I sort through my notes.  On a piece of scrap paper something a student said:  “We have only one chance to feel the things of life.”

Road from Semey to Oskemen, early morning

The Muslim cemetery, looking toward Semey (minaret visible in distance)

“Dr. Kietzman, please can we meet.  I want to see you one more time.”

Lunch with the fourth year girls at Masha's flat. Nina sitting next to me.

Aliya -- "See you in America!" she said as we parted. Is she a future Ph.D. in "Second Language Studies"? If anyone can do it, Aliya can. We learned that MSU has a large Kazakh Student Association!

"We are Dostoyevsky and Chokan Valikhanov," joked my friend Lyuda. "But who is who?" quipped Ula.

I walk and walk these days to see one more time friends smiling with arms outstretched, Communist statues, dusty streets, light on mud brick, berries ripening, pink clouds and a minaret with an open door to a small room for a real muezzin.

Old house in Tatar quarter

Mosque along with river in a northern "suburb"

Ornament on a doorwary, near our flat

“Madonna of Semipalatinsk, if you grant the special prayers of our hearts, don’t let it seem like a dream.  With each breath, make the little room inside me as spacious as a yurt to hold the precious things I hate to leave.”

Madonna of Semipalatinsk, an icon with special "power"

Katya took communion on our last Sunday at the Orthodox Cathedral. Warmed wine in tiny teacups and a bit of bread.

Elderly women and women with children sit at the back of the church

“We’re dreading having to return to England,” said a British diplomat we met, travelling with his wife, two boys, and a dog.  They love life in Astana (“making it up as they go along”) and have two more years in Kazakhstan.

Mara (Juliet), Assima (the Nurse) and others: we made the whole thing up!

I have two more days in Semey.  I’m dreading the end of an adventure I’ve lived every day.

Winter at Semey's bazaar: Katya wearing my "chipmunk" hat and I pause to see what used stuff is for sale

“Madonna of Semipalatinsk, plant each image like a seed in me.”

"Give of yourself," says the nursing Madonna

The very kind woman who sells candles in church and distributes hosts

Nina’s mother-in-law opened a box of seeds, folded origami-like into paper packets and labeled carefully.  My packet says, “Pomidor 2008.”  I unfold the paper to peak at seeds which are tiny and delicate, round and white and dry.  They have magic power when placed in dirt.  “You must tell us if they grow in Michigan.”

Will I?

Abai watches over the bridge to the island

I glimpsed "paradise" behind the wall of faces

          Although Kazakhs in northern Kazakhstan preserve many elements of traditional culture, their traditional way of life disappeared through forced collectivization in the early 1930s.  The Kazakhs who survived this period adapted to the new social conditions, giving up nomadic life and migrating to Russian-speaking cities.   In Semey today, the Kazakh language is widely spoken, although the lingua franca remains Russian.  Older men wear the traditional cap and older women the traditional scarf and vest.  Kumys (fermented mare’s milk), Kazakh butter, cream, and zhent (a confection made from ground millet) are widely available.  Kids learn the dombra at the local state music school.  Women continue to sew pillow covers with traditional designs and make felt syrmaqs.   In the nearby steppe, it is common to see horsemen watching flocks of sheep and herds of cattle.  Thus it is unfair to characterize Kazakhs in this part of Kazakhstan as Russified.  Conditions merely have caused them to come under certain Russian influences.

House in Ölgii under construction. The vertically placed logs will be covered with mud.

          However, in Western Mongolia, where Kazakh tribes settled by the 1840s and to which further groups escaped in the 1930s, it is interesting to see how the culture has survived without Russian influence and without forced collectivization into settled life.  Although it has Soviet-style government buildings and apartment blocks, Ölgii is basically an overgrown Kazakh aul [village].   Most of the houses are single-story, built of logs and covered with mud.  The interior of these largely two-room houses is organized and decorated like that of yurts.  Mud brick walls surround each compound.  Many have low, mud brick barns, and, in the summer, many seem to be living in yurts in the compound.  These are the same design of the winter houses that Mukhamet Shayakhmetov describes from his childhood in the 1920s near Ust-Kamenogorsk in his book The Silent Steppe.  Although many Ölgii residents seem to live permanently in town, others continue to stay there only in winter, taking their livestock to pasture at higher elevations in the spring and summer.

Three yurts comprised this aul.

           We had the good fortune to visit a summer aul.  On the road between Khovd and Ölgii, at an elevation of over 7000 feet, our driver Ada made a sudden turn, driving uphill towards a distant group of three yurts at the bottom of a mountain.  We were making a stop at his relatives’ yurt!

Waiting for tea.

           The inside of the large, spacious yurt was a feast for the eyes.  We had seen many yurt displays in Kazakhstan museums, containing 19th-century artifacts, as well as yurts in use as hostels and kumys cafes, but this was our first time in one used in the traditional manner. 

