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The pilgrimage to Beket-Ata

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

The main reason we travelled across the length of Kazakhstan to begin with was to join Muslim pilgrims in their journey to the tomb of Beket-Ata in the desert near Aktau. Thankfully, given the time and effort expended, it was quite extraordinary – not only the highlight of our three weeks in Kazakhstan, but one of the most spiritual experiences of my life.

At dawn opposite the bazaar in Zhanaozen, two hours from Aktau, a handful of jeeps and 4WD ‘tank’ minibuses were waiting for pilgrims wanting to make the journey through the desert to Beket-Ata. We joined a local family of seven – four men and three women, including an old lady who had only one eye and could not walk without support – in a minibus, and by eight o’clock we were on the road. Leaving Zhanaozen we passed hundreds of oil drills right along the highway, more than I’ve ever seen, even having lived in the Arabian Gulf. (And I should point out here that in their own strange way, Aktau and Zhanaozen somewhat resembled the Gulf in their town planning and architecture, though still with an unmistakable Soviet feel as well in some parts.) Soon the sealed road was no more, and we drove through the desert that was, thankfully, more interesting than any we had previously seen in Kazakhstan. Here there were rock formations and plateaus in a mix of whites and pinks and everything in between, and none of the flat shrubbery that had completely dominated the landscape ever since Almaty.

NickSoon we reached our first stop at Shopan-Ata. We performed ablutions with the other pilgrims and were treated to the first of our five meals of the day (all provided free of charge): a surprisingly good spread of breads, meats, fruits, vegetables and sweets, much tastier and more varied than we had expected. (And as a side note: even these Muslim pilgrims were not fasting during Ramadan.) We walked through a nearby necropolis en route to the main attraction: the tomb of Shopan-Ata, contained within an ‘underground mosque’, which could perhaps more accurately be described as a cave mosque. You enter through a small door into a surprisingly homely cave-like room with carpets covering the floors and a hole in the ceiling offering light in the style of the Roman Pantheon. There we sat with the pilgrims as they prayed and performed certain rituals which seem to derive from ancient regional beliefs rather than orthodox Islam, including whispering (praying?) to a tree branch in the middle of the room and then circling it three times. We then saw the tomb of Shopan-Ata himself in an adjacent room, for which even I needed to cover my head; the mosque’s imam gave me a Muslim mosque cap for the purpose, and when I tried to return it later he wouldn’t let me. I was very thankful for the gesture and I will keep it forever as a memento that has so much more meaning than if I had bought the exact same cap at a tourist stall (and, for what it’s worth, I do like these caps anyway and have considered buying one in the past in places like Oman). It was this generosity and willingness to include us, as clearly the only tourists there that day among over 100 pilgrims, in all activities (washing, eating, praying, sleeping) that made the whole journey so special.

Underground MosqueAfter returning from the mosque we were treated to another meal, and this time men and women sat in separate circles to eat the Kazakh national dish – beshbarmak – which, as essentially a huge chunk of all-inclusive goat meat on top of a noodle or rice base, was more typically Muslim than the rituals of the mosque. We ate communally with our hands, allowing me to choose the more appealing pieces of meat and leaving the fat and innards for the Kazakhs to gobble up. But when our group was given a goat skull as, I suppose, a kind of dessert treat (since not all groups got one), and after one of my company spent much effort cutting it up to get to the brain, and then offered me some, I had nowhere to hide. It was quite mushy, but not too bad.

After leaving Shopan-Ata we continued for another two hours or so to Beket-Ata, where all the pilgrims would spend the night. Not many foreigners make this trip, so we were the talk of the group; I discovered that Kazakhs, on the whole, are quite familiar with kangaroos. We were befriended by a woman from Aktau named Baktagul who spoke English reasonably well and was staying indefinitely at Beket-Ata to pray for her son, whom she described as having a ‘psychological illness’ that could only be cured by spirits and not by a medical doctor. She told us stories about Beket-Ata (she said she knew enough to fill a book), and was delighted when we saw eight goats on our way to and from the tomb, as the holy man appears as a goat to pilgrims of good hearts, and as a snake to those with bad hearts.

The tomb of Beket-Ata, an 18th-century Islamic holy man, is closed to all visitors, but the adjacent underground mosque is open, and after a walk of about half an hour from the main pilgrim complex we entered with Baktagul, her son, and another young man who the previous day had walked through the desert from Shopan-Ata to Beket-Ata, leaving at 7am and arriving at 11pm. Inside the cave, the imam sang an Arabic prayer in a beautiful, moving voice that I will not soon forget. It was incredibly surreal to hear this prayer inside an otherwise silent cave in the middle of the desert, nowhere near anywhere.

