west

I arrived in Aktau by boat, sharing the 24-hour Caspian Sea crossing from Azerbaijan with a truck driver named Yirkin, who was hauling electrical machinery from Poland to China. He’d been driving for seven days, and had at least another six ahead of him before reaching Ürümqi.

Wedged between our bunks, we talked about our homes — his city of Aktau, capital of Kazakhstan’s Mangystau region, my Canadian prairie. He wanted to know about drivers’ salaries in Canada. I gave him a fair assessment. After a moment’s nodding thought, he went to his bunk, curled up facing the bulkhead, and remained that way for most of the journey.

Canada, it seemed, was in the air. Dmitry, owner of the Mr Ponchik (Mr Doughnut) coffeeshop, where I went almost every morning the two weeks I was in Aktau, had tried to relocate there as a young man. “Beautiful,” he said, “but hard, very hard to get in.” And one evening, I dined with a woman who had studied in Vancouver and later made a career out of advising Aktau youth on going abroad. “Of course,” she said, “when they go away, they expect a fancy, expensive car is waiting for them.”

There were plenty of expensive cars in Aktau, however — shiny BMWs, Audis and Range Rovers. Thanks to the oil and gas industry, Mangystau has some of the highest salaries in Kazakhstan. “But everyone is living on credit,” someone told me.

Still, when it came to my company, not even debt could deter anyone from practising konakasy, the Kazakh tradition of offering guests an abundance of generosity. It is a big-hearted culture, and needs only the barest introduction to offer a meal, a drink, a gift. Even when I tried to pay for a taxi ride, the driver batted away my tenge banknotes.

Youthful dreams of a peripatetic life might be expected. Kazakhstan has always been a nation of nomads (this past week the capital Astana has been playing host to the World Nomad Games, a sort of alternative Olympics with traditional sports involving archery, riding, falconry and wrestling). It’s only in the past 60 years that people have lived in Aktau with any sense of permanence. For the nomadic herdsmen of the past, Mangystau was a seasonal retreat, suitable only in the cool winter months — the name means “wintering place of a thousand tribes”. In summer, the blistering heat would be catastrophic for sheep.

Beginning in the 19th century, the Russians used this Caspian shore as a penal colony, Kazakhstan being their equivalent of Australia — distant, arid, suitable for undesirables and troublemakers. The Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko was one such prisoner, and there is a museum dedicated to him in the dusty town bearing his name, Fort Shevchenko, some 90 miles north of Aktau. An afternoon visit was enough to convince me of its suitability for exiles.

And like Australia, western Kazakhstan held unanticipated potential in its vast reserves of uranium, oil and natural gas. After these discoveries in the mid-20th century, Aktau was built in such a hurry that there wasn’t time for a centre to form. The result is a suburb in search of a city, each disparately geometric micro-district offering up street after street of high-rise breeze-block brutalism, punctuated by wide, empty squares and gleaming shopping malls.

The latest resource to be tapped is tourism. There is, in Aktau, the year-round skating rink (inside a shopping mall), the replica Arc du Triomphe that sits against the desert and the Caspian promenade, lined with hotdog and kebab vendors. But better are the natural wonders of greater Mangystau, which rival the greatest on Earth: the expanse of the Ustyurt desert, monolithic inselbergs, tiramisu-hued mesas and enough underground mosques to visit one every day for a year and not see them all.

To reach these sites — most of them located hundreds of miles inland from the Caspian, there are various local tour companies offering one- or multi-day trips into the desert. Some of them seem affected by a strange Soviet-style approach, wherein strictness is gilded with a certain screwball madness. A private jeep can run to £400 per person per day, while shared, single-day van trips are only around £25, including lunch.

One day, with seven other sightseeing Kazakhs, I took a van trip to visit the canyon of Bozzhyra. I sat between Nurman, an engineer from Almaty, and Zhanara, an administrator from Astana. Nurman thumped his broad chest: “Kazakh nation good; Kazakh strong; Kazakh noble.” These were statements, but also appeals to agree with him — which I did. There were also three university students from Aktau, each of them harbouring dreams of going to Canada. One had a friend who’d studied in Ottawa. “Oh Canada,” he said. “It is my dream.”

