Almaty – TRAVELTRUNK.NET

‘There are bullet trains in Uzbekistan?’, I peered at the online site where the man was booking the train tickets in Uzbekistan. The Afrosiyob’s nose, a long haughty one at that, stretched out low and sleek over the rails. It would be an experience by itself! The man’s charter was to get us in and around Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and mine to do the accommodation, so I could not crib about it. Planning a trip through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan was a breeze. Connectivity with Samarkand and Bukhara, the stars of the fabled Silk Route, was aplenty. But getting to Khiva, an oasis of blue beauty and elm pillars on a limb across the Kyzlykum desert, was proving to be a challenge, till we came across an overnighter from Tashkent. It was a winning trifecta – accommodation, travel and food! The train sounded much like our own, slower, more ponderous, different classes but with a dining car. I love the idea of dining cars. A restaurant on the move…. We were to discover the best journeys were not on the bullet trains!

Stationed

We are not sure of the exact location of the station as there are more than one in Tashkent, so we head to it early … Very early. The arched façade is modern and nondescript but announces itself in big letters and there is a security check near the entrance. Inside the main hall, metal chairs are laid out in neat rows. There are a few kiosks selling knick-knacks, a luggage room, a very fancy paid waiting room and the loos. They are Indian style with plastic goglets for water!

People wait outside under a covered waiting area. They do not seem to mind the heat. The platform stayed deserted save for one train’s departure in the time that we were there. A small bakery outlet is stocked with flaky puff pastries, naan and such like things. Like good travellers catering for contingencies, and what can be more calamitous than being hungry on an overnight train, we stock up.

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Cozy Cabins and Tepid Teacups

The train rolls in just a few minutes before departure. With its olive green, white and golden colouring and spit polish shine it looks like a military special straight from Russia! The stairs unfold down and the staff is at hand to check our tickets and guide us. We have booked a cabin. Inside, the berths are thickly padded and covered with rich covers. The windows have blackout curtains and are tinted. All my photographs on the move have, what I call an ‘Uzbek filter’, a pinkish brown tint. The compact cabins seem to have no space under the seats for the luggage. A lady sharing our cabin tells us to stow our luggage overhead in a narrow opening over the passage. The man has a lot of heavy lifting to do. We settle in and are off on the dot.

There is a samovar dispensing scalding hot water near the inner door. Tea must be the national drink given the copious quantities drunk, especially along with meals and it seems to be a done thing to carry your own ubiquitous blue and white china. We are also carrying our tea bags but no cups. On the return journey I am tut-tutted for being so ill-prepared for the journey and then being given a cup by the attendant. Why I wanted tea when the air conditioning had gone kaput and we were like sodden tea bags ourselves is beyond me.

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Hearty Hospitality

Come dinner time and we head for the dining car. It is small, basic but clean, all in vinyl. The lady incharge seems to run it with crisp efficiency. Some of the staff is crammed into one table and making short work of a mound of plov (or Pulao as we know it). We are greeted with big smiles. The main guard is the only one who knows a smattering of English and as he strikes up a conversation, I eye the dinner. The plov is looking tempting. With unabashed curiosity we are asked where we are from. The smiles get bigger and more heartfelt when we say India. They seem genuinely happy and excited to have Indians onboard. We settle down and I promptly ask for beer and the Laghman soup which has been on my menu, and I am delighted it is on theirs’s, and the plov as well. The smile on the lady’s face dims. The dish I have eyed is meant only for the staff. Oh! Okay! We understand. An exchange in Uzbeki ensues between her and the men. As we sip our beer, a big bowl of the soup fetches up. It has vegetables and broth and for me anything soupy in a bowl is soul food.

Just as we are about to dig in the lady returns and sets down a bowl of…plov with a smile and a nod towards the staff. The big burly guard says something in Uzbeki with a smile. He has sent a portion of their dinner to us. It is a little embarrassing but the men are just all smiles and insist, happy to share their dinner. It had looked delicious and it is! Greasy but so flavourful. The best I have on my trip to the land of the plov! Belly full and the heart warmed up with the gesture, we return to the cabin. Thank God for the air-conditioning! The cabin is upholstered for Siberian winters and not Indian summer-like temperatures.

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Morning reveals a stark landscape- towering dunes, sand and scrub till we cross the timeless Amu Darya lined with reeds, emptying into a sea that has dried. The change from one bank to the other is dramatic. It gets greener as the miles roll till we reach Khiva. It’s station is a miniature version of Tashkent’s. The hotels lining the boulevard in front look like a mirage of a movie set. Plush and exotic. Letting off a faint aroma are basil bushes lining the path. Naturally, curious me cannot help but surreptitiously taste a leaf. Feel like a goat and probably looked like one while I was at it!

