The Diarrhoea Diaries

I had intended to organise my Kazakh visa in London as, seemingly, the overnight service there would be relatively hassle-free. Unfortunately when I showed up at the embassy, my passport photo was gone and I had no time to get another one done before they closed for the day.
‘No worries’, I thought, 'I’ll just get it on arrival in Almaty'. I had read, in my trusty Lonely Planet, that this was possible. Unfortunately, I didn’t check this information until I was sitting at Moscow Airport, having already checked in for my 4-hour flight to Almaty. It was only then that I discovered that apparently I could get a visa upon arrival in Almaty….. with a Letter of Invitation - Something which is not necessary when applying at any Kazakh Embassy in the world!

For the next four hours I sat on the plane, reading and rereading the visa section of my guidebook to see if I’d somehow misread the information, all the while biting my nails down to the quick! My heart sank when, after arriving in Almaty, the immigration officer asked for my LOI. When I responded that I didn’t have one, his reply was ‘I think you have some problems’!

The next two hours were spent trying to reason with the (surprisingly friendly) immigration officers who wanted to put me on a plane straight back to Moscow. This would have been an even worse situation for me, since my Russian visa expired that day! I tried to politely suggest a bribe by saying I didn't mind paying double for the visa (Wink, wink... nudge, nudge...), but this was met with the stern response ‘I could get in a lot of trouble for doing that’!

Eventually a compromise was met. I was to buy an onward flight so that I could get a 5-day transit visa and be allowed into the country. I had a Chinese visa already and so I almost bought a flight to Urumqi, but chose Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan instead due to the cost of the flight. Lucky me! I would’ve flown, completely obliviously, to Urumqi in the middle of the Uyghur uprising and subsequent retaliation by the Chinese forces!

And so I was finally allowed into Kazakhstan!

Internet? Nye rabotayet!

Telephone? Nye rabotayet!

Toilet? Nye rabotayet!

When I went to get off the bus, the young boy who yelled the destination at every stop, put his hand out for more money, yelling the same word at me as if yelling louder would make me understand. The other Kazakhs on the crowded bus were snickering and laughing at the confused 'tooreest' with the oversized backpack. I finally figured that he was supposed to be tipped, so I dipped into my pocket, found a small coin and gave it to him. He laughed and let me off the bus.

Almaty is a nice city. Just nice. Nothing more, nothing less. Like all Central Asian cities, it is very, very green, with an abundance of parks and shady, tree-lined avenues. Although the entire country north and west of here is flat, barren steppe, Almaty sits on the north side of the jagged, snowcapped Alatau Montains, providing an awesome backdrop to the city.

Kazakhstan has oil, and as a result, the country is booming. Mercedes and BMWs share the streets with the old Russian Lada Nivas and most of the locals - Kazakh and Russian alike - wander the streets in sophisticated European-style outfits and shop in expensive western-style shopping malls. It's a far cry from the picture of the country that Borat paints, and apparently most locals despise this unrealistic incarnation of a Kazakh!

No one has realised the money-making potential of opening a cheap, backacker-friendly guesthouse or hostel in Almaty as yet, and options range from poor to bad. I went with bad. The 'Third Dormitory' is the kind of place you'd expect to find a guy passed out in the stairwell with a needle in his arm, and where you have the strange desire to push the wardrobe in front of the dor while you sleep. The staff like to yell abuse at you in Russian rather than cleaning the bathrooms, which becomes necessary after dirty Chinese men wash their feet in the basin you're about to use to brush your teeth!

My few days in Kazakhstan were spent in search of visas. I only managed to get one: My Tajik visa. Horror stories of people having to bribe the Kyrgyz Embassy staff with $180 for overnight service abounded, and not having time for the usual 'express' 3-day service for $90, I opted to take my flight to Bishkek, after having decided to cancel it and go overland. I also moved it forward a day so that I could go with an Icelandic couple, Andrei and Una, that I'd met, and a Swedish guy, Otto, that they knew.

Almost all flights into Bishkek airport (Which also doubles as a US Army base - very convenient to Afghanistan) arrive in the early morning, and I had no desire to tackle the evil, scheming bastards that are Central Asian taxi drivers, alone. It was a blessing, then, that I arrived with Otto, whose friend at the Sakura Guesthouse had paid for and sent a driver to the airport to meet him and bring him back in one piece, without having to negotiate the dark streets and alleys alone.

I feel like I know Bishkek pretty well now. I did spend about nine nights there! Bishkek is the hub of Central Asia when it comes to getting visas for travel to the other 'Stans, Russia, or China. It seems everyone staying at the ever-so-relaxed Sakura Guesthouse is waiting on one visa or another. I myself had to get my Indian and Uzbek (I'll spare you the gory and frustrating details on this one) visas there, which meant having to visit Bishkek three times!

Like Almaty, Bishkek is not a bad city... it's just not a very good one either! Uzbekistan is the place in Central Asia for visiting cities. The other 'Stans are all about the countryside. Bishkek is one big, leafy grid with little in the way of visible history. The central area, around Ala-Too Square, buzzes as the sun goes down, the buildings light up in neon blue, and the many fountains start dancing to cheesy music. The Las Vegas 'Bellagio' it is not, but it seemed the only thing to do in Bishkek on a summer's evening.

Bishkek is not the safest city after dark, however. The Kyrgyz have a lot of electricity due to several large hydro-electric stations. Unfortunately, they sell most of this to neighbouring Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to get money for the country, while they themselves live in cities with barely-lit streets. Several people - mainly young Japanese - had been robbed and beaten in the dark alley outside the guesthouse in recent weeks. One was knocked to the ground and had his hip broken - and that was before dark! Luckily, I didn't see this side of the city. Nor did I have a single run-in with the notoriously corrupt police force who relish in 'inspecting' tourists' passports, finding a 'prablema', and refusing to give it back until the situation has been rectified with enough Som, or even better, dollars!

Sakura Guesthouse gave me an insight into a bizarre subculture that exists in Central Asia. There are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of people travelling across this part of the world by Motorcycle or by bicycle. One crazy Frenchman had even walked from his hometown in France! He'd so far been walking for 15 months! One Czech cyclist, Mikhail, had crossed the Kazakh desert, with daily temperatures exceeding 40 degrees and nothing to look at for weeks but sand! He said he was consuming fourteen litres of water every day!

Many of these people, as well as the regular backpacker crowd, became good 'single-serving friends', as Ed Norton might say. There was always someone there waiting in lines at embassies with me, accompanying me for a dinner of the chicken shawarma, lamb 'shashlyk' or diarrhoea-inducing Chinese food, drinking a quiet beer with me in the shady Sakura courtyard, or pushing me to dance with less-than-attractive Kyrgyz 'cougars'. Despite visa issues severely impacting on my time in Kyrgyzstan, it wasn't so bad having to continually return to Bishkek!