Kazakhstan redux
When I first arrived quietly at the semi-abandoned Soviet-era cosmological research station high in the Tien Shan mountains above Almaty, it was to the tune of a middle aged Kazakh woman berating her downcast Russian partner.
She halted her tirade when she realised my presence and he came over, introducing himself as Valentin amid a waft of vodka breath so strong it seemed in danger of spontaneous ignition.
I didn’t realise how emblematic this encounter was to be of my brief time at the old research station, to which I’d hiked while waiting for my Tajik visa to be issued by the consulate in Almaty.
The site was classically ex-Soviet, with lots of expensive infrastructure quietly rotting away.
Besides half a dozen empty observatory domes, there was this awesome piece of Dr Evil machinery. Really, who needs sharks with fricking laser beams when you have this in your arsenal?
Each time I came back to the main building where the accommodation was, she’d be berating him at high volume and he’d be taking it like a beaten dog but always reeking of vodka, even at breakfast at 8am.
And in a way it was like coming home. Not for that couple’s dysfunctional relationship but because Almaty was so familiar from my visit about six months before following an intended media familiarisation trip to Astana, Kazakhstan’s dire and soulless new capital city, which ended in mutiny and a hastily arranged flight to see the nation’s original capital.
Compared to the Dhabs, the climate was refreshing. The only way to tell the seasons in the UAE is to look at a thermometer but last time, Almaty had been bedecked in autumn colours and this time it was clear from the vibrant greens that the city had very recently emerged from under the lingering snow of winter.
At the war memorial, it was a few days away from the 65th anniversay of the end of the Great Patriotic War, as WWII is known in the former Soviet Union, so the town’s war memorial featured a series of pubescent guards with barrel-less pretend rifles, shoes with velcro tags and a couple of bored young women marching up and down in their street shoes
There was even the novelty of experiencing rain — the UAE is in the rain shadow of Saudi Arabia, so there was unlikely to be any more precipitation this year — and the city had a youthful buzz that I found deeply appealing.
On this spring morning, the fortune tellers at the market were doing a thriving business.
And on that previous visit, I had an equally alcoholic encounter with a traumatised Soviet war veteran from the Afghan invasion in the 1980s who gave me an equally vodka-laden breath — mixed with the other two components of the Central Asian breath syndrome: cigarettes and stale mutton fat — during the breakfast commute as I made my way to the airport.
This time I left behind the bickering couple, hiked down the mountain, collected my Tajik visa and took a share taxi towards Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital.