Riding the Kazakh desert

From the port of Aktau in Kazakhstan to the border of Uzbekistan there is one straight road through the desert. This road continues south east through Uzbekistan, passing through the tragedy that was once the Aral Sea.

Jamie and I left our friends in Aktau the morning after we disembarked and set out in to the desert. They’d decided to rest up for a day, but we were feeling restless after so much waiting.  We rode for 6 days to Beyneu, the town closest to the Uzbek border before deciding to board a train to Nukus in Uzbekistan. Deciding to take the train instead of riding was a difficult choice, but infinitely less difficult than our experience of riding it.

Predictably it was not easy. Unlike most other landscapes we’ve come across the desert was harder in reality than I had imagined. It wasn’t that we weren’t forewarned.

We knew it was going to be hot. It’s the desert and it was July and we’re not stupid. However I didn’t account for how much of the day would be unbearable for me. I tell myself that I’m Scottish and not made for this, we thrive in the damp and green, like fungi or mosquitoes. We would rise at dawn and by 11am I was ready to seek shade.

Once or twice we rode past midday, and regretted it. One day we foolishly attempted a hill in the midday sun, hoping to find the restaurant on the map at the top. Barely making it a third of the way up I pulled off to rest in the shade of what turned out to be someone’s house. Feeling queasy and with a worsening headache, and a bit delirious according to Jamie, I refused to move till the following morning.
People we met pleaded caution. They told us it’s been hotter than ever this year. They quoted temperatures that are hard to believe even having suffered through them. Upwards of 50°.

I knew there would be little shade. We saw occasional bus stops, a shop or restaurant once or twice a day. More often we’d stop in a well proportioned drainage tunnel under the road to hide from the midday sun. They were surprisingly comfortable, and we’d manage to spend a good few hours taking turns to rest on the curved concrete floor.

It was often only cool enough to ride again at 6pm at which point we’d try and get a few hours in before dark, edging closer to the next water source before we camped.

We’d fill up 12 litres of water at least at every stop we could find, and were always on the lookout for the next opportunity to refill. The map had restaurants and shops marked, but too often it was inaccurate or incorrect – we’d pass the spot marked and see nothing but dusty plain stretching to the horizons. We never ran out of water, thank goodness, but I won’t say we were never thirsty.

We knew there may be wind. With nothing to interfere its passage, the wind just keeps howling. The best, but rarest, is when it comes from behind. My next preference is from the right when you only need to brace yourself so as not to drift in to the road. When it comes from the left the passing traffic causes terrific eddies in the air buffeting you back and forth. Or worse still the endless headwind which steals away all your speed and leaves you grinding endlessly forward. These are not new experiences but in the desert the roads are so long and straight that you know as the wind decides it’s direction as the sun rises that it will not change its mind for many hours to come, and the road will not waiver from its present course for 70 – 80 – 100km.

And in the afternoon, to make it worse, the wind is hot like a hairdryer in your mouth, stealing the moisture from your lips. The precious water gone almost as soon as it was sipped.

We had been aware of all these factors before we set off but what I hadn’t accounted for was the boredom. That the long straight featureless dusty windy roads gave me nothing to distract me from how much more long straight featureless dusty windy road there was still to traverse. I would torture myself by staring at the mileage, watching each half kilometer tick over, agonising about how little we’d travelled since I last looked. That I would count pedal strokes to the next signpost, where I would create a reason to stop, just to alleviate the sameness. Just for a change.

Jamie had to keep cajoling me, persuading me to keep on going.
We’ve got to push on Maria.
Don’t stop for too long, it’s not going to go away.
I could see the strain it was putting our relationship under – Jamie doesn’t like having to bully me, and I react very badly to being told to do something I don’t want to do. Usually I can talk myself in to keeping going, but the desert wore my resolve thin.

In the relative cool of a drainage tunnel, or the occasional chaihanna we would revert immediately to our affectionate and amiable norm, and would strategize how to get through this. But in the heat of the road, my reason evaporated.

Interspersed with this there were of course hours and moments of joy and beauty and wonder.

The first camel sighting a few kilometres from aktau on the first day of our adventure. Many more camels came, the one and two humped ambling amicably along. That first camel reminded me with a jolt – as happens some days – just how far we’ve come.

Not long after a herd of wild horses grazing close to the road. Over the week we saw many herds, and always a joy to behold. In herds of ten or fifteen, with a few foals at the back, they’d watch with intelligence and curiosity as we would pedal respectfully by. Thin, but strong and glossy they looked healthy despite the inhospitable environment. One evening we watched them gallop on the horizon in the light of the setting sun, kicking up dust, looking for all the world like a romanticized scene from one’s imagination of the central Asian steppe.

