Asia's Wild West

Susannah: A tiny, mountainous country, isolated Kyrgyzstan is a unique and charming mix of traditional Сentral Asian and Russian culture. It was here that I saw my first babushkas, with wizened faces smiling under colorful scarves, and enjoyed my first authentic bowl of Russian borscht with flat, delicious bread (a miracle after weeks of Chinese steamed buns). The scenery is spectacular, and the lives of the people who make their living off the land are fascinating.
We actually saw more of Kyrgystan's ugly post-soviet capital, Bishkek, than the lovely countryside, since we were forced to wait for a week there for our Uzbek visa. Arriving from Almaty late in the day, we discovered that the cheap hotel we were looking for had closed. Exhausted and nearing despair, we spotted two guys ambling toward us who were definitely not Krygyz. Mike sidled up to them and asked if they knew a good place to stay. "No," the older guy replied in a thick Australian twang, "but I have a friend who would. Are you hungry? We're having dinner down the street."

So began our fortunate and pleasureable friendship with three oil company guys posted in Bishkek. Over several nights of pizza and beer with John, a thirty-something Canadian, I came to appreciate his surprisingly nuanced (to me) views on environmentalism, development and his own role in the world. It didn't hurt, either, that his Kyrgyz right-hand-man found us a luxurious apartment for less than the price of a cheap hotel.

Our next stop was the turquoise waters of Lake Issykol, ringed by mountains, and the tiny city of Karakol. Here, our improbable companions were a young Peace Corps volunteer, Kay, and her Kyrgyz boyfriend Arabek. His mother gave us a taste of Kyrgyz hospitality, over steaming bowls of black tea sweetened with homemade fruit preserves and honey. We met a beekeeper the next day on the road, who pulled us into his house and insisted on filling a plastic bag bag with creamy honey for us straight out of the honey-churn.

On Saturday we got up at dawn to see Karakol's teeming animal market. We had just set out on our long walk when a horse cart appeared, headed to the market, and the driver motioned for us to take a seat next to his trussed-up sheep in the back. We lumbered along through the city streets and showed up at the market in style, already smelling ripe.

The market was full of real cowboys and farmers checking out each others' livestock, getting their horses shod, and buying their feed.

These guys, who at 8 in the morning had just completed a tipsy deal on this cow, insisted we take their photo to commemorate the happy event and their new friendship. You can see how proud the Russian guy is of his new bovine companion.

The next day, we headed with our Peace Corps friends up to a high mountain plateau to see an eagle hunt. At first we had thought there was some linguistic miscommunication, and that the Kyrgyz meant falcon hunt. But when we pulled up in the van to pick up the hunter and his bird, we discovered there was no mistake. If you've never shared a minivan with an uncaged eagle, you'll have to take our word for it that it was disconcerting. Struggling to keep its balance, it continually smacked the back of our heads with its wings. At one point it actually fell headfirst into the trunk, then proudly pretended it had never happened.

We had brought along a sweet grey bunny, scuffling nervously in a cardboard box in the front seat. When we reached the plateau, the hunter hooded the eagle and Anabek set the bunny down five hundred yards away. When the hood was removed, the eagle took off like a streak. The bunny never saw it coming.

In a real hunt this would all have happened on horseback, and the hunter would only have allowed the eagle a slice of the meat. But it was sobering to see the food chain before us so vividly. Apparently, the eagles often take down fox and even wolves!

On the way back to Bishkek to pick up our Uzbek visas, we stopped in a mountain town west of Lake Issykol and headed up into the hills to see the "real nomad life." We couldn't help laughing when our host family's yurt came into view:

Tourism aside, they really did graze a huge herd of sheep, goats, and cows, and even a couple yaks. While they cooked a sheep they'd just slaughtered, we headed out for a ride. I had never been on horseback aside from trail-riding on ponies, and was continually kicking the horse in a vain effort to get it to at least trot. Not until the yurt again came into view did it break into a gallop, and I let out a wild yell as we hurtled down the hill. Mike had slightly less trouble controlling his noble beast.

Back at the trailer/yurt, dinner was ready: boiled sheep, flat bread, and bowls of hot fat. A vegetarian before the trip began, I was a little disturbed by the sight of the sheep's head in the middle of the table, but gamely began to gnaw on the leg tossed on my plate. As the bones piled up on the table, I turned to Mike and whispered, "At first I thought nomad life was quaint--but it's actually barbaric!" (Mike, with most of a leg bone in his mouth and a sharp knife in his hand, could only grunt in reply.)

Raised on legends of cowboys living free and wild in an American west that has largely faded into myth, we had found the real thing alive and well in Asia.

Goodbye Mao, Hello Borat

Mike: It turns out that China is a lot harder to leave than it is to get into. When we applied for our Chinese visas in Bangkok, filling out forms in triplicate and then waiting around for days before forking over a hundred dollars each to have our passports adorned with the official stamp, we thought we were getting the hard part out of the way. Little did we know.