Bed framed with curtains and luxurious embroidery contrasts with the harsh exterior

           We sat on syrmaqs (thick felt rugs with appliqué designs) near the dastarkhan (a low table).  Single beds around the perimeter were framed by curtains, behind which were brightly embroidered tuskiizes.  The hostess, who had obviously been working around a stove heated with dried dung all day, served us milky tea in pialas, followed by fresh kumys, and a plate of homemade noodles with meat (kurdaq).  The table was filled with bowls of sweet butter and thick cream.  Not long after we arrived, a group of more relatives arrived, on a trip from Ulan Bator, and we talked with them, at least to the best of our ability in Russian.

           Katya left to play with the kids outside.  The temperature was about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, probably thirty degrees colder than it was in Khovd.  We soon followed, taking pictures and chatting with the men and women of the household.  The pictures here tell the story.

Around the stove at the center of the yurt.

Grandmother stirs the bag of mare's milk to make kumys.

The kids loved to pose for us.

Tundra flowers hugging the ground

           The drive went along a large lake, Tolbo Nuur, and we stopped to dip our feet .  The water was clear and cold.  Nobody was fishing; no person was in sight—something impossible to imagine at similar lakes in even the most remote spots in America.  The road then led through the Hashaatin Duvaa pass, 8400 feet above sea level.  Until that point the area seemed to be sparsely populated with the occasional Kazakh aul.  The view of the snowcapped mountain Tsambagarav (13,786 feet) dominated the middle part of the eight-hour trip.  In the high areas, some of the flowers hugging the ground were likely to be the same species as those growing in the tundra, given what must be terribly cold winters in this area.  The road then gradually went downhill, through very sparsely populated territory, until it reached a large valley.

View of the valley

           Khovd (or Hovd) is the center of the region (aimag) of the same name.  Although smaller than Ölgii, its urban core, consisting of government buildings, stores, and apartment blocks, is more developed.  The rivers running through the valley provide water for grass to flourish, and alongside the city, hundreds of families live in yurts, many with horses.  In the city itself, many walled lots contain only single yurts, although the southern side of the city seems to have Kazakh winter houses.  For our purposes, a stay in the “luxe” room of the Tsambagarav Hotel did the trick, even if the hot water didn’t work.   

           Probably the main attraction for us in Khovd was a chance to visit a Mongol area.  In this region, several different ethnic groups, including the Mongol Khalkha (the dominant Mongol group), various tribes of the Mongol Oirat (historically called Dzungars and Kalmyks), and the Turkic Kazakh and Tuvans, live near each other.  The language of the city is Mongolian, which made it hard to communicate, or at least harder than in Ölgii, where Kazakh is the lingua franca. 

Crowd watching wrestlers

           We happened to be here during Naaman, a national holiday, featuring wrestling matches, archery competitions, and horse racing.  Evidently because the national competitions are held in Ulan Bator on July 11 and people here watch them on television, the local competitions are held a day earlier.  We went to the sports park, where food and other vendors set up early in the day.  Nearby, twenty or more yurts provided meals for the crowds.  The atmosphere reminded me of a county fair in the U.S.  There was a bounce house, video lottery, games of chance; people sold cold drinks, ice cream, snacks. 

Wrestlers competing at Naadam festival

           Wrestling was the main event.  The participants arrived in traditional costumes, as did the judges and other officials, changing into wrestling shorts on the grassy field.  About six matches went on simultaneously.  Each wrestler first did an “eagle dance” around the referee before wrestling.  The crowd stayed behind ropes at quite a distance from the athletes, so it wasn’t easy to follow closely.  Still, people seemed to watch avidly.  The program continued for two hours or more, while archers shot arrows at the rear of the park.

Saran and her parents

           We sat by the rope barricade as the events began.  Sitting next to us was a man and woman with three children, ranging in age from four to twenty.  The oldest, an attractive girl with natural ashen hair and sunglasses, asked in English where we were from.  Mary Jo answered, feeling almost that she had met another English-language student for her proposed “international book club.”  Saran was her name; her father was Tuvan and her mother Mongol.  She was a student at the local pedagogical institute and had traveled to Barnaul, in Russia, to study Russian.  In good English, she described how she and her family lived in a yurt in Khovd, having electricity that powered a television, refrigerator, and computer.  Like others in this town, the yurt lay within a walled yard.  Their only animal was a dog.

Loading up with sacred spring water

           The next day we set out on foot towards a sacred spring, Ulaan Bogchiin Rashaan, a little north of the city near the road to Buyant.  The spring had a stone on which visitors placed blue ribbons and rocks, the Buddhist practice at holy sites.   This was obviously a site of pilgrimage, just like the springs in Kazakhstan we had visited.  Whether ostensibly Muslim, Christian, or Buddhist, this practice seems to date from much earlier times.  While we sat and drank the water, a group of Mongol tourists from Darkhan, in northern Mongolia, wearing identical T-shirts, arrived and took in the water. 

