Round One

Kellen Smetana
Kazakhstan verrry niiice! – Borat Sagdiyev

In case you weren’t sure, I can confirm that Kazakhstan is not accurately depicted in the movie Borat.  The quote, however, is spot on; Kazakhstan is a very nice country.  It was another place I thought I would simply breeze across en route to Kyrgyzstan, but I have been blown away by the beautiful riding here.  And fortunately, that was only the first round.  Kazakhstan is the only country I will visit a second time as I head west out of Uzbekistan.

Will be glad to return

At the border we could immediately tell we were in quite a different place.  It’s even evident in everyone’s faces; Kazakhstan is populated primarily by Kazakhs and Russians.  This means that without the bikes or our passports, we no longer stand out of the crowd as everyone simply assumes we are Russian ("Ia nye gavariou pa rouski” – I don’t speak Russian, picked that one up pretty quickly…).

With our passports and bikes crossing the border though, we were still a novelty and three of the guards approached me to ask, “Amerika?  California?  California!?!”  “No, no,” I responded, “Michigan!!  Amerika, Michigan!”  And my enthusiasm was so contagious that the guard from the fifth checkpoint even marched ahead to the guard from the sixth checkpoint to prepare him, “Amerika!  Michigan!!”  I just smiled, pointed out the location names on my passport, and secretly hoped the next American crossing the border here gets a “Michigan?... Michigan!?!” interrogation.

The guards also had a good chuckle at my last name.  Throughout Central Asia, people, especially those educated in Soviet times, speak Russian as well as the country’s titular language (e.g. Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen); so this means that, as at the Kazakh consulate in Urumqi, people always get a hearty laugh whenever I tell them my last name (see Team page).  It seems to be a good icebreaker and I’m loving it so far.

Smetana in Cyrillic

Finally through our first border in over two months, we noticed a second difference on the road.  Every vehicle is either a pastel-colored Lada or a late 80s German car.  To our complete delight, traffic was light, nobody honked, and people actually respect traffic laws!

Lots of Ladas

And the final difference was most appreciated in the evening: no people.  There was hardly anyone living near the road and our horizon was a sheet of beautiful open, unused fields as far as the eye can see: a far cry from China, where every non-desert region had land utilization that was beyond astonishing.

Unused land!

In our ride across the corner of Kazakhstan, we crossed one of only two mountain ranges in the country.  The vast majority of Kazakhstan, the world’s ninth largest country, is open grassland steppe.  This meant that the country was the site of the last great nomadic empire before falling to the Soviet sphere of influence in the late 19th century.  Even today we saw wild horses roaming the empty fields.  And it also means that this area is prone to churning weather patterns as winds whip pressure fronts across the open steppe.  For the first time in a while, we’ve had rain every day, but only in intense one-hour sideways downpours that clear as quickly as they arrive.

These horses are slightly more civilized

Caution: Stormy weather ahead

On our route to Kyrgyzstan we climbed two passes, picked up two flats (both me), stopped for a swim in Lake Qapshaghay, and ate our first doner kebabs of the trip.  It was a “verrry niiiice” week in the most well-known country of Central Asia and I’m looking forward to returning a second time.