Astana or Bust

I apologize in advance if this post gets a little too graphic. I try to keep most of my blog postings as family-friendly as possible in hopes that someday Disney will make a movie about my life; we all know that the folks there would never publish anything inappropriate, such as a discretely-hidden penis on the original cover of The Little Mermaid. Anyway, put the kids to bed, pour yourself a bottle of wine, and read on.

I used to wonder why I put myself through hell to save a few dollars. Then it occurred to me: past-Jason is an asshole, and future-Jason is a pushover (or “little bitch”, for lack of a better term), who always puts up with his behavior. You may have even hear me say on occasion, after doing something particularly (fill in the blank), “we’re just going to let future-Jason deal with the consequences of this one…” In summary, since this probably doesn’t make sense to anyone but me: I have a tendency to make decisions without considering what I’ll be putting my future-self through.

Right. So that aside aside—I love saying that—I decided that it would be a good idea to take a bus from Almaty, Kazakhstan to Astana, Kazakhstan. Since very few of you know where both of these places are, here is an easy map: easy map. And since some (hopefully fewer) of you don’t know where Kazakhstan is either, here is another easy map: easy map 2.0. Now, let’s not worry about why I’m in Kazakhstan in the first place, and focus on the distance between these two cities: about 600 miles as the crow flies. This equates to a 13 to 22 hour train ride (depending on which train you take), an 18 hour bus ride, or a healthy 85 hour jog. I opted for the middle option for expense reasons, and bought the bus ticket sitting next to the pretty Russian girl. Here is my log—mostly written as it was happening as a means to pass to the time. The side notes are my posthumous additions.

Bus Log: Star Date 2:01 PM – Supposedly the departure time. Sitting on the bus, sweating, and wondering what I’m about to put myself through.

2:05 PM – Kicked out of my seat. Apparently they are assigned, and not first-come, first-served. If I had a nickel for every time that this has happened to me, I’d be rich—though only by Kyrgyzstan standards because nickels aren’t really worth anything anywhere else I’ve been.

2:20 PM – An overweight Kazakh man climbs aboard, the bus starts, and we leave the station.

2:30 PM – By now everyone has given up trying to adjust their overhead AC vent to “open”, and accepted that there will be no air conditioning—or airflow, minus the driver’s window—for the rest of this 18 hour trip. It’s 34 degrees (Celsius) outside.

2:35 PM – The overweight Kazakh man starts heckling the driver in Russian. Everyone is laughing, but I have no idea what the joke is. It feels like middle school all over again—still not part of the “in-crowd”.

2:37 PM – The driver pulls over, and opens the two emergency exits in the ceiling—propping each of them open with an empty water bottle because they don’t stay ajar otherwise. The heckling continues, but the driver doesn’t seem to care anymore and doesn’t stop again.

2:55 PM – The smooth road surrounding Almaty has given way to 2 lanes of potholes, broken glass, blown-out tires, and little else. I guess this is the steppe.

3:00 PM – Time for a snack. Dried apples (please check out my previous post if you’re curious about how much I love dried fruit).

3:05 PM – Finish off my snack with a tomato, cucumber, and a bit of formerly-carbonated water.

As a side note, the water “with gas” here stops having “gas” once you open the bottle about 3 times. Knowing this, I’ve stopped trying to figure out how to tell if the bottled water I buy—tap water usually isn’t potable—is carbonated or not.

3:15 PM – Just a steppe in the right direction…

3:35 PM – Not feeling so good. The road is pretty hellish, but I’m not sure what the issue is since I rarely get motion sickness. Mild heatstroke? I did walk around for 2 hours in the sun carrying my 22 kg souvenir-and-snack-laden pack looking for the bus station without any water… Then again, I don’t feel cold, and I don’t know any of the other symptoms. Something I ate? No way—I love dried apples, and they love me; they’d never try to hurt me.

4:00 PM – Okay, reading isn’t helping the motion sickness. Time to close my eyes, relax, and listen to the lyrical mastery of “Trouble”, by T. Swift, that’s playing from someone’s phone.

As another side note, this has been a reoccurring situation on almost every bus, Marshrutka, or shared taxi I’ve taken since entering the former USSR: when there is no radio playing, someone takes it upon themselves to act as DJ via their cellular device—subjecting the rest of the passengers to their musical whims. As someone who is not carrying an iPod, headphones, or any source of electronic entertainment though, I haven’t been bothered by this; it’s a neat insight into the local music scene, and every fifth song is in English anyway.

4:15 PM – We stop—thank god; my stomach can’t handle much more of this road. I get out to pee and buy some 7-Up in hopes that it will settle things down.

4:30 PM – The driver is blaring his horn and driving away slowly as people scramble to board the moving bus.

4:35 PM – Apple-flavored burps are starting. Also: the 7-Up-lookalike I bought is lemon-lime-flavored tea. It’s not even carbonated. Damn.

4:40 PM – The end is near. I accidentally tear a hole in a plastic bag as I rush to remove the precious contents—cucumbers—from inside it.

4:41 PM – Vom. And again. And then again. In the actual act, I manage to avoid coating myself and those around me. However, the plastic bag is leaking (via the hastily-tied repair) all over my tank top, shorts, and backpack. I put the vom bag inside another plastic bag, and the flow is stopped. I estimate that I’m holding a 3” x 3” x 2.5” bag of vomit in my hands. The pretty Russian girl next to me looks more unimpressed than disgusted; apparently 23 cubic inches of vom is not good enough for her. In Soviet Russia, bag vomits you.