The valley, full of horses on the rich lawn

           We then walked along the lush, spring-fed valley that was dotted with hundreds of yurts.  Horses, goats, and cattle grazed near two rivers running parallel.  The animals kept the grass trimmed so close to the ground that it had the feel of a golf course, as Mary Jo commented.  Along the way we happened to see a group of horses tied to a rope that stretched between two poles.  A tiny foal was trying to suckle its mother.  Katya couldn’t resist the cuteness of the situation, so we went to look at the four-day-old horse.  A man came over and let her look at it.  The rest of the family soon followed, and we took pictures.  I asked about kumyss, and he promptly came back with a pail of the best, freshest, fermented mare’s milk I’ve ever tasted. The official holiday lasted three days after the local festival, which meant that most businesses in town were closed.  There was little to do but walk around and see what we could see.  We then went back to Ölgii, with more adventures waiting for us.

As they say, a Mongol child learns to ride as soon as they walk!

View of Ölgii from a Nearby Mountain

          Kazakhstan is reputedly the most Russified of the Central Asian republics.  The population arguably conceded to Soviet collectivization in the 1930s without incident.  Was Kazakh culture lost or suppressed?  It is difficult to say, especially for Americans who have spent over six months in Semey—an urban setting—and who have seen little of village life.  In the thirties, when the Soviets were killing nomads’ livestock and forcing them onto collective farms, many Kazakhs fled to Mongolia, where others had settled long before.  Before returning to America, we wanted to make the short trip across the border to see what, if anything, we could experience of a perhaps purer Kazakh culture, one that remained close to its nomadic roots.

             Although dubious about trying to find the “real” or “authentic” Kazakh culture, I did want to see nomads and yurts if they were there to be seen.  I am guilty of romanticizing nomadism, but at least I know that I’m doing it.  I recall one conversation with students this semester when I asked whether they romanticized the traditional Kazakh lifestyle.  I was almost guffawed out of the room.  Only two girls out of twenty had slept in a touristic yurt, and they said that for them this way of life meant collective living, constricting traditions, no personal choice, and absolutely no room for romance!

A "Gray Beard" in the Ölgii Bazaar

              We flew to Ölgii from Oskemen (Ust-Kamenogorsk), viewing barren mountains and a few yurts before the plane touched down.  Broken computers made getting through customs to the squat toilets outside, with full bladders, very wearing.  Hotel choices were limited.  The first one had only two single beds in a room, the second had three beds but no toilet, and the third – far from being just right – had three beds and a toilet but also flaking plaster, sagging floors, no hot water, and a bathtub so dirty that I wouldn’t think of letting Katya play in it.  We settled for the third Soviet-style dump.  There was no “reception,” but the woman who showed us the room insisted on money (all of it) up front.  She later tried to claim that we’d only paid for one night.  Obviously she attempted to pocket the money.  When we went to change Kazakhstani  tenge for Mongolian tögreg at a nearby bank, we were cheated by the clerk who gave us four hundred dollars worth of tögreg in such small denominations that we couldn’t stand in line to count it all.

           Usually able to tolerate a high level of discomfort, I was more discouraged than usual by the accommodations and was getting bad vibes about the place.  My negativity came from a bit of culture shock , disorientation, discomfort, helplessness – all experiences that were necessary to unsettle my idealized notions of traditional Kazakh life.  In our first night in this large village we met a Kazakh guy who had recently returned from studying at a community college in Seattle.  He addressed us as “you guys”:  “So what do you guys think of Mongolia?”  I didn’t have the heart to tell him my first impressions.  He loved America, despite being stopped from fishing in rivers without a license, prevented from entering parks without a permit, and driving freely across open terrain:  “You know, people say that America is free, but I think Mongolia is the freest country of all.”  After two days in Ölgii, I would have to agree – yurts are set up and flocks graze with seemingly no concerns about property rights ; however, I would add that this freedom is inflected with a certain lawlessness that made this American slightly nervous.

 Ölgii – Settled Kazakhs in a Permanent Aul

Summer Yurts Next to Winter Houses in Walled Compounds

         Ölgii has a main square and government buildings with Communist-era statues.  It is the only place we’ve visited where a Lenin statue still occupies its original place.  The businesses are few and the stores stocked mostly with sweets and bulk goods from China.  Beyond that, there are neighborhoods of walled compounds.  The walls and winter quarters are made of mud brick.  Within the walls, many families have a yurt set up.  It seems that the yurts are used for summer living.  There were animals, mostly goats, inside the compounds.  Apparently some of Ölgii’s residents have larger herds and go on zhaylau with their families and herds for the summer.  We would meet one of these large families, summering in high pastures, a week later.  Still, many of the families that settled in Ölgii retain the yurt even though they no longer move seasonally.  As a result, the settlement has the appearance of a more permanent aul.  Life seems casual.   Children literally run wild.  On an evening walk through a neighborhood to the river, I was watching a girl shoot baskets, and Katya chased goats.  Eventually we all convened, smiled with pleasure at the unlikely collision of worlds, and enjoyed the soft light and very cool breeze from the mountains.  It was a temporary respite.  For the two days of our initial stay in Ölgii, a fierce wind which achieved sandstorm intensity stung our exposed skin and coated us with dust.  We had no warm water to wash away the grime of travel.

