Feeling like we'd only just woken up, we were subjected to yet another search. They kindly allow you a full 5 hours between your 'wee small hours of the morning' search and your 'early bird' search. This time it was a little less irksome as the custom official was a polite and well presented young lady. With her danish pastry twirled blonde hair and eager smile, Charlie was charmed enough to comply with any luggage unpacking and repacking. This signalled our last customs stop, the next was to be for passengers alighting only and our first taste of Kazakh air.
We pulled into the first station, a dusty, rundown shack with the platform and track in a sort of symbiotic perilous whole. People waited right up at the edge of the sleepers and their cows and dogs meandered across metal tracks, seemingly oblivious to the potential several thousand tonnes pulling in next to them. I got off to stretch my legs and explore with Anatoly. He pressed to buy 'real food' concerned that oatcakes and fruit just don't hit the spot. I inspected the fare on offer: various dry, greasy looking meat pies, looking for all the world like elephatesque samosas burnt a little too long. Whole roast chickens hung on string, offered with rounds of flat bread and then as a sweet, what can only be described as solid balls of blanc mange. I quite liked the thought of chicken but a complete lack of cutlery or plates soon put stop to that. A student at heart, I opted instead for Kazakh pot noodles.
However, pot noodles are quite tricky to manipulate without cutlery... it requires technical savvy far beyond my capabilities. Trying to drink it like soup results in the whole sorry clump of noodles stubbornly threatening to land on your face, making it an all or nothing dilemma. I resorted to using my fingers much against all my taught table manners. Charlie used a pen so I was in good company.
Our course was now directly southeast and would go through kazakh desert. It has been interesting to see how the landscape, climate and physical features of people have changed over that time. Going from the dark, loamy lushness of Poland, with its endless forests and rectalinear buildings to the grey expanse of European Russia with its small houses. Then to discover Southern Russia with its wide grey rivers, bright green plains and endless pylons. Entering Kazakhstan was obvious, suddenly all civil engineering went overground. Huge pipes coursing in parallel a metre off the ground, leaping to square arches across roads made for interesting land decoration.
We stopped at Turkistan which is a pilgrimage site for Islamic people. Made up of mainly nomadic people, their religion has changed over the centuries from pagan, to buddhist, to christian to Islam. It's evident in the mix of cultures you see by the trainside, although Islam, being fairly new, is the most noticeable- new mosques and headscarves abound. We contemplate our surroundings whilst munching on lamb shashlik. A man comes past our cabin, flashes open a briefcase filled with gaudy, shiny wtaches and urges us to buy one. He's insistant but we decline. In his place, ten women seem to bustle past trying to sell us alcohol, scarves, twittering bird toys and magazines. It's quite tiring constantly turning them down so we close our cabin door and go back to watching the treeless mountains.
Eventually the landscape petered out to a dry green sandiness, the sky the palpable blue of holidays filled with cartoon-like clouds. This marked the beginning of the desert, starting with shrubby dunes, anchoring a perfect sunset.
