Well... I'm going to attempt to blog in a slightly different fashion, because it always just comes out dull when I try and tell you what I've been doing and eaten for breakfast.
A quick narration of events. Kazakhstan remains great, were it not for the fact that Kazakhstan and Kazakhs remain great, I might well have thrown myself on a pitchfork a week ago. The place has been punishing, truly and beautifully punishing... A gzillion little upsets have occurred that, when put together, have formed quite a big upset, an upset that could well have got me upset. Spokes have broken, valves have broken, in order to make a lovely, new road the Kazakhs had to totally annihilate the old one, just as I was needing it... which left me with 250km to travel through the toughest cycling I've ever done, and with no money... the expiration of my funds, I'll add, was not entirely reckless on my part... I could have made it to the nearest cashpoint in a day... it was the death of the road that made for two days, and that was also why I took the unprecedented measure of asking a guy in a nice and newly buffed Toyota Land Cruiser for a loan... he obliged, and I'll repay my debts in Almaty... It wasn't a particularly proud moment, however, I wasn't going to be looking too dapper after two days of eating and drinking principles in the desert. As for the word 'desert' ... I always prefer to err on the understated side, I will generally call a mountain a hill, and I was wondering whether or not I was being dramatic using the D word... however... the number of camels, come the end of it, would definitely suggest a desert... the dead camel I spied was himself not holding-up so well, and I met a bunch of anglophone kazakhs at a roadside cafe, and they addressed me, outright, with the question.
'What are you doing in the middle of this desert?'
To which I could only reply, with my bicycle upside down once again, 'I don't know.' And I didn't.
Another entertaining, but at the time quite crummy, upset almost saw me in a fight with a security guard at a petrol station... Basically... I was at the counter, waiting to pay for my orange juice, but drinking said orange juice, much to the alarm of Mrs Cashier, who screamed for Mr Boulder to come barrelling out of his locker-room, Mr Boulder rolls with his knuckles facing forwards, he's one of those, and he had an audition for his shoving abilities before he was given the job... Anyway, he shoved me, good and proper, a good few times, until I was in the forecourt, almost thrown onto the bonnet of an arriving car, watching the air in front of me for the arrival of his fist, and then shouting, in Turkish, RAHAT ... which.. to be honest, kinda translates, in my head, as 'at ease' (in the 'be at ease' sense, not the militant sense) .. but, could equally be translated more literally as, comfortable. So yeah, either shouting COMFORTABLE!!! worked, a thought that continues to make me laugh, or he just got bored of shoving me... anyway. The next mirror I arrived at explained things a little... I'd cut holes in my vest a few days beforehand, to let out the heat... I've been having nosebleeds, pretty heavy ones, every day since Russia... My nose has always had a thing for bleeding, and heat has never been good for it, but, to be honest, I think it's more about the hours of dust and exhaust that accumulate up there... every morning I have to blow a load of shit out of there or I have to breathe through my mouth, anyway, that day's nosebleed was still a little on my snout, I'd also had a puncture that morning, and, with oil on my hands, must have removed some sleep from my eyes, leaving a nice black eye, and, with my tangled hair, I did probably look like more of a brawler than I actually am. Anyway, once it had been established that I was actually a rich westerner, and not an Uzbek, he came over all diplomatic and convivial. Either way, further confirmation that the BBC would have got a much better piece of drama from my rather ramshackle adventuring
But anyway... some rants..... Sacha Baron Cohen and his Borat film... Every passing day I hate that man more... Ok... So, his career has consisted of taking the piss out of black urban culture, and once he had truly done that to death, he moved on to taking the piss out of Kazakhs. Not in a particularly imaginative way, just incest jibes, and old women held before the camera with Cohen saying 'she's only 28' ... anyway, a riproaring success it amounted to, and Cohen is now a multimillionaire many times over. Hurrah. First thing that agitates me is the idea that it's fine and funny to take the piss out of poverty in the Caucasus... I don't know if it it's because Kazakhs are largely Muslim, or because it's a Turkic culture, but for some reason the entire media establishment seemed to think that what Cohen was doing was fine. In Africa (sorry, I know that Africa is many nations, but so is Europe, and I still call it Europe), the king of Swaziland has over 100 wives, 20 Lear jets, and one of the world's poorest countries, the former South African president thought that you could catch AIDS by chopping an onion vertically instead of horizontally, in Egypt there's a good chance that, as a girl, you'll have your labia sewn up with gorse, and if you're the unfortunate woman that gets raped in Nigeria then they might well call you a hussy, bury you up to your neck, and throw stones at your head.