Time Travelling

Done exploring Uzbekistan’s opulent offerings we head over to the country of wild landscape, Kazakhstan, crossing the border on foot. A windy car ride to Shymkent through the rolling steppes follows. Our train to Almaty is in the evening and after booking our luggage at the Shymkent station we explore the town.

In the evening the platform is choc-o-block full by the time the train arrives. The interiors look very well maintained and the staff is courteous. There seem to be only coupes in our bogey. The daughter has a university student returning back to Almaty for company and we don’t see her till the next morning. Our coupe is brightly lit, the berth is wide and the linen crisp. With a small wash basin, hangers in a narrow cupboard and a full-length mirror, it is more than comfortable. There is no need to step out but the dining car has to be explored.

The chrome, Robin egg blue and sweet orange vinyl combination gives the dining chaircar the look of a diner from the 60’s! Just a jukebox, Jackie-O bobs and mini shift dresses seem to be missing. The bar counter is long and chilled beer is served on the glass and as the moon sails over the silhouettes of moulded hills we gently sway and wind our way between them to Almaty. We are in no hurry to head back to our cabin, from this full restaurant on the move….

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While the places on the ancient Silk Route more than lived up the hype, the warmest interactions were on these modern caravans with the charm and hospitality harking back to another era. The slower trains and the people they carried turned out to be as memorable and worth experiencing as much as the destinations they connected.

Fact File-

1. Uzbekistan has three types of trains- The Afrosiyobs which run between Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara. The slower Sharq between the same cities. The overnight sleeper on the longer routes.

2. A faster day train has been recently introduced between Tashkent and Khiva but it does not run everyday.

3. Booking for all the trains can be done online.

4. We travelled 1^st class on all the overnight trains.

‘Thank you Mithun Chakroborty!’, exclaimed the daughter, holding her giant chocolate piece up as trophy outside a clothing store in a mall in Almaty. A manna from heaven after two hours of trying to hunt for a measly jacket in mild desperation in the wrong place. (There were only shops selling very expensive knock offs of obscure, for me, Italian designers!) The owner of this last one where we had walked in was a Mithun fan who could not seem to believe his luck that people from the land of the ‘Disco Dancer’ had come to his store, perhaps for the first time and so had promptly offered a chocolate to the daughter who till this trip had no idea of ‘Jimmy Jimmy’ Chakroborty.

Kazakhstan was added to the holiday itinerary as an appendage I felt, with just two days in Almaty and half a day in Shymkent while crossing over from Uzbekistan. But even though it was no more than ‘dipping the toes’, we got a glimpse of a land that was exactly as one had imagined it to be- wild and vast!

Horsepower

While driving from the border to Shymkent the scenery unfolds a golden, sometimes green, gentle slope at a time. We speed in a vintage Soviet era red Mercedes with the windows down at 140km per hour (It is a wonder my scalp didn’t fly off!) When I ask how do I get the windows up, the driver takes out a rotating handle from the glove compartment with great enthusiasm…

Shymkent is a leafy well laid out city and we have a few hours to spare. The sprawling War Memorial Park is where we head to. Besides a MIG that looks poised to take off and other war machinery, there are endless rows of names of soldiers who died in World War II on a low wall. Later, we catch a very nice train and rock and wind our way through the night to reach Almaty spread on the lower slopes of snow-capped mountains early in the morning.

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Buttery Cathedrals and Cheesecakes

Since our Airbnb is not going to be available till couple of hours later, we leave our luggage at the station. After fortifying ourselves with coffee and snacks from a convenience store nearby, we drive to Panfilov Park. It is like a forest in the middle of the city and we walk down a wide path, crossing well-dressed old women with their tiny pooches, young mothers pushing prams and the odd jogger, in the backdrop we can hear church bells peeling. In a large sunny square stands the buttercup yellow Zenkov cathedral.

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The mirrored crucifixes on top of the wooden church catch the morning rays brilliantly. It sounds and looks like something from a fairytale. Inside this Russian orthodox church Sunday Mass is on and we join in for a bit. The singing is haunting and uplifting at the same time. Later we have the most delicious, melt in the mouth cheesecake, probably home baked, from a stall outside.