Soon we were cresting a plateau, and had a view over the flat basin we’d just crossed: a world of desolation, dominated by salt pans. Within Aktau, a heavy distribution of security cameras means that drivers are relatively sedate and cautious. Beyond city limits, however, things were different.

The flat, gold-on-green expanse that made up the vast steppe seemed to shake something loose that the city suppressed. We were moving at considerable speed, the van swaying as we switched lanes to overtake slower cars, buffeted by the whump of other vehicles going the opposite direction. None of the other passengers seemed fazed by this. If anything, they looked bored.

En route to Bozzhyra, we made a brief stop at the holy shrine of Beket-Ata. “This is the Mecca for Kazakh Muslims,” Zhanara said. The mosque is built into the rock of a mesa, the interior walls whitewashed and smooth, the ground covered in balding sheepskins and carpets. In a small antechamber, an imam sat beside the tomb of Beket-Ata. With women to one side, men to the other, he spoke his prayer, his voice hoarse with repetition.

Afterwards, over a picnic of plov, camel-milk sweets and tea, Zhanara told me she had been shaking. “It was mystical,” she said. As we walked back to the van, a camel, its front legs shackled, grazed with shuffling steps.

We sallied forth across the steppe, bouncing on a rough and winding dirt track. When the great chasm of Bozzhyra came into view, whatever sense of calm our driver had managed to cling to was abandoned. He turned the radio to some ear-splitting heavy metal, and steered with speedy intent towards a narrow peninsula jutting into the abyss. I looked around the van, and saw glee on the others’ faces. Were they insane? Had I accidentally boarded the Jonestown Express on its final voyage to the desert? Had the visit to Beket-Ata been to prepare our souls for the afterlife?

I wasn’t ready for this. I was sweating. We were on the peninsula, speeding right along the edge of the canyon, only a few metres from a 250-metre drop. We veered away, only to begin turning a tight circle that just narrowly cleared the drop on the other side of the cliff. The music blasted; the others danced in their seats. I wondered if the tea had been spiked with MDMA. Nurman sang, in falsetto, what sounded like a different song. “Dance!” he said, prying my hand from the seat back.

In the rear mirror, I could see mania in the driver’s eyes. I couldn’t die now, slipping off a cliff like a twit. There was too much to live for: red wine! Hashbrowns! The cool side of the pillow! I’d never read any of the Brontës!

The driver did one, two, three doughnuts, the van leaning as we span in circles, the others screaming in ecstasy. Finally, we came to a halt, the dust settling around us. 

I was first out of the van, my palms damp with sweat. It was my turn to shake, but with fear rather than mysticism. Even in that state, I had to admit, Bozzhyra was a sight.

The scale of it cannot be captured on film. It is the ancient floor of the Tethys Sea, and were it filled with water, the bottom would be beyond the point of light, a place of freak-fish and boat carcasses. The monolithic structures — ship mountain, fang mountain, yurt mountain — appear nearer, and therefore smaller, than they are. Looking to the bottom of the valley, one might estimate the scattered boulders to be human-sized, until a camel sidles near them and is dwarfed in comparison.

The rock itself was crumbling, like walking on 200-year-old Parmesan. The others either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. They were almost skipping to the cliff edge, as though height — and the risk of smashing to the ground far below — were completely unfamiliar concepts. They draped themselves in the Kazakh flag, pulling poses on the threshold of oblivion.

The Kazakhs had proved themselves to be a people of incredible tolerance. Tolerant of economic change, of foreigners, of even the prospect of death. They were optimistic too. As we piled back into the van, Nurman spotted an eagle high above us. We all looked up, shielding our eyes, searching for the circling figure. Finally, I saw it, a pinkish form against the blue. “A good sign,” Nurman said.

“Maybe it means I will go to Canada,” said one of the students. “What kind of car do you drive?”

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