One morning we rode at dawn through the mountainous stretch of the route. In the morning light the world seemed sketched in pencil, only the foreground painted in colour, in ochre – a name I only know from my long disused paintbox. The mountains were strange and wonderful rock formations, not dissimilar to some in cappadocia. Some striped pink and grey, some soft and pillowy. Cycling through them, as colour seeped back in to the world, I was full of gladness and gratitude to be exactly where I was at that moment.

The end of that valley contained some lovely shady caves that gave us a wonderful place to rest.
There were some bike tyre tracks leading to the caves. I asked Jamie whether he thought they were a bike tourist or a local, whether he recognised the tread. Schwalbe Marathons, he reckoned. I’m not sure whether he was joking or not, but I liked the idea that another bike tourist was just up ahead, passed this same way and stopped at this cave.

I remembered a poem, or the spectre of one. Something about chasing the beloved from fire pit to fire pit on the caravan trail across the desert. Never catching, but always being drawn on by the signs she’s left behind.

Another rest stop, this time at the house where I’m lieing on the concrete exhausted. A few meters away there is an open air mosque or pilgrimage site. All day long people stop and visit, staying so briefly that I conclude they come often. The closest town is 70km in either direction. They come as families, or in ones or twos. Some sit briefly outside, some do their prayers. Some come and talk briefly to the owner of the house, a couple stop and talk to us, but mostly they park and visit and go.

At the same stop we are befriended by a Russian truck driver who’s travelling as part of the 20 truck entourage for a gigantic piece of oil refinery machinery that is travelling to Uzbekistan, with a police escort. We’re invited in to his truck, which contains a fully equipped kitchen – we assume he’s the entourage cook. At another truck we are given a shower. They park up next to us all night, engines running. We quietly move our tent round the corner to protect ourselves from the noise.

Another afternoon in a drainage tunnel, this one close to the hunting ground of an owl. She swoops past the mouth of our cave as we watch transfixed. The small birds fall silent as she comes then start up their chattering a few moments after she’s gone. It hard to imagine the desert can support so much life.

Our last morning in the desert, I open the tent door to find an eagle perched a couple of feet away on a small mound. She’s surveying the landscape for breakfast I suspect. She sees me, pays me no mind. She allows me a couple of hasty photographs then lazily beats her wings and is off in search of a more private spot.

We meet friendly and supportive, if sometimes baffled, people on the way. Women in restaurants want selfies, they pat my head maternally, and sympathise about the heat. Men just hand us bottles of water, sometimes frozen, from the back of their cars where they sensibly stockpile it. In shops the shopkeeper and the customer get involved helping us decipher the produce. We have an entertaining evening in a restaurant with a group of celebrating friends, one of whom speaks animated English. He and his friends want to know everything about us, where we’ve been where we’ve come from.

And the desert itself, barren as it is, is beautiful in its way. Particularly in the sunrise and the sunset. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to engage with it more positively at the time. The best I could do most of the times was meet my internal complaints with the mantra “it is what it is”, trying to at least remove my internal objection to my circumstance – arguably a more difficult factor to contend with than all the others.

We made it across the first desert stage – 570km from Aktau to Beyneu. By day 4 I was very ready to abandon it, in fact I felt ready to abandon the whole trip I felt so weary , but we made it. We did decide to forego riding the Uzbek desert, and instead experience the delights of the train.

I still find myself in two minds about this decision.

There’s a part that feels like I let myself down. That I failed. That I should have just kept going through the pain, the boredom, the intense heat and that somehow the process would transform. That I would find that ideal tranquillity of mind that would never again allow the shadows of suffering or boredom to cloud its joyous appreciation of the world as it finds it.

Or something.

But, these are the musings of someone now sitting comfortably in a hotel, with air conditioning and access to as much water as I could need. I can still taste the despair and frustration when I think back to some of the worse moments. Because it’s all very well telling you and myself now that it was the heat and the wind and the dust, but in the moment it was impossible to rationalise like that. All I knew was that I was weak and struggling and I couldn’t believe how strong Jamie was, how he could just keep on going and going. I knew he was suffering too but you wouldn’t have know it to look at him. And even riding in his slipstream, letting him do more of the work, I’d lag behind.

I don’t like to admit that I’m weak, but the desert made it possible.

I’m glad we rode the Kazakh desert. I’m also glad we decided not to ride the Uzbek desert.

And I thank the universe that I have a Jamie, who offers his slipstream with unconditional generosity, who will badger me through the desert risking my wrath, and who will at the end of it all agree that our pride can withstand a couple of train rides all things considered.

Some highlights from six hard days riding through the Kazakh desert from Aktau to Beyneu. Too hot for me!

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Special thanks to my brother, the Mighty Ben, and this playlist which helped me through a few tough kilometres. Stay humble, mustn’t grumble.

Stay humble and dont grumble roots n dubwise selections by Mighty Ben

Ital sounds from the Mighty Oak!