Passerby Tries Out a Dombra from a Dombra Seller

           We spent the next day seeing what we could of the town and its surroundings.  We visited the bazaar (tourists are charged an entrance fee) and the local museum (which seems to exist for the sake of a shop where local women sell handicrafts).  A woman had accosted us early on the street and told us that we must visit the very good museum.  Later, I saw her among the group playing cards and waiting for the tourists to get done staring at stuffed and dusty dioramas of local wildlife and the usual ethnographic displays (a yurt behind plexiglass).  In the store, the women aggressively displayed their  embroidered yurt paraphernalia, copying our phrases “this one very nice,” “very old this one,” “my mother worked this.”  Although difficult to actually see the items when they are pushed into your face, it is true that we’d never seen so many examples of crafts in Kazakhstan.  But the increasing numbers of tourists, mostly from Western Europe coming here via Russia and Ulan Bator to trek and climb mountains, has created a new demand for such products.  

Local Children Pose in Front of a Large, Recent Mausoleum

           I was eager to escape from the center and go out across the river to the cemetery on the hillside.  In the last light of our first evening walk, I’d see the glint of a mosque dome in a city for the dead.  They are usually on hillsides.  I wanted to have a walk up the barren slope and a look at the “city” and the view which promised to be dramatic.  Katya came along, lured by the promise to play with animals .  Through the lanes between mud brick walls we three walked.  The ground of the hillside was hard and rocky, and the mountains looked forbidding.  The blowing sand hurt Katya’s legs and stung our eyes.  A mother with a little girl walked past us.  We paused and watched them go, but they turned around, the daughter dragging her mother. 

Mother and Daughter

Standing face to face we told each other our names and the girl ran along with us, leaving her mother to her errand.  We climbed to the cemetery:  fenced in plots surrounded vertical stones on mounds littered with jagged rock.  Some of the graves were marked and inscribed.  We sat on a wall, shared what chocolate and apples we had with the four new children who ran behind us up the slope.  Since we had come so far, we decided to climb a little further onto the rock mountain.  The rock looked hard but alive, having the texture of coral.  Paul wanted to climb all the way to the peak and did, but the wind was blowing so hard and there was a little child of only two or three years old, so I stayed with the kids.  We spotted goats on another mountainside, grazing.  Looking part goat himself, the six-year old boy dashed straight up the rock in a burst of energy.  Katya threw rocks.  I stared in wonder at red hair and freckles in a Kazakh face, remembering the Altai graves in permafrost that yielded red-haired princesses wearing tartan cloth.  DNA testing suggested that there were Indo-European migrants in ancient times.  Perhaps she was of that line. 

Katya Met a Girl Her Age

           We followed the children down the hill.  They were moving fast.  The “princess” led the way.  “Katya,” we called.  “My friend wants me to come somewhere.”  She led us through compounds.  We saw open root cellars and yurts with fires burning.  Katya disappeared inside a crude mud brick house.  She poked her head out, “Mom, it’s nice in here!”  And there was the girl’s mother, who we’d met earlier, inviting us inside.  We removed our shoes and passed from a small first room with a pot and some cooking implements into the main room, where the family eats, sleeps, and lives.  There were two rickety looking beds piled with quilts and bedding.  The piles were spread with pieces of needlework.  There was also a wooden chest painted with designs, exactly the sort we’d seen in yurt displays in museums in Kazakhstan.  All of the needlework was her own.  Except for a small television and cassette player in one corner, the room was fitted like a yurt.  I would later learn, after I’d seen hundreds of yurts, that many have satellite dishes and solar panels to power refrigerators, televisions, and even computers.  This woman’s mud brick dwelling even had a hole in the roof at the center, just like yurts, so she could set up a stove for cooking indoors when necessary.  The woman moved a table into the room, carried in pialas (cups without handles) and a kettle of watery black tea and a bowl of cold, hard biscuits.  We had our tea and tried to communicate with her, watched by fifteen children, five of which were hers.  When we left, I wanted to thank her for her hospitality.  “Rakhmet” [“thank you”] didn’t seem enough of an offering.  I pulled off a bracelet with icons on it which was sold at my home church in America for Mother’s Day.  I hoped the Christian symbols wouldn’t offend her.  There seems to be a current of missionary Islamic zeal in Ölgii which accounts for the new mosques being built and the “covered” women.  But this woman wore a Kazakh-style scarf over her braided hair.  Being a mother defined her more than any religion.  The dank smell of her house, its peeling plaster, and her hospitality told me that I ought to stop finding fault with life’s hard necessities and create as much comfort and beauty within mud brick as I could.

This Women Kindly Offered Her Hospitality

 The Drive East – Seeing Nomads

              We hired a driver to take us 200 miles southeast to the town of Khovd.  We would be there to witness the festivities and games associated with the summer holiday of Naadam.  The driver picked us up in a sturdy blue minibus with a high chassis and hard springs.  We waited for him to make repairs to the clutch and stop “two minutes” at the bazaar to purchase a wrench.  His family lives somewhere between Ölgii and Khovd, and the English-speaking ex-teacher who coordinates drivers in Ölgii said that we might have the chance to visit his relatives’ yurt.