War and Glory

A short path leads to the Memorial of Glory, the war memorial. It is a dramatic brutalist composition of men charging. They seem to burst out of the very stone they are hewn from. An eternal flame burns nearby in memory of World War II heroes. We take a taxi to the Central Mosque. It’s dome is shiny new, having being built in 1999 in a post-Soviet era revival of religious roots, but after the opulent ones in Uzbekistan it seems a rather drab affair.

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Fresh Greens

The Green Market is close by which is the go-to place for all kind of shopping. Apart from colourful fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, there are mounds of dry fruits and a whole section dedicated to dairy products including produce from mare’s milk. The caviar looks tempting and surprisingly, thanks to a large Korean population resettled here by the Russians in the 1930s, there is an entire row of women doling out Korean food. It is a feast!

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Art Everywhere

We miss a cable car ride up to Kok Tobe Hill in our wild goose chase for a jacket early in the evening. (Had been told about great and reasonable winterwear available here so in all ‘wiseness’ did not carry one for the daughter!) The rest of the evening is spent at the lively pedestrian Zhebik Zholy Street with its musicians and art stalls on the pavement, and eateries crowded with youngsters and families on the sides. We take the metro to return to our apartment. The chandeliered stations are like nuclear bunkers deep down in the bowls, with vertigo inducing escalators.

Of Steppes, Steep Canyons and Sunken Mountains

It is an early start to a long day in the countryside on a guided trip the next day. We head down the slopes of Almaty and speed through an expansive countryside. There are fields of maize with snow-capped mountains as backdrop on one hand and on the other, the fields roll till a bare horizon.

We cross small cemeteries with miniature monuments, villages with mounds of pumpkins till we start winding up a gentle multi-hued slope. Then the road unrolls through flat land that is heating up to create mirages. The hills in the distance look suspended in the air. We cross golden eagles sitting on the ground. One can just imagine horses in full gallop here…

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Soon the land start to break up and we reach Charyn Canyon. Drained by a namesake river that originates from the Tian Shan mountains, it has over millions of years eroded the red sandstone earth to create this canyon. We explore only a small portion, descending down a gentle gully and scrambling up a narrow shortcut. A scampering gerbil is the only wildlife we spot. A Korean with us plans to camp the night here and will rejoin the next day’s tour. The narrower Black Canyon cleaved by the same river upstream is our next stop. (No prizes for guessing the colour of the stone there!) We miss seeing the rare Sogdian Ash trees that are only found here.

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In the distance mountains rim the flat land and we cross small herds of horses and solitary ones peacefully grazing, and bales of hay being collected around small villages. We reach Saty village in a valley where we leave our comfortable minibus and get into a matador that does not look like it has seen better days but serves the purpose as we canter up a dirt road going into the mountains and rock and roll through streams lined with seabuckthorn. The last couple of kilometres are an option of a horse ride, a hike or a quick jeep ride up to Kaindy lake.

With white needle-like dead spruce trees piercing the lake’s aqua surface, it makes a pretty picture in a bowl of steep mountains covered with conifer trees. The lake owes its existence to a landslide in 1911. We hike back to the matador van on a path meant for the horses. Back at Saty village lunch is a feast at a local’s house. Its not just the quantity but the layout of the spread that is special as well. Conversation veers to Hindi movies as the guide is a Bollywood fan and vividly remembers Khoon Bhari Maang as one of her favourites. We are asked for the English translation of the title…haha..

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Post lunch we head to the bigger and more touristy Kalsai Lake in the mountains surrounded by thick conifer forest, crossing small yurt settlements. The first and only one accessible by road of a trio of lakes at increasing elevation and of decreasing sizes. The cobalt blue lake stretches into the mountains and the jackets finally come handy!

Geography lessons from another life had described the endless miles of mildly undulating landscape of the steppes and history had told us about the Mongol hordes sweeping across it to murder and create mayhem. It was exactly all of that and more! Okay no, hordes but loads of horses!

Fact File

Getting there-

There are direct flights from Delhi to Almaty.

Staying –

We stayed at a very smart little airbnb in a neighbourhood of Soviet type blocks to get a local feel.

Getting Around-

Yandex app for taxis works out to be very reasonable.

The overnight train from Shymkent to Almaty has very nice coupes and a dining car.

We booked a day trip to the canyons and lakes with Kazakhstan Guided Tours.

Tag: Almaty

Wining and Dining on Modern Caravans through the Old Silk Route

2 Days in Kazakhstan- Exploring Splendid Almaty, the Steppes and Sunken Mountains