Now, I'm not saying that any one of those beliefs/practices is, in itself, wrong, however, poverty in Africa seems to have some sacred sentimentality to it (one that is, generally, a bit demeaning to Westerners and Africans alike), which leaves me wondering what the poor folk in the Caucasus did wrong to deserve such ridicule. More than this, however, I get agitated by Cohen's whole anti-semitism inferences, suggesting that Kazakhs have nothing better to do than abuse and loathe Jews. The fact of the matter is that Kazakhs are really decent, warm, hard working people, who don't really seem to have the time of day to go around torching synagogues... Furthermore, if Cohen, as a Jew, had really wanted to do something intelligent concerning anti-semitic problems in the former USSR, rather than propogating some sort of *nobody likes us, everybody hates us* dirge, he should have gone there, with his funding, and his university education, and researched and criticised, as a Jew, the fact that the entire and considerable wealth of the Soviet Union was sold off to a band of oligarchs, many of whom happened to be Jewish. I know that the presence of Jews amongst the Soviet oligarchs is a non-straightforward thing, and that anti-semitism in this part of the world goes further back than 1990... but still, it's a two-way misfortune that such an injustice might, on the one-hand, reinforce old prejudices, and, on the other, be entirely overlooked by an apparently intelligent individual.
OK... well I'm sure that that was already more than enough to get me called an anti-semite, so I'll move on to talking about the police instead. The Kazakhs that asked what I was doing in the desert.... we got talking about the police, and they said, the 'kazakh police.... they.... are not the best' ... And it's so nice to hear people saying that the police are shit, because the Turkish dislike their police, the Italians dislike their police, the French dislike their police, the Kazakhs evidently dislike theirs... and in Britain everyone mills around saying 'they do a difficult job' ... well, so do brain surgeons, but nobody's going to start making excuses for Mr Brain Surgeon if s/he accidentally leaves peanut shells in the cranium.
I was in Serbia, on one of the country's major roads, which made it about 10 metres wide, with ten cars an hour... some farmers were going along the gravel at the side of the road, with their cart full of hay, and the police pulled them over and were telling them to leave the road. In Romania, I was leaving the city of Giurgiu, and the police were pulling over every cyclist that wasn't wearing a hi-vis jacket... which meant that they were pulling over every cyclist. OBLIGATION OBLIGATION the po-faced anus shouted at me, and it was a joyous moment when I was able to retrieve my own hi-vis jacket from the depths of my panniers and grin at him... but, be that as it may, this officer of the law was only doing his job - that is, inconveniencing perfectly decent people in the undertaking of their daily life, whilst the Romanian government continues to suffer from the greatest corruption anywhere in Europe...
Same story in Britain, where our leading banks lose hundreds of billions of quid through dealings that were, in reality, no better than mass fraud, and the police make their number one priorities the targeting of cyclists on pavements and the poor bastards that make twenty quid a day selling caramelised peanuts on Waterloo Bridge. Meanwhile, people mill about defending the force by invoking the example of their family friend, the police officer, who says nothing when people bring out the weed at the end of the party... or the one police officer that they know, who's a really nice guy... These people doubtless exist, but they don't justify an entire insitution of ineptitude.
I worked with a volunteer police officer once, an accountant by day, he loved the 'adrenaline' and the 'buzz' of his other job, then one night he got lumbered with a suicidal Romanian and Monday morning he was saying what a boring night it had been. Police... it's just another word for cunt in any language under the sun... the problem in Britain is that we feel obliged to defend anything that's ours, no matter how pathetic... it's the same mentality that led to a decade of Tim Henman being worshipped as a hero, and for not even managing to be a runner-up.
I will now stop that particular rant, because, believe it or not, I'm actually being very restrained on the subject. Actually... no... I can't quite bring myself to end the tirade without saying that the British police force spends 39,000,000 pounds, a year, on PR campaigns and media advisers.... that is, of course, 39million smackeroos of public money, and, needless to say that if it takes 39million quid to try and convince people you're doing a good job.... well... you're not doing a good job.
OK... enough.... Saw a sign for Almaty as just shy of 700km away, which means I want China in a week's time... I got hills to ride however, so we'll see how it goes. This part of Kazakhstan is cooler I hear, and with more shade and greenery and places to buy water... so we'll see how it goes.
The photos.... You have Besimgale in his yurt... it's a great thing to point to a Kazakh's yurt and say 'ah! Mongolian!' ... Besimgale half-rescued me from a desert, then I had lunch in his front room with his family, and then we all fell asleep on the floor, which seems quite a typical Kazakh thing... You should also have the horses... I'm a sucker for those horses, beautiful things... think I've put up some camels too, a little bit of landscape, the sand dune in which I camped a night, just beside where the Aral sea is/used to be... you also have Fatma, posing with her wallpaper, the same wallpaper that adorns the hallway of a flat in Dolapdere, Istanbul, for which I have a great deal of fondness.
Well comrades, until next time.... to thine own self be true.
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