Driving to Khovd

              We were on and off a path through rugged mountainous terrain.  Roads here are almost unnecessary, since much of the treeless landscape is hard ground, often covered with only small rocks and sparse vegetation.  He seemed to navigate more by landmarks than by quirks in the road.   It was not a relaxing ride.  It was more like riding a horse, where you have to watch your animal’s footing in order to prepare for bumps, swerves, jars, and jolts, so as not to be thrown.  No chance of catching a nap on this ride.  The driver knew all the paths the nomads use and some used by animals.  When we asked that he turn back and allow us to take a look around a lake that held all the subtle colors of its surrounding mountains in a surface sheen that changed like taffeta, he consented and drove straight across the hard ground.

              There are no villages through these mountains, only groups of yurts called auls in Kazakh.  Small ones consist of three to six yurts, but we also saw large auls of forty yurts.  The herds seemed to consist mostly of goats, but we also saw herds of horses, cows, a single yak, and—-amazingly—- Bactrian camels.  Nomads in these mountains transport their dwellings in jeeps and larger trucks. 

These Herdsmen Came to the Cafe on Horseback

              After we’d been driving for five or six hours, we pulled up in front of a mud brick structure with horses tied up out front.  Inside the dark room were beds around the perimeter and tables.  Our driver was already sitting with a bowl of meat-filled fried bread (khuurg), which is eaten spread with hot sauce.  We too ate and drank Mongolian-style tea in pialas.  The tea here is very milky (goat’s milk) with salt in it.  Two men came in wearing Mongol costume – long quilted coats with brightly colored belts and baseball caps with visors tilted to the left.  They are served the only thing on the menu and eat hungrily hunched over their bowls.  They cast sidelong glances at us, the strangers in the room.  They must be shepherds.  I look at their black hands and begin to imagine their different reality but know that I never can.  Even the leap of imagination is impossible for me.  Yet here I am, observing my eight-year- old blond Russian daughter in a pink Hannah Montana T-shirt and sunglasses sitting next to Mongol  herdsmen. 

              There is no doubt that visiting Ölgii and making the drive to Khovd brought us closer to nomadic life.  We saw settled Kazakh nomads in Ölgii and nomads in the mountains.  We would see Mongol nomads who live year-round in yurts they call gers during our stay in Khovd, and we would eventually visit a family in a yurt.  But did we get closer to understanding their different reality of few choices and forced movement that depends on conditions of weather and the needs of animals?  That is hard to say.

                 Walking among encamped yurts on the morning of the Naadam holiday in Khovd, we watched a mother washing sheets in a basin by the river and laying the sheets on grass to dry.  Her children helped her.  When they weren’t needed, they ran off to play a game with rocks.  They’d created the shape of a soccer field with small stones and were throwing them back and forth.  Katya lingered on the sideline, wanting to join the play but not knowing how.  No child ran up to her to take her hand and show her the ropes.  “They’re mean, they don’t like me!” she yelled and her yelling got louder and sadder.  “Honey, we’re strangers here.  It’s hard when you can’t communicate.  Sometimes you can find ways to play more easily and sometimes people are friendlier.  That game involved rules and it might be harder for you to play.”  She is learning – with difficulty – the lesson that we are not the center of the world and that other people are not always interested in us.  How often as parents we verbalize lessons so glibly for our children that we are still learning ourselves!  This became clear after I’d been drawn into one of her ploys to play Daddy against Mommy and felt hurt when she said “I want to spend some time with Daddy.”  I walked alone through Khovd, enjoying the solitude, I must say, repeating “I am not the center of the world.”

Two Among Hundreds of Mongolian Gers in Khovd

Feral puppies along the river in spring

Boys hunting crayfish in the shallows

            Sometime in May, when spring was really coming, I heard something like loud duck quacking from the old bridge over the Irtysh.  The quacking was audible even above the traffic noise.  When I scanned the river’s surface, I saw no ducks at all.  But bright blue pools and marsh grasses along the shore caught my eye.  It must be frogs!  The next day I pried Katya away from cartoons on TV and convinced her to put on her rubber boots and hunt frogs with me over there on the other side.  I love frogs, and hearing their spring mating calls, so ardent even while sunk in mud and muck, is one of the things I love about the Michigan spring. 

