Up before dawn to catch the ride to Charyn Canyon. When you read about this region, that and Big Almaty Lake are the most-frequently mentioned natural wonders. I’m not super sporty, but I kind of feel like I can’t say I’ve seen the place without having experienced the actual landscape. Almaty has been welcoming, but its character isn’t radically different from many other cities with emerging economies.
It’s possible with more time, I could tease out its distinctness, but through the window I have it feels like it’s the usual formula for a suddenly free and open country. The big companies have a starter-kit for you. It smells like coffee and fried chicken, and you’re going to love it.
This feels especially true in the places the Soviets totally trashed when they were in charge. When everything local got bulldozed and replaced with austere government buildings long ago, you’re not really losing anything personal when an Aeropostal moves into the old Ministry of Rocks. You miss the pumpkin market the Ministry replaced, but that’s long gone. You don’t miss the ministry.
And so… I wanted to see the natural world, the things it was too hard to bulldoze or commercialize.
The road to Big Almaty Lake was being “winterized,” so Charyn Canyon it was. My driver’s name was Roman, and he collected me right on time. On the way out of the city, he pointed out a monument I had missed, a large bronze of two girls holding hands. “They die in Great Patriotic War,” he said. “Many small people help to explode, how to say, in Russian the word is ‘tank.’
I had read this. In WWII, retreating soldiers would “deputize” a village. They’d be like, “Hey, farmer, some tanks are following us, but they’re not our tanks, they’re the bad guys. Here’s some explosives. When these tanks roll through, have your daughter roll under them with the explosives, ok? Yeah, the ones I just gave you. What’s a tank? You’ll know it when you see it. What? No, she won’t survive it, you’re being ridiculous. But it’s better than having a bunch of tanks rolling over your pumpkins, you know. Or us. All right, gotta go. Remember what I told you.”
They were often successful, these villagers. Got a reputation as “tank busters.” And a statue. Of course it made me think of the amazing monument from yesterday with the people bursting out of the enormous bronze Russia.
A huge traffic jam of folks were heading into the city as we were heading out. Smooth sailing for us, but what looked like at least an hour of delay for them. “The morning commute,” Roman told me the villages around Almaty have no work, so everyone who can comes to the city for an eight-hour shift sandwiched between two-hour commutes on either side. Sandwich types.
He spoke for while on the expense of cars and some interesting notes on the local economy, what things cost. I noticed chickens on the side of the highway, an interesting collision of urban and rural life.
I asked him about some spelling differences I'd noticed. On billboards and such, I would often see "Qazaqstan" and a neighborhood called Zhibek Zholy was wildly diverse with variants like Jibek Joly and Gibek Golie, etc.
He told me they're trying to convert from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet, and they have their own ancient one, so a lot of the Latinization is phonetic and it's also incredibly expensive to change all the signs. Adding to that, the recent change of the capital's name from Astana to Nur-Sultan has had a huge cost. It's very interesting to me, these things. You want the Latin alphabet to attract Western interests, but it means you have to repaint a lot of road signs, not to mention spend a fortune on reprinting your business cards!
We stopped for breakfast in a Uighur village. The shortcut often used to describe the Uighur people is the "Chinese Muslims." It's pronounced "we-GOOR." Or that's how I hear it, anyway. An interesting history deeply tied into the history of this region. Like, say, the Kurds, they are a large stateless ethnic group. They live here and, mostly, in Western China. In the last several decades, they have suffered much persecution for their religious beliefs.
East of here, across the border, are many "reeducation camps." It's just another atrocity the Western world has trouble keeping up with. Who has time, when the reality-show presidency and Brexit are so entertaining. The suffering of people you've never heard of are one of the channels your cable package came with that you mean to get around to watching sometime but don't.
Roman greedily smoked a cigarette outside the little cafe. I had an egg and some instant coffee. When I got back outside, he said he had hoped I was going to be late this morning, so he could smoke, but I had been on time and cheated him out of his cigarette. This was all good-natured. "I was so happy when you want breakfast," he said, "It meant smoking time for me."
We pressed on. Long, smooth stretch of road on a Chinese-built highway. Kazakhstan has no manufacturing, and everything comes in from next door. It's one of the reasons beyond the ideological that the Uighur are being displaced. Easier to build routes for the trucks full of nail clippers and plastic harmonicas if the locals aren't raising kids where you want to pave the road.
Pretty, though unvaried countryside. In the distance, the Tian Shan mountains. Long stretches of cultivated fields. Gold and yellow without much green. Roman told me most of the farmers were Uighur. Kazakhs, he said, "do not grow up."
This made me think of Peter Pan, of course, but context led me to understand "grow up" meant "cultivate and harvest crops." Kazakhs were traditionally nomads and didn't develop a farming culture. So they didn't "grow up" wheat or corn or anything.
"Except apples," I said, "right? I had a wonderful apple yesterday at a farmer's market."
"No," he said, "We used to have apple trees. Long ago, scientist pull the DNA from apple to prove they are from here, but Russians try to stop the drinking, make stupid law to stop the drinking, and they cut down all fruit trees to prevent the making of drink from fruits."
