23 hours in Kazakhstan

June 5, 2008

En route from Almaty, Kazkhstan to Dujanbe, Tajikstan

We got in the country but I’m not sure it was worth $262 in visa support and visa costs and all of the hassle. If Uzbekistan was characterized by friendliness and hospitality (and a certain level of ‘cloak and dagger’), then Kazakhstan can be characterized by its suspicion and xenophobia.

From the time we arrived until we left we felt unwelcome, examined, and suspected. For example, arriving at one of the “luxury” hotels in town (former Department of Geology), we are greeted with “Documenty!” We were then given the privilege of handing over $200 for one night in a giant (thankfully cool) cave with one small double bed (strangely short), two chairs, two bedside tables, a desk and a TV. But it is only one night and we are in Central Asia and are not going to complain. The high cost and low value is irritating but we had been warned that Almaty is a very expensive city. However, we were given a taste of the back side (or maybe cause) of the paranoia here the next morning when we were checking out of our room: pure corruption. The housekeeper came to our room to check the mini-bar. She claimed that we drank 2 bottles of water (complimentary water is apparently not included in the $200). We insist that we only drank one bottle of water and show her the empty bottle as evidence. Down at the front desk, we are now accused of drinking three bottles of water. We are obviously being scammed and insist that we will only pay for one bottle. It’s not the money that is the problem (although $4 for 250 ml of water is a scam in itself), but the fact that we know the blasted housekeeper is completely corrupt. They threaten to call the police if we don’t pay for the other two bottles and since prison isn’t something we want to add to our list of misadventures, we call our contact in Almaty who talks to her. She then tells him there is no problem because “I only charged them for one bottle.” Grrr…Needless to say, we couldn’t wait to get out of the country.

But trying to leave is almost as difficult as getting in. The passport control to leave is puzzlingly the most rigorous of any country I have ever visited. But all of the suspicion and unfriendliness we experienced probably had nothing to do with us; Kazkhstan has simply not been able to shake the Soviet mantle the way the other Central Asian countries we have visited have. For example, we noticed that every time two people exchanged shifts, all items and money had to be counted and checked. I think the paranoia would drive me crazy if I lived here.

Enough whining. We are now on a Tajik Air flight to Dujanbe, Tajikstan and already we can feel that the final country on our tour is going to be very different from anything we have experienced thus far. Boarding was a chaotic, whirling adventure, with people waving their boarding cards around, children bawling, and someone blasting Persian music from their own radio for everyone’s enjoyment. A troupe of 10 year old “Scouts” walks by with blue uniforms and white braiding, a line of skinny, grim Indian or Pakistani men file by. The only people not making noise are the few women in headscarves. Lunch is a plastic box filled with a potpourri of items from around the world: Finnish cheese, a Chinese wet wipe, Turkish peach juice and chocolate, Russian chicken and prune pate and apricot jam, Iranian cookies, Moroccan Nescafe, Belarusian hard candies, Dutch butter, and boiled eggs and bread presumably from Kazakhstan. The United Nations in a box!