View of Irtysh marshes from the old bridge

                We walked off the old bridge down to the river.  It felt like we were stepping out of the city (or under it) to slosh in the muck with floating crayfish bodies and explosive yet elusive frogs.  Plop!  Into the water before we could grab a single one.  The edge of the Irtysh on the Zhana Semey side feels like a wasteland.  Nature is lush and undisturbed, but there is scattered trash, and the abandoned-looking buildings (especially an old boat terminal and the Hotel Turist) made me recall seaside resorts whose heyday has passed – Atlantic City and Far Rockaway.  Where are the beautiful people, the hotels, the pavilions, the excursion craft, Playland, the Steel Pier with its diving horse?  All gone to quiet, wind, surf, dunes, and seed, with thankfully no urban renewal.  It is the same here.  “Mom!  My foot is stuck (in mud)!”  My daughter’s voice wakes me from my dream.  “Come on, Mary Jo, this is a river in Siberia … it’s thousands of miles to any ocean, and this one flows into the Arctic!”  Yet there are gulls, whispered a deeper voice.  I’ve since learned from Paul that the gulls here migrate all the way from the Pacific Ocean.  Which travel writer was it that describes the Irtysh as a safer sea in the heart of Asia?  Was it the one who travelled in a steamboat on this same river sometime around 1916 and was moved to lyricism by its flow from the silences of the Altai Mountains, through the silences of Northern Asia and, despite its traffic of steamers and sailing boats, the “noise of man hardly becomes more than a whisper upon it.”  Oh, I remember.  The writer is Stephen Graham.  Which other writer compared the sublimely expansive steppe with to the sea?  Or was that a moor?  I pushed aside these thoughts and mentally demanded a reality check.  I got back to the real work of frog hunting which turned into the work of finding a satisfactory substitute.  We found a snail which Katya named on the spot — “Slimey.”

Near an old boat terminal that is no longer used

                That was a month ago.  Today is July 1st.  I have eleven days left in Semey, not counting days in Mongolia.  I want to walk as far down unexplored roads as I can before they close on me forever.  So today it is Zhana Semey – the road behind my institute.  I’ve never walked far enough to see the footings of an old bridge that once connected the left bank to an island in the river.  I’ve always wanted to see it.  As I snap pictures of houses that I still love even after experiencing the reality of one, I think of Jamaica Kincaid’s distinction between the tourist and native.  She points out that everyone wants to escape the reality of their everyday life, but only Westerners can afford to turn someone else’s ash-heaps and wet laundry into sources of pleasure for themselves.  But today neither her disparagement of the tourist nor a touch of guilt stop me from clicking away at desolation, weathered wood, broken statues, and overgrown soccer stands.

Waiting for a ferry? There was one in the 19th century

                When I get to the concrete pilings that must have been the bridge foundation, I see cars with their doors flung open.  They look like they’re waiting for a ferry.  As I move closer, I see children swimming, boys jumping off concrete slabs, and a man gently coaxing his dog into the water.  When I get past the line of houses with a clear view of the pebbled beach, I can’t believe my eyes.  There are colorful beach umbrellas, towels spread underneath with people lounging, and—my goodness!—that can’t be a lifeguard stand.  I run, taken over with enthusiasm, and find a place to pull off socks and shoes. 

Umbrellas waiting for bathers

Sisters

         “Dyevooshka!,” yell a couple of men drinking vodka on what I would call a sandbar, were it not for the stones.  I splash children, snap their pictures, and wish Paul and Katya were here.  It’s the beach that was in my mind!  It’s my fantasy!  It wasn’t a mirage or some romantic projection. 

Someone has even installed two changing booths on the "beach"

          The natives of Semey have remade a grubby world into a resort for themselves that reminds me not to believe all that I read in books.  “It’s not true what Kincaid says,” my student Mira objected months ago. “Everyone can afford to arrange an outing for their friends and family.”  This homemade riverside beach resort also reminds me to trust the thing in me that responds spontaneously and almost unconsciously to the faces of a place.  I felt that I was at the shore while hunting frogs in May.  Two months later, I’m a little closer to being there.

An idealized view of the river in the cafe of the Hotel Turist where a cup of tea concludes my day at the beach

"No money, please" says the woman who runs the cafe

          We have already described the hüzün (gloom) of Semey in March, but another kind of hüzün remains into June, visible in the ghostly vestiges of a faded social vision.  For all its fundamental faults, problems, and mistakes, Communism offered people a sense of collective hope for the future in “building socialism.”  Every five-year plan promised new economic development.  During the early Brezhnev era, before real stagnation set in, Semey (or, rather, the local or Kazakhstan Central Committee of the Communist Party) planned numerous cultural and touristic projects  that opened the way for Semey to show others, as the rector of Semey State Pedagogical Institute told us when we arrived, that it was the “cultural and spiritual heart” of Kazakhstan.   After twenty years of independence, some survive, while others have fallen into complete oblivion. 

Memorial to Abay Kunanbayev

           It appears that in the late 1960s decisions were made to enhance Semey’s cultural institutions and, in a related gesture, to improve its tourist facilities and attractions.  This may have been part of a larger city plan, but without further research into old newspapers (due to our limited language capability), we have to make assumptions.  The earliest of these was the construction of a statue to memorialize the literary figure Abay Kunanbayev, announced in 1969.  The Abay statue, surrounded by a park, remains an important site in the city.  Each Saturday, Kazakh wedding parties stop to lay flowers in front of it.

Literary-Memorial Museum F. M. Dostoyevsky annex

          In 1971, an old house which had been Dostoevsky’s home while exiled here in the 1850s and more recently a branch library and branch of the local historical museum was expanded into the Literary-Memorial Museum “F. Dostoevsky,” with a new addition.  Forty thousand sets of postcards with images of the museum were printed (now given away for free). 

Abay Theatre

          Nearby, the imposing Abay Theatre, facing a large square, was built in 1972.  This houses both Kazakh-language and Russian-language drama companies.

