Kazakhstan
MAKE VISIT TO THAT GLORIOUS NATION
‘Borat’ got the country noticed for the wrong reasons.
Blaise Hopkinson went looking for some right ones
U NTIL I sat through the movie with my then 14-year-old niece in 2006, I had thought of Kazakhstan as this barren place of yurts and camels.
They drink fermented mare’s milk for kicks, have built their capital Astana overnight and are on their way to becoming one of the world’s leading oil and gas suppliers.
Yet when you say: “I’m going to Astana,” as I did a few weeks ago, even world travellers in the Bamboo Bar at the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok (my local) look puzzled.
Some eight years after the release of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s hilarious send-up of the US, which most people confuse with a spoof about Kazakhstan, what is in fact the ninth-biggest country in the world remains a mystery.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was filmed in the US and Romania and Cohen is believed to have never set foot in Kazakhstan.
Borat, who liked to tell people his sister
Borat was a prostitute, would have loved the scene in a hotel coffee shop at 7am on a recent Sunday morning, as I tried to hook up to the wifi, curiously absent in a luxury Astana hotel room, and discovered a Boratian hook-up in the making instead.
A gorgeous woman in an expensive white dress, beautiful hair and lots of jewellery, plonked herself down opposite me, blew a cloud of Snow Queen (Kazakh vodka) so dense it curled my lashes and started purring in drunken Russian. She realised I didn’t have a clue as to what was being said, pulled out her iPhone 5 and, using the translation app, asked me some pertinent questions about being alone etc. She then went in for the kill with the question: “Sex?” I made my excuses and left, not daring to ask the price for my research purposes.
Astana, which means simply “capital”, was the brainchild of benign leader-for-life President Nursultan Nazarbayev. It began its creep skywards in 1997 as he sought to create a modern, even futuristic city to inspire the confidence of his pliant citizens but also to bring some real attention to the
burgeoning former Soviet state. In the many soaring travelogues and hagiographic videos about the president and his pet toy town, one is treated to visions of a mini-Dubai, a barren glass-plated Rome built in a day.
Yet up close, the edifices are rather ill-fitting, out of context and without any character that links them together except the scent of new money. Yes, I adjusted my Burberry trench coat, combed my hair and preened, this in the windows of a building resembling a beer can. But otherwise it was just a mirror on, well, me, not some 21st-century metropolis.
From the world’s biggest tent, the Khan Satyr shopping complex, to the Norman Foster pyramid and the grandiose presidential palace designed to dwarf the White House, the architecture is both flash and surreal. But at least, unlike Dubai, they used their own money to create the legend.
The Foster pyramid is grandly called the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation and is home to meetings of representatives of all the world’s religions every few years. Nazarbayev, a practising Muslim, has made religious tolerance a cornerstone of his policies.
Astana is also the second-coldest capital city in the world, with mid-winter temperatures plunging to around - 50°C. Expats who survive a winter there wear it as a badge of supreme honour, and virtually the first question any Kazakh asks when you meet is whether you have been there in winter.
The winds from the frozen steppe could slice a horse in half, so vicious are they.
She went in for the kill: ‘Sex?’ I left, not daring to ask the price
With nearby (in steppe terms) Ukraine in flames, Kazakhstan confidently goes about being a good neighbour to Russia and Belarus and welcomes major international conferences, including the recent annual Asian Development Bank (ADB) annual meetings. Days before that, former US Congress speaker Newt Gingrich and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak graced the Eurasian Media Forum conference, presided over by former TV news host Riz Khan.
With more than a 100 ethnicities calling Kazakhstan home and Russian still the dominant language, the young nation is struggling to find an identity.
Getting there is getting easier, with flag carrier Air Astana boasting one of the youngest fleets in the world, an easy boast because they have only 30-some planes. There are some branded hotels, including a Radisson, a Rixos and a soon-to-open Marriott in Astana and every expensive car is found in the increasingly congested traffic. KFCs are everywhere.
The old capital in the south, Almaty, has more charm, with its snow-capped mountains and old cathedral, not to mention its pride and joy, the world’s highest television mast.
The people are friendly, particularly the younger generation, who tend to smile, unlike their Soviet-era forefathers, who regard smiling foreigners as morons.
Food is iffy, although there are some passable Italian and European restaurants. The national dish of besbarmak is not for the squeamish: boiled horse meat with a sheet noodle. You can also go for the mutton variety, but horses are a key element of Kazakhstan’s nomadic culture, providing transport, milk and meat.
I used to ride horses and the idea of eating a nag still leaves me cold.
Geographically, Kazakhstan was on the famous Silk Road linking China and Europe for trade, and today it is seeking to regain that bridge status, linking East to West but this time in energy and industrial terms.
The subject of Borat often came up in polite company when I was in Astana, and once the initial barrier was breached the Kazakhs were amusing about the guy who basically put them on the world map for all the wrong reasons.
Some even suggest Baron Cohen should be commissioned to be a cultural ambassador, hosting documentaries and travelogues.
Others told me they would like to boil him in mare’s milk or drag him across the steppe behind a furious stallion.
Whatever the opinion, few people in the West can think of Kazakhstan without a smirk.
Nightlife in Astana and Almaty, while not exactly stellar, involves lots of drinking and karaoke. Vodka toasts for the unwary have been known to produce hallucinations.
One evening in my hotel’s karaoke bar, some swarthy gangsters demanded I join them, plied me with liquor and insisted on vigorous dances, their molls sitting in the banquettes doing their nails while the lone foreigner, the resident status symbol, was twirled around like a steppe pony.
The taxis have no meters, English is scarce and many have their eye on parting a foreigner from his money — just like the taxi touts outside the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok. You just have to be firm.
But there is much generosity shown to visitors. On my last evening, while waiting to go to the airport and lingering in the foyer of the grandiose Rahat Palace hotel in Almaty, the pianist asked me my favourite classical piece, and miraculously found the sheet music for Albinoni’s Adagio, which she played just for me.
While mountain and pony trekking are major tourism draws, 200km east of the Aral Sea is Baikonur Cosmodrome, leased to Russia by Kazakhstan. It is the largest functioning space-rocket launch-pad complex, made famous to South Africans in 2002 when our very own billionaire Mark Shuttleworth departed mother earth from here as a space tourist. The base is remote and difficult to access, but plans are afoot to ramp up civilian access and make it a true tourism attraction.
Astana will also welcome the world for Expo 2017 and with the first shoots of spring recently, construction on the dazzling world-fair complex broke ground.
Borat would have been proud. It has moments of being “glorious”!
Indeed, meeting his “sister” made my entire three-week steppe sojourn all that more worthwhile! — © Blaise Hopkinson