Getting deep into the heart of Kazakhstan, overnight on the train ... So far, so good, well ... read on
This country has gone through a lot of positive changes since gaining official independence in 1991. The place is clean and relatively organized, and the people seemed quite good-natured. They immediately notice that we are not locals, and have been consistently curious about where we are from.
The buildings here in the capital are on a rather grand scale, with exaggerated Soviet style architecture and wide boulevards. In the picture below, the building was so big I could only get half of it in the frame.
After we spent the whole day walking around and seeing the sights in Almaty, we finished up the day by heading to the train station. We were on our way to Turkistan, a distant city in a different region of the country. A note about the name: Most places ending with "stan" are countries, but our destination was a town in a place that used to be almost like a country back in the old days.
It was late at night and it started to rain. The train trip to Turkistan was going to take twelve hours, but we had tickets that included a sleeping cabin with two beds. It turned out to be a nice compartment, with service minded staff. After a rocky start, we left the station and rode off into the night.
It was indeed a long trip. You'd better have a good book or two, which we did. Traveling by train can be relaxing to the point of boring(?) but we made the best of it, and since we were so darn tired, we slept all night until 6:30 in the morning, when the train stopped to load and unload some passengers.
We had still had some time to kill so I went down to explore the dining car, and soon we actually enjoyed a nice breakfast, of four cups of coffee, three eggs each, a bunch of bread, and some kind of meat of undetermined origin. And since everything in this country is inexpensive, the breakfast only cost around six dollars for the two of us.
We arrived at Turkistan at 9:30 and were met there at the train station by our guide for the next couple days, and we went to check in at our hotel. It was a Soviet style block building that looked rather foreboding. It turned out to be just that. I'll expand on that story in a moment.
We had a full day of exploring to do, so we set off right away. There are some spectacular ancient buildings within walking distance and we made our way across the dry (and increasingly hot) landscape. It can get pretty hot in this region of Kazakhstan, as we found out later in the day.
Upon close inspection, the tiles coating the large structures are hand painted, and seem to last forever in this dry climate. This one pictured below is about eight inches across. It was placed on the outside wall in the year 1475.
This part of the world is one of the most remote and little known on planet earth. When you walk up to a gigantic structure built in the 1500's, on a wind-swept, sweltering, empty, arid wasteland, you wonder - who built this in the first place and why? Why here? What great civilizations have existed and vanished and most people never heard of them?
Okay, that's a lot of unanswered rhetorical questions, but that stuff does cross your mind. It took twenty years to build this using thousands of captured slaves from all over Central Asia. And despite the sands of time and a history of conflict, it still stands.
Not to mention, how did they pull this off? Kind of like the pyramids of Egypt, just how did they have the engineering and construction know-how to get this done?
There is a lot of ancient history involved in these structures and this region. But the pictures help tell the story. This is why you travel - or at least why we travel.
So back to the Hotel in Turkistan ... This is not why you travel
Okay let's be honest, our hotel looks like a Russian prison. We get to our room on the fourth floor, walking up the stairs. There are two elevators, but we are told they haven't worked in years. The room looks serviceable, at least the air conditioning works, or on second thought the controls don't work, but it's running.
We promptly leave on an all day walking tour. We spent the day on a walking tour of the town of Turkistan, and after visiting the old ruins and fortifications, we made our way through the local bazaar.
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Upon our return to the hotel at the end of the day, we enter our room and it smells like a sewer. Really bad. I go into the bathroom to have a look and I flush the toilet, and it backs up into the shower. The sink also backs up. (Side note to my fellow Americans - and I've said this before - we have the best plumbing in the world).
And when I look at the drinking glass on the bathroom sink, it has a huge jagged break with open shards, and it's filthy and there is some kind of hideous liquid in the bottom of the glass.
So I'm still thinking I can cope with this and I will grab a towel and clean up the water coming out of the bottom of the toilet, and notice that we are supplied with only one small towel. If I use it to clean up, then we have nothing for our stay. All in all, the room is disgusting.
Okay, that's enough of this grief, I'm gonna go down to the desk and tell these guys we want another room. Only, as I'm walking down the four flights of stairs, I realize they will not be able to speak English and I can't speak Kazak and will probably get nowhere. So I try anyway and the front desk clerk just stares at me.
Long story short, we are able to find our guide who instantly assumes the role of international diplomatic negotiator, trying to get these morons to move us to another room. They are not having it, "so your room smell like poop and there are no enough towel and there is sewage on floor and you have broken glass with disease and disgusting unsanitary issue ... so, what is the problem?"
After haggling and kicking up a fuss, we finally get another room. So we move our stuff over the new room and the maintenance guy starts jamming a steel rod down into the sink because it is stopped up with cigarette butts. Is this an improvement?
We get down to the lobby to go out for our dinner and the front desk jerk says, what happened to the towel in your room? I tell him "we took it to the other room, because there are two people and one small towel doesn't cut it."
And our tour guide (still acting on our behalf) says, "just let them use it as a token for their inconvenience", and the hotel staff guys says rather indignantly, "what about my inconvenience - I had to move them to another room!"
They have a long way to go in terms of customer service. Oh well, it's only one night here.
Tomorrow we move on to another distant city, Shymkent, near Uzbekistan. Then at the end of the day, we take another overnight train ride back to Almaty, so the next blog post is a couple days away.