Dostyk (formerly Oktyabr) Movie Theatre

          The Dostyk (originally Oktyabr) Movie Theater, with impressive bas reliefs depicting Soviet soldiers in World War II, opened in 1974, following a three-year period under construction.  It is now closed and forgotten.  Someone seems to have tried operating the adjoining restaurant in recent years but obviously gave up.

Abay Museum annex

          The Abay Museum opened in 1966 in a Tsarist-era building, but in 1975, an annex, which contains exhibition areas and a round, dome-covered  lecture hall, was added. 

Turist Hotel and adjoining restaurant

Irtysh (Ertis) Hotel and adjoining restaurant

           Soviet planning certainly associated museums with facilities for tourism.  We don’t know exactly when they were built, but the architectural style of the hotels and other projects along the Irtysh River certainly suggests that they date from this era.  Grandiose as they appear from the distance, unfortunately now they appear to be just barely surviving.  Others are gone.  It seems that the government assumed the maintenance and support of museums and drama companies but privatized the movie theatre and hotels.  Inevitably, changing technology and the free market has threatened their survival.

Boat terminal

          The sorriest -looking site from this era is probably the boat terminal on the left side of the Irtysh (Zhana Semey).  Pleasure and work craft have used the river for more than a century.  Planners designed a large terminal with a restaurant and other facilities.  At some point the boats ended, and the picture here tells the rest of the story.

The house where we took a banya

          It is Sunday and we are invited to Nina’s mother-in-law’s house.  Nina has been sleeping there since “grandmother” took ill.  “I want to invite you, Mary, but is very poor and old,” she said.  I answered that  I didn’t care.  I didn’t say how long I’d wanted to see the inside of the kind of house I’d photographed hundreds of times.  “And you may have a banya,” she added.  So the visit promised to satisfy a longstanding curiosity and supply a physical necessity as well.  Semey’s water pipes are still being repaired, and we who live in Soviet-era apartment blocks are still without city hot water after five weeks!

                Since it is Sunday, we go to church first.  Going to church after six months feels like visiting friends.  Certain icons are so familiar.  There is the Madonna with eyes like black teardrops, regarding me as she offers an exposed breast to her baby.  There is the dejected prophet holding a tract no one cares to read, standing alone on the riverbank with eyes cast heavenward.  There’s Jesus holding the shining white orb (the pearl of great price?  A whole soul?).  “There’s “Nielsen”!  He’s my favorite.”  Katya has found the perfect image of her guardian angel in the placid, red-haired figure, who is just her height.  The icons translate complex inner states into simple and definite expressions, postures, and gestures.  They are ethical teachers.   But they also remind me of friends for whom I’ve whispered special prayers , friends who are also my teachers when I contemplate them as I do a painting or watch them as I watch a sunrise.  As I stood in the back of the church, surrounded by homely saints, it occurred to me that friends can help us find what matters most and encourage us to move toward it.  That was my prayer.

Katya's guardian angel, "Nielsen"

          Behind the heavy gate and wooden door is a village world.  “The house is over one hundred years old.  My mother-in-law came here when she moved from a nearby village.”  The majority of older houses in Semey are tiny log houses, just like this one, and the majority of Semeyans were at one time migrants from villages, predominantly Russians.  Nina remembers that in her class of thirty there were only five Kazakhs.  Times have changed.  What hasn’t changed , it seems, is village life.  When people talk about moving from the village or going to the village, it’s always “the village,” without a specific place name, as if the word “village” refers more to a way of life than to a place.  This is a world within the world of the city – one I didn’t expect to see.

Nina showing the kitchen garden

                Inside the wall, extended family members work and play.  Nina’s ex-husband waters the “kitchen garden” in a skimpy nylon brief that looks like a Speedo bathing suit.  They discuss their battle with the grasses that have made it difficult to find the small potato plants.  Neverthess, Nina points out cabbage, carrots, potatoes, strawberries, currants, apple and plum trees.  She encourages me to pick and eat my fill of the ripe berries.  Her granddaughter Angelina splashes naked in an old bathtub that Yuri has filled with water for her to play in.  Alyosha, Nina’s youngest son, carries a bucket of coal into a small outbuilding that is the banya.  Her daughter-in-law arrives with loads of wet laundry to dry on the clotheslines in the yard.  Things have a look of being old, weathered, disheveled, and I find this worn look comforting, different as it is from the manicured and ornamented yards of home.  A feeling of cooperation and of tending to the body’s basic needs for food, warmth, to be clean, to have clothes dominates. 