4:45 PM – The urge to vom has subsided completely. I tie off both bags and place the vomception (a vom bag within a vom bag) gingerly on my lap. The balancing act to ensure that it doesn’t tip over begins; we probably have another 3 hours of driving before we stop again and I can throw out the bag. Awesome.

5:00 PM – Begin passing time by counting camels. Start singing “Harvest” (shout out to Neil Young circa 1972) to myself, as it’s been stuck in my head for two weeks now. The bus’s cell phone DJ hasn’t resumed their duties since the last stop.

5:20 PM – Start singing “What Would You Do” (shout out to City High circa 2001) to myself. Conclude that if my son were at home, cryin’ all alone on the bedroom floor because he was hungry, I probably wouldn’t sleep with a man for a little bit of money. Sorry City High, I’d find an alternative solution.

5:35 PM – Steppe update: still looks the same.

6:00 PM – Finish off the lemon-lime-flavored tea. Despite my initial reaction, I want more.

6:15 PM – Contemplate the business feasibility of introducing the Marshrutka to America. I can’t figure out why it hasn’t been done already—it’s such a perfect concept—but overall can’t come to a conclusion on how the public would react.

6:40 PM – Bus pulls over. I throw out vomception and look for a sink to wash my tank top and backpack in. There’s no running water. I consider throwing away the tank, but on the other hand, I’ve already lost one friend to the dangers of travel this trip and can’t afford to lose another. The tank top stays. Also, I don’t have access to the rest of my clothes since they’re locked in the storage area beneath the bus; being shirtless for the next 14 hours isn’t appealing to me, even though I'd have the company of two other similarly-dressed passengers.

6:50 PM – Fail in my attempts to say “I want to buy ice cream from the refrigerator behind your counter” in Russian, and settle for buying water and eating the melted snickers bar I’ve been carrying in my backpack for 5 days. I can’t figure out if the “Property of Milwaukee College” shirt the clerk is wearing is legit or not. Based on the number and variety of English-language shirts I’ve seen being worn lately, and her proficiency in English, I guess that it probably isn’t. Since I don’t feel up to the challenge of asking her if she goes to school in Milwaukee though, it remains a mystery. I’ll probably die never knowing.

7:00 PM – The driver climbs aboard carrying a beer, honks the horn, and we hit the road again. People are scrambling aboard a moving bus.

7:01 PM – More steppe.

7:15 PM – Notice the pretty Russian girl next to me is drinking something called “Dizzy Cocktail.” I consider the notion of icing Teddy (John “Teddy” Cordes) via the Kazakh postal system. I start working through a quick cost-benefit analysis.

8:00 PM – Calculate—based on my height and the curvature of the earth—that there is nothing within a 4 mile radius of me; rounding Pi to 3.1, there is nothing within the 49.6 square miles around the bus except camels, cows, truck drivers, and broken beer bottles.

8:15 PM – The pretty Russian girl next to me gets a phone call. Something is happening at 11 PM tonight. Based on her first impression of me though, I probably won’t get an invitation. 

9:00 PM – Sunset. I speculate that I’ll regret wearing only a tank top and shorts on this trip. Damn you past-Jason!

9:30 PM – Start to wonder if/when the bus driver will sleep on this trip. I’m exhausted (vomiting really takes it out of you) and I’m just a passenger—with 11 hours left to drive. Also: we just passed two gas stations that were across the street from one another; one said that it was 25 degrees, the other said it was 26 degrees. I don’t know who to trust.

11:00 PM – It’s still dark outside.

11:15 PM – We stop. I get off to buy some water, but the pretty Russian girl gets her luggage and leaves the bus for good. I hope Balkhash is worth giving up your seat next to the—dashingly handsome—guy who reeks of apples and hasn’t washed his clothes since (The) Ukraine.

11:25 PM – I board the bus again, but there’s an old man in my seat. I try to explain that he’s in my spot, but he gets angry and refuses to move. He’s pretty mean, but I find consolation knowing that he’s sitting in relatively fresh apple-vomit. I sit where the Russian girl was.

12:00 AM – Some coffee right now sure would put a spring in my steppe

2:20 AM – I wake up in a mysterious new truck stop. It’s cold outside, but the bus is cozy; someone removed the water bottles from the emergency exits. #tanktopsuccess

2:40 AM – The seat-stealing old man gets back on the bus and takes his (my) spot. He reeks of cigarettes. Gross. Then again, I’m no bottle of Pine Sol myself… Maybe we should be friends.

7:30 AM – Too tired to be witty—haven’t slept. I would do awful things for a toothbrush and some legroom.

8:25 AM – We pass the city limit sign to Astana. Time to steppe on it, driver.

8:27 AM – The overweight Kazakh man gets up and puts on his jacket, and I notice for the first time that he is wearing a full, bright blue, Kazakhstan track suit. The sun simultaneously breaks through the clouds. Today will be a good day.

8:50 AM – Arrive in the Astana bus terminal. Time to get weird…And change my clothes.

And thus marks the end of my bus log. I ended up only spending about 9 hours in Astana before deciding to leave it and go—via a 3 hour Marshrutka ride—to a nature park in the north. Was it all worth it? I’m not sure. All I know is that past-Jason is a jerk, and that he’ll manage to find more ways to screw future-Jason. Stay tuned.

Happy trails,

JHW