In the evening, all the pilgrims ate together (including another meal of beshbarmak, but without the brain this time), and then we slept on mattresses on the floor. At 3:30am, for reasons not explained, we were woken for breakfast and before 4am we were in the minibus and had started the return journey. By the time the sun rose we were back in Zhanaozen, and two hours later in Aktau, tired but content, awaiting our train to Uzbekistan.

Across the Kazakh Steppe to the Caspian Sea

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Since leaving Turkistan, we’ve travelled 2500km in two separate train journeys to the far west of Kazakhstan, so far that according to guide book speak we’re almost in Europe (as though once you cross the Ural Mountains it’s all cobble-stone streets and gnocci alla gorgonzola thereafter) – in fact ‘almost in Russia’ would be a far more accurate description both geographically and culturally. Along the way we’ve discovered some of the various nuances of Kazakh train travel, which to begin with is quite luxurious, even in third class, to someone born and bred (figuratively) on Indian second class sleeper trains. On the latter, which is actually fourth class, you get nothing beyond a kitchen counter-style berth with some padding. But in Kazakhstan we get so much bedding in a special ‘kit’ – an extra mattress, two sheets, a blanket, a pillowcase and a towel – that we don’t know quite what to do with it all, and have been sort of reprimanded by train guards a couple of times for not making our beds correctly!

If the 46 hours we’ve spent looking out train windows in the past week is any indication, Kazakhstan’s western landscape is about as disinteresting as I’ve ever seen. For miles and miles on end, we travelled through flat semi-desert scenery dominated by endless straw-coloured shrubbery. The occasional small settlement, or camel, broke up the monotony, but the snow-capped peaks of southeast Kazakhstan are long gone, replaced mostly by vast swathes of nothingness – only three places on the 32-hour ride from Aralsk to Aktau are worthy of inclusion on a map. It’s easy to see now how Kazakhstan is one of the world’s emptiest countries; despite being geographically larger than India and its billion souls, Kazakhstan has only 15 million inhabitants, fewer than just the city of Mumbai alone and about the same as Calcutta. (And yet, Kazakhstan is still more densely populated than Australia!)

Between our two long train rides, we stopped at Aralsk, which would be a completely uninteresting town on the Aral Sea … if only the Aral Sea was still there. Instead, Aralsk is a mostly uninteresting town with a quirk: a waterless harbour, thanks to the Soviet diversion of the Aral’s river lifelines in the 1960s that caused the sea to drastically recede, one of the worst environmental disasters of all time. The sea then broke up into two parts; the larger Aral (mostly on the Uzbek side) seems lost for good, but the Kazakhs have dammed the smaller Aral on their side to try to save it – a process that seems to be working as the sea is inching back to Aralsk and is now only 60km away. But for now, a couple of rusting ships sitting on the semi-desert shrubs that make up the dried-up sea-bed, and a mural at the train station showing Aralsk fish feeding starving Russia in 1921 are all that’s left to remind anyone that the sea was ever there in the first place.

Caspian SeaAfter spending two more days in Aralsk than we wanted to while waiting for our train, and then two consecutive nights on the train (the longest train ride either of us have ever taken), we’ve finally arrived at Aktau on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. I’ve always been somewhat intrigued by the Caspian Sea, because it has an enchanting name, and because everyone’s heard of it but few really know where it is (due west across the sea from Aktau, 300km away, is the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya), but mostly because for many years after childhood I erroneously associated it with The Voyage of the Dawntreader, which in fact features a Prince Caspian but no Caspian Sea.

I’ve been looking forward to visiting Aktau ever since we decided to go to Kazakhstan, partly because not many foreign travellers make it here; those who do are either coming from or going to Azerbaijan on the ferry that departs once a week or so, or are stupid enough, like us, to have come all the way here just to turn around and go back in the other direction again! There are some Muslim holy sites around Aktau that we want to visit, and then on Saturday we’ll cross into Uzbekistan, the last country on our Central Asian itinerary. And then after all this ‘Almaty is almost European’ and ‘once you cross the Ural mountains you’re in Europe’ talk … in only 13 days from now we really will be in Europe, and after spending all of the last 12 months travelling in Asia save eight days in Australia, Europe can’t come a moment too soon.

Southern Kazakhstan: Holy Tombs and Ramadan

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

The devastating Soviet oppression of Islam in Central Asia has led – even nearly two decades after the collapse of the USSR and subsequent independence of the five Central Asian republics – to a religious apathy I’ve never before ... [Continue reading this entry]

Switching ‘Stans

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Marco Polo Sheep

It’s been almost a week since we left Kyrgyzstan, and although we once again didn’t do a great deal in our final week in Bishkek as Wendy prepared for her ... [Continue reading this entry]