“Wa wa wee wa!. . .This is my country of Kazakhstan. It locate between Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and assholes Uzbekistan.” That is a quote from Borat, created by actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Borat is arguably the most recognizable representation of Kazakhstan (and Central Asia as a whole) that Americans know. And unsurprisingly, it is not remotely accurate. But here’s the thing: Cohen knew that. He also knew Americans wouldn’t know what someone from Kazakhstan looks like, sounds like, or lives like. This gave him carte blanche to effectively dupe anyone he encountered including politicians.
As we were getting ready for bed in Samarkand on our last night in Uzbekistan, I told Nicole that it was kind of exciting to not really know what we would encounter the next day in Kazakhstan. Would it be similar to Uzbekistan at all or completely different? Would they know more English? Would the culture be as different as the landscape? On one hand, it is of course ignorant on our part to not know everything ahead of time. But as this is essentially a forgotten part of the planet, it allows for a travel experience that is more raw — what traveling was like in another era.
As it turned out, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are nothing alike. The only similarity they share is bad traffic in the cities. But even within Uzbekistan, there are vast differences between Tashkent and Bukhara for example. The countries of Central Asia have their own identities, but also their own identity crisis as the grapple with being the crossroads of the region that has seen so many ruling factions over the years. Under the Soviet umbrella for nearly 7 decades, they are still looking to define themselves. I majored in international affairs in college and my concentration was on Eastern Europe — later renamed to Eurasia to encompass the Central Asian countries. But everything we learned about the USSR still pretty much focused on the Eastern Europe part of it all. I could tell you a lot about the Prague spring, the 2004 egg assasination in Ukraine, or even the sarcastic pop song about Putin being the ideal man which ironically ended up being used as propaganda for one of his reelection campaigns. If we talked about Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan in class, it was fleeting and not memorable. And thus the mystique of this region of the world remained in spite of my so-called expertise.
And if you followed this blog from the beginning, you could see we were learning on the fly. Every day brought a new challenge: languages, hostile taxi drivers, left turns. In the moment, it could be stressful. But at night as Nicole and I reminisced about the day’s events, we always had a good laugh, basking in a kind of absurdist humor. So many times I felt like I was being gaslit. The guide leading us up the road at Big Almaty Lake told me (in Russian of course) to keep my phone in my pocket while we were driving, then proceeded to pop a wheelie most of the way up the mountain to further exemplify his safety-first mantra. Boarding trains, the conductors would shake their heads when I showed them our tickets as if we’d done something wrong, then would repeat the same seat numbers that we were sitting in. Confusion would be an understatement.
We embraced the madness and had a few nonsensical statements up our sleeve. We choreographed a response in case another taxi hawker were to follow us around. “Нет не надо. У нас скоро прилетит самолет!” (Nope, no need, we have an airplane arriving soon!”), at which point Nicole was going to look up eagerly at the sky with a very serious expression. It was so unhinged, we figured they wouldn’t know how to proceed. But I think that kind of antic captures the general theme of the trip: an overall cheekiness and joy in the face of annoyances.
Obviously most Americans aren’t likely to take part in any aspect of this voyage. When the ending of your country ends in “Stan,” people get nervous. You might be interested to know, however, that Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan both receive just a level 1 travel advisory from our very own state department. France, Italy, and the United Kingdom have a level 2. But lots of people go to Paris and London or Rome. They’re familiar. People post about them on instagram and TikTok. And that alone makes them seem safer. It also makes them inundated with tourists. We, Bricole (everyone’s favorite celebrity couple) have not hid from the fact that we hate a crowd. Going to a crowded museum in Warsaw was like our own personal hell.
And yes, as you’ve read, there were some complexities to the experience. English was really not spoken outside the hotels. The most English we heard during the trip was when six bus loads of primary school children kept saying, “Hello! How are you?!,” to us as they hiked up toward the meditation temple in Mongolia. Elsewhere, if you wanted to get anything accomplished, you would need to know at least some Russian. At first, it was surprising how little English was being spoken, but perhaps it shouldn’t have been. These countries have been under Russian influence well before the Soviet Union absorbed them. Russian is like the universal language in these parts — challenging everything we thought we knew about the world and its perceived Anglocentrism.
Toward the end of our trip, I woke up in Mongolia and opened the shades to exclaim, “This looks like communism,” not realizing until that moment that Mongolia was indeed closely tied to the USSR. I became humbled by my lack of knowledge, yet excited to discover so many new things about the world. 100 countries in and counting, we are still learning. This is a fine time to remind you all that we still haven’t been to Spain, the world’s second most visited destination. This trip was certainly unique — a true traveler’s adventure. Not only did we circumnavigate the globe, we had the opportunity to experience what travel used to be: learning by seeing and experiencing instead of watching some vlogger tell me what I should be doing or eating.
To be fair, however, this was by all accounts an adventure. Nicole is not only looking forward to a beach vacation, but a break from margherita pizzas. And as Borat would say, despite its challenges and complexities, I think this trip was “great success!” See you at the playa.
passports & pepto bismol 