Silk Roads

IN CENTRAL ASIA: KAZAKHSTAN

People keep asking why we went to Central Asia and Berlin last year, and the easiest answer was “For the food.” Yes, I have always been interested in the land where stone fruit originated: those “Golden Apples of the Sun” from Greek and Roman mythology were likely ancient Central Asian peaches or nectarines. On the other hand, worries about the rise of negative nationalism in the countries of the old Soviet world are pressing and very real.

But truth to tell, what settled the idea of Central Asia was the inspiration of a guy named Mikael from Kazakhstan who I met over ten years ago in San Francisco. The fantastic image of a place where everyone was tall and mixed Asian and Russian was irresistible. Which is how we wound up in Kazakhstan’s oldest city, Almaty.

Now a modern metropolis on a 1.7 kilometer-high plateau between the endless Steppe and the Tian Shan, a Himalayan mountain extension bordering far-western China, Almaty is quiet during our early morning arrival. The quaint gingerbread of a Russian-inspired building, where the taxi dropped us, was in marked contrast to the horror-film-scary staircase of a Soviet-era apartment we had managed to reserve on Mr. B&B. But before long the wide tree-lined streets became populated with children. They were everywhere, schoolboys in dark blue mini-business suits and little girls in big pouffy hair bows walking with their mothers. In the near distance to the south, 20,000-foot snow capped peaks top the mountainous horizon; glaciers still fill alpine lakes to provide water for the city’s two+ million folks, but it turns out that they are quickly shrinking.

Instead of booking a rather expensive guided tour we went on our own to Big Almaty Lake. The first stage was a city bus (35 cents) and then a round-trip taxi ($25) with Hassan who spoke only Russian or Kurdish, but was full of energy and wanted to talk about gangsters in Chicago and Las Vegas. Ken managed pretty well, between the Cyrillic alphabet he was learning and Google Translate; he even cracked Hassan up when he told him, “In our country gangsters do own casinos, but in yours they own banks.”

Too true, as on the road to the lake we passed along First President Boulevard, through First President’s Park (27 years after getting independence from the USSR he’s still its only president), past four of his houses (two with different wives, one who controls the national airline), the mansions of his crony relatives who own all the Kazakh banks and finance corporations, plus his herds of horses.