After exploring China's little known (but REALLY big) Xinjiang Province, we decided to take the train from Urumqi accross the border to Almaty, Kazakhstan. It sounded simple enough, but booking cross-border train tickets in China ain't easy for us foreign imperialist types. Rejected at the train station ticket window and several travel agencies, we eventually found ourselves in a hotel suite on the outskirts of town negotiating for tickets with a hulking Russian guy and his beanpole Uigur sidekick. After a frenzy of cacaphonic tri-lingual communication, we finally managed a breakthrough: they couldn't sell us tickets, either.

Finally, it was a small counter in the lobby of yet another hotel that saw us through. Tickets in hand, we triumphantly boarded an old Russian railcar for the two-day journey to Almaty. The other two berths in our compartment were taken by a Mongolian woman and a Chinese guy. We passed the miles in good spirits, exchanging stories (Tower of Babel, take two) and the food we'd packed. All was right with the world. Then, like that famous piece of refuse colliding with that famous fan, we trundled up to the Chinese border post.

We didn't expect trouble - we were leaving the country, after all, not trying to get in. Still, we should have known better. As the train ground to a halt, Chinese soldiers immediately climbed aboard, collected passports, and herded every European and North American aboard off the train and into a seperate building. There weren't many, just your faithful correspondents, three New Zealanders and a Norweigan. Good thing, because the soldiers brought each of us into a small room individually, with our luggage, and interviewed us for a minimum of 15 minutes each while they rifled through our bags.

Mike had an especially good time, since the Chinese were somehow aware of his checkered past as an imperialist military officer. It took over an hour for him to clear. He passed the time evading bizarre questions about his military service and watching a squad of the People's Liberation Army's finest look for secret documents sewn into his boxer shorts. If there's a transcript out there, part of it reads like this:

Chinese Officer: "You in army before, we know this. Yes?"

Mike: "Yes."

China: "Where in army you fight?"

Mike: "I fought with my sister sometimes, when I was a kid, but we get along great now."

(faint but audible rustle as socks are held up to the light by a teenage soldier, breathing loudly through his mouth)

China (after long silence): "You in army, yes? We know you in army."

After such hospitality, the Kazakh border was a glorious sight. We were also questioned by Kazakh officers - but all they wanted to know was why their Chinese counterparts kept giving westerners so much trouble, and they stopped by our compartment to ask their questions instead of confining us. Finally, after engineers changed the wheel guage on our train to accomodate the old Soviet-laid track to the north, we were on our way into Kazakhstan.




If Sasha Cohen's character Borat is your image of modern Kazakhstan, think again. Almaty's wide and leafy avenues, mountain vistas and European sensibilities felt cleansing after China's industrial, desert interior. As we arranged visas and plotted our onward journey to the Caspian Sea, and Istanbul beyond, we strolled through parks with locals decked out in western fashions bought with new petro-dollars and visited resplendant Russian Orthodox Churches.



At the famous Green Bazaar, we gawked at mountains of fresh meat and produce and indulged in heaping portions of laghman, the national dish of pulled noodles, vegetable sauce and meat.



Kazakhstan's largest city was the most vibrant place we'd visited since Shanghai. Still, despite the Italian fashions and French restaurants, we couldn't help singing a few lines from Borat's ficticious national anthem, written to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner:

"Kazakhstan is the Number One

Exporter of Potassium,

All other countries

Export inferior potassium!"

China's Inland Empire

It's obvious enough from a glance at the map that China is an exceptionally large nation, stretching from the Pacific to the mountainous ramparts of the Pamirs. But to truly appreciate just how damn big it is, there's nothing like crossing the country by train. Only when you've spent an entire day and night sitting on a bench in a packed rail car full of rural Chinese, with many people standing in the aisles or slumped on their luggage, does all that colored map space really sink in. It took us the better part of a week to make our way from Beijing to Kazakhstan, traversing Xinjiang's deserts in the hoof-prints of the old silk road camel caravans. Along the way, we discovered one of the world's most overlooked Islamic communities, the Uigurs.

In some important ways, a very large amount of that colored map space representing China isn't very Chinese at all. A massive percentage of China's land mass is found in its two westernmost provinces, Tibet and Xinjiang. In our travels through both places, we found the majority of people speaking non-Chinese languages, following non-Chinese religions, eating non-Chinese food, wearing non-Chinese clothes and generally going about their lives in a very non-Chinese way. (All of this, it goes without saying, happens under the attentive supervision of some very Chinese officials and police). There are some pretty obvious complications that result from this arrangement, and we discussed them at some length here and here during our travels in Tibet and in the Tibetan exile community in India.



While Xinjiang's Uigur Muslim majority hasn't found itself in the spotlight (or under the gun) to the extent their southern neighbors have, they do face a similar situation in many respects. Separatist movements have arrisen here on a number of occasions, only to be crushed. Still, despite the political tension and riot police patrolling the streets, life in Xinjiang's villages adheres to a rhythm much older than the town clocks chiming on Beijing time. Mao's face still appears occasionally, but the heart and soul of Xinjiang is the call to prayer echoing in the early morning, and the afternoon light filtering through grape trellises to illuminate the mud-walled alleys.