That was the sickle, but then the hammer fell: "The apple you eat yesterday was probably from Poland. Most apple here we get from Poland."
Well, I just about died. I had eaten one of the Father of Apples' bastards.
I was quiet after that, and he asked if he could listen to music. I said of course. "In this place not work radio," he said, "so I use my toy." He had some sort of MP3 player that plugged into the lighter. We listened to piano versions of Metallica songs for a few miles. It was very funny to me. Sometimes I would sing the lyrics where they belonged, and he would say, "I know you expect here, but no words coming. Only more piano."
As we raced through a small village, he asked me to notice that the doors of the homes stood open. "Is tradition," he said, "Open door mean happy home." Later, he saw an eagle hunting in a roadside field. "It wants the mouse," he said, "all eagle want mouse. He is small, because we are near the hills. The closer the mountain, the smaller the eagle."
The closer the mountain, the smaller the eagle. How badly I wanted that to be an aphorism. It deserved metaphorical meaning like an eagle deserves a mouse.
We passed a pretty building which I thought Roman said had symmetry. But it was a cemetery. There was a donkey tied to a tree next to the cemetery gate. "There is a hard worker," Roman said, "What is English word for this?" I said donkey, and he said "In Russian is 'asshole.'" I brayed like an ass upon hearing this.
Later, I looked it up. The Russian word for donkey is "osel." Amazing.
We passed a battlefield of some significance. It was a place where the Kazakhs had fought the ancestors of the Uighur long ago. The Uighur were too fierce, so the Kazakhs asked neighboring Russia to help. Russia helped, then helped itself to Kazakhstan. That's how they got here. From mercenaries to masters.
Charyn Canyon was everything they say in the guide books. A massive gorge carved out by glacial melt, soaring castle-like stones, high rock walls. It's cliche to say it felt sacred, but... I spend so little time in nature that it felt special to me. I was often awestruck by prehistoric watermarks and the... weight of the place. We were almost entirely alone. In summer, there are busloads of tourists, but here in autumn it was deserted.
You can camp there, and we came across some Latvian (my best guess) teens who were. They played guitar and sang like a buncha hippies. "They have much monies," said Roman, "but they do not spend."
He asked why I wasn't taking many pictures, and I was embarrassed to tell him the focus was fucked up, and I had been unable to fix it. He took the camera from me, touched a button, and it was fixed. Just like that. I was very grateful. I have always relied on the kindness of Kazakhs. After that I took many pictures.
We took a "shortcut" back involving a long, steep climb up "stairs" formed by kicks from previous climbers' boots. I reached my physical limit and felt amazing. Worn out in a way that felt earned. At the top, I saw a mouse. In my exhausted state, we were both easy pray for eagles of any size.
Roman asked if I wanted to "catch any throats." I waited for context clues. He said he loved to catch throats and that many lakes nearby were stocked with them. You catch and they cook. Trouts. Throats were trouts.
We stopped for lunch at a small cafe instead. Hand-torn noodles and grilled meats.
On the drive back, we passed an old Soviet bus stop. I asked if we could stop to photograph it, and he agreed. He had been so nice, and it was safe to stop, but for some reason I had expected him to say no. Because I wanted it so badly.
Four or five years ago, traveling in Poland (land of apples!) and the Baltics (land of hippies!), I was fascinated by the many abandoned bus stops. Someone, I thought, should make a project of photographing these old Soviet relics before they fall down. Someone had, many people have. When, at the very next place I stayed, there was a giant art book of them, I tore through it.
I am always on the lookout for them when I travel, but it's never worked out that I can stop to see one, touch one. They are in remote places, it's hard to get a bus to stop (ironically), they've been trashed, etc.
But here one was. And it was spectacular with fading mosaics of a stag, a falcon, and turbaned worshipers. Roman was amused by my reverence and suggested I sit in it, then pretend I was hitchhiking. I did these things unapologetically.
On the way to Lake Issyk, he asked me why I liked it so much. In the aftermath of my excitement, I felt a little guilty for fetishizing them, but my appreciation is honest. I told him, for me, there was something beautifully lonely about them; they suggest possibility and connection but also distance and isolation. Also, the shape and design of them is often unique, and since they aren't active, they often pop up by surprise.
He seemed to understand and told me he knew where many more were, but not near here. A dream tour for another time.
We stopped for an hour or so at the very beautiful Lake Issyk. So blue! The snow-peaked mountains ringed it so ringingly! Some Koreans were filming a wedding video there. It was cute to watch them change costumes. Roman said it was a common thing in Korea to make up a story about how couples meet and to dramatize it with a short movie starring the couple to show at the wedding. I love that idea.
He asked if I was ready to go home, and I wanted to make a joke like, "I sick of Issyk," but I felt like it maybe wouldn't translate and the time for jests was o'erthrown. Instead I thanked him and said yes, I was ready to go.
On the drive back to Almaty, we saw the long line of villagers driving home.
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