Western Kazakhstan has desert, camels, awesome dairy products, some more desert, oil, more desert, and the city of Aktau. First stop: the supermarket. I was excited to see Tan, Central Asia’s salty sour carbonated milk drink that is ever so refreshing on a hot summer day. After downing a bottle, we joined a couple of hitchhikers from the ferry to find a campsite. Our accommodation was the parking lot of an unidentifiable building, which we only found out was a judo academy when we were woken up the next morning by dozens of kids in judo uniforms.
As we ate our bread and cheese breakfast outside of a supermarket, I sent a few Couchsurfing requests and was delighted to receive a near instant reply from Aigul, who agreed to host all 4 of us in her extra apartment. Normally she rents it to tourists, but when she has no paying guests, she lends it to couchsurfers. Wonderful people like this exist all over the world, and we were lucky to meet one right away. Having a full kitchen is an exciting thing for a traveler, so we did a lot of cooking and eating. The next 3 days were spent trying to get visas to Turkmenistan (a country nearly as closed as North Korea, and when we finally managed to get visas, the border closed for no apparent reason), going to the beach, and hanging out with some other local Couchsurfers – Dina and Rassul. Thanks to the amazing people of Couchsurfing, our experience in Aktau was very positive.
We hit the road after a long break, directly into a strong headwind. This was the first of 7 difficult days of desert riding. The next day, headwind again. Third day, headwind again. At least the terrain varied a bit, and this desert had some interesting rock formations and plenty of camels to look at. At one point, we decided to hitchhike, and got a ride for about 25 km in a pickup truck. This was the highlight of those 3 days as the driver took us to a cafe and ordered shubat (fermented camel milk). It’s surprisingly good.
In the town of Shetpe, we found a very awkward host on Warm Showers, the Couchsurfing analog for cyclists. Bauirzhan works as an English teacher and asked if we’d introduce ourselves in his class that evening. He abruptly said “I should leave because they won’t speak English if I’m here,” and disappeared to watch TV for the next 1.5 hours. After over an hour of drawn out introductions, we realized that he wasn’t coming back to teach the class…awkward. That, in addition to an uncomfortable supermarket experience where he left the clerk to tell us that we’re footing his bill, the unwelcoming vibe from his family, and his constant asking questions and ignoring the answers, made us happy to get back on the road.
Our fourth day of cycling was certainly the most interesting, through a dramatic desert landscape with a labyrinth of canyons and bright white rocks that formed a giant natural playground. It was well worth a detour down a sandy unpaved road to get a closer look at Tuzbair, a salt lake surrounded by impressive natural sculptures.
From there, we had a treacherous ascent up to the top of a plateau where everything interesting about the previous landscape abruptly ceased. At least we encountered more friendly people, and some construction workers invited us for delicious soup and tea in their cafeteria. They told us they had built 60 km of road in the last 5 years…efficiency at its finest.
40 km facing a headwind in this boring new landscape was enough and we soon boarded a train to Beyneu, the last town before the Uzbek border. As we walked towards the train, one man seemed overly excited to help us get our bikes on the train as quickly as possible, so we followed him. It’s sometimes hard to tell when people are doing things because they really want to help or because they want something from you, but in retrospect, this was clearly the second. It turns out this man was the ticket controller for that wagon and he got excited by the prospect of collecting a bribe from rich tourists. As soon as the train began moving, he told me to have a seat in his cabin, where he immediately turned to me with a stern look on his face and asked how much I was going to pay him. I had genuinely thought we could buy tickets on the train, but quickly realized that this wasn’t an option.
“Listen, we got your bikes on the train, and we let you both on even though there’s only one space left, we could get in trouble for this, so how about $20?”
“A ticket costs $1.50. We’ll pay that.”
“We don’t sell tickets, we can get in trouble, you can give us $15.”
It continued on like that for a while until I finally bargained him down to $5, and later realized that I had been wrong about the price and we had bribed him less than the cost of an actual ticket. Win-win situation.
The next stretch of road after Beyneu is legendary among cyclists for being the world’s shittiest road, but due to a falsely forecasted tailwind, we decided to dive into the adventure the next morning. Wow, was that a mistake. What had been pavement decades ago had eroded into a series of waves and potholes (not sure if I can call them potholes when they’re so much bigger than pots…maybe elephantholes?) buried under a thick layer of dust. Nine hours of splitting headaches and dozens of mouthfuls of dust later, we hit our 60 km mark at the only village before the border. Finally, a place where we could give up and take the train.
Or not. The train pulled up to the station at 4am and we wheeled our bikes down to the last car where we were told we could board. The door was locked so we went to the next door. Also locked. And the next, also locked. As we approached the door where people had just come out of, the train pulled away. That was that, fate had us biking the full 85 km.
Fueled by a pack of instant noodles, we hit the road as the sun poked up on the horizon. It was nice riding at this time of morning, less traffic, less heat, and a peaceful energy descended upon us (well, as peaceful as you can get when your brain is constantly rattling around in your skull). Three hours later we pulled up to the border with the most beautiful sight in front of us. Asphalt! With only one major crack per square meter! We had reached paradise! The border crossing was a breeze and the Uzbek side brought another comfort which we had been missing for the past week: WiFi! Wow, what a good first impression Uzbekistan was giving us. We happily rode the remaining 20 km to the first Uzbek village, where we bought a train ticket to bypass most of the desert on the most awesome train ride of my life. More about that soon.
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