Girlplay

                I duck my head as I pass into the door and slip off my shoes to walk barefoot on rough wood planks.  We enter a small kitchen with an old stove and a work area.  It is a small space for a single cook, yet three women are clustered together dicing vegetables for the okroska (a cold vegetable and sausage soup with a kvas and sour cream base).  Nina comments that it is usually eaten in summer when the weather is hot.  From a small room off the kitchen, the sick mother-in-law pokes her head out of blankets, and her eyes, magnifed behind very large, old-fashioned spectacles, seem to smile a welcome.  Later, I go in to speak with her and notice icons on the walls.  The house is small (four rooms only) and the ceilings feel very low.  When I walk into the living room, I reach up to feel the wood beam covered with plaster.  I can easily touch it.  “It’s just my size!”  I joke.  The family laugh, but I think of the cave-dwelling Indians, wishing I had such a tiny cottage built for one or two, a bed in the kitchen, and a work table by a window.  The only disadvantage is that in summer here they keep the windows closed and shutters drawn to keep out the heat.  The thick walls (made of logs, covered with stucco on the outside) have kept the space cool, if a bit damp.

The banya's changing room

                When Nina invited me to visit and have a banya, I confess I had thought it might be a group experience.  I think this is why Paul decided not to join us.  Gradually I understood that the banya was heated once every two or three weeks (usually on Sunday), when the entire extended family (and friends, too) would drop by to wash, one at a time.  I was first.  Nina showed me what to do:  “here you take off your clothes and then go into banya.  Take this basin.”  In the hot room, there was a bucket of scalding hot water on the stove and a large bucket of cold water on the floor.  Nina showed me how to mix the water to use for washing.  She told me to use as much water as I liked, stay in as long as I liked, open the door if it got too hot.  Lastly, she asked permission to check on me and left me alone with a cold glass of kvas in the changing room.  Ahhh!  The aroma of birch leaves soaking in hot water.  I stayed in as long as I could, relaxing deeply, happy to be alone for once while Katya played outside.  To cool off, I sat on the bench in the changing room and sipped my drink.  Leaning my bare back against the cool clay wall, I felt myself to be a simple receptacle for sensations and imagined I was living a simpler life in a small cave.  I thought about how this day was returning me to earlier sources of gladness:  sharing a popsicle, playing with baby animals, eating more strawberries than I’d picked, having water sluiced down a shining boy-thin body after days at the Jersey shore.  When I emerged from the shed, I felt a lightness in my body.  I felt more responsive to pleasant stimuli.  All I wanted to do was sit in the yard and feel the breeze.  When Nina saw me with my head wrapped in a towel, she cried, “S Lyogkim parom!”  It means “with light steam.”  When Katya saw me, she said, “Mom, why is your face so red?”  When Angelina saw me, she called me “Tanta [Aunt] Mary Jo.”

Katya with birch boughs comes to "warm up"

                Before too long, the meal was ready.  We’d begun to spoon the refreshing okroska into our mouths, when Yuri – red-faced and dripping – entered in his Speedo.  “S Lyogkim parom!”  the family members cried.  I understood that this was a ritual greeting.  After this salute, Nina poured some kind of white homemade liquor called samogonka into glasses.  Nina reassured me:  “This will not hurt your head.  It is a substitute for vodka.  It comes from Russia.  Our relatives make it.”  The glass is thrown back and all the contents swallowed at once.  I’ve watched plenty of men drink vodka this way but never thought I’d be doing it.  I later learned that the stuff I drank was moonshine vodka – much stronger than the regular forty-proof commercial product.  I knocked one down each time a different family member entered to rousing cries of “Light steam!”.  By the fifth glass, my head felt so light and I communicated through smiles, laughter, facial expressions, hugs and light touches on bare backs.  There was no argument, no reason, no point. 

                “She doesn’t really want to return to America,” I heard Nina tell her daughter-in-law’s mother Tanya, who had also come to bathe.  I incoherently try to explain that there are things about life in America that aren’t so good.  Nina translates my rambling explanation, and Tanya rephrases it: “Maybe people there have so much that they don’t have to strive.”  I think it’s true that in America many have lost an awareness of direction and a clear sense of what matters – the inspiration for the melody.  A deeper reason for my mixed feelings about the return is that I find friendship harder at home.  I wonder why it feels easier for me to befriend strangers.  I wonder if the comforts and insularity of American family life make people hold one another at arm’s length.  We “do lunch,” “have coffee” (every once in a while), talk on the telephone, and call this friendship.  No one in American has ever invited me to bathe.  No one in American arranges a Sunday to bathe their entire family and bless each one as s/he emerges.  People at home gravitate to others who are like them – those who share work, children’s schools, or hobbies; so few see the halo (the sunrise coming from within) and even fewer help to create it. 

          Then I thought of my friend’s letter and a curious Greek word he used, “arche,” as in “the arche of my discourse.”  When I read his sentence, I replaced “arche’” with “arch” or “arc” and thought of the way the direction or life force of a person or creature is expressed by the arc of the spine.  When I looked the unfamiliar word up, I discovered that it came from philosophy and means “the underlying source of being of all things.”  I am a traveler, concerned with direction and with moving toward things.  “Her mind was like a ragbag into which she had been frantically thrusting whatever she could grab.”  My friend’s word counseled me to seek simple and clear things, original things, things that are really mine.  The word reminded me that every journey or direction has a beginning, an origin in some obscure inspiration or stirring, which can be “the seed of sorrow and of so much delight.”*  I will return to America with some things that are really mine.

          Suffering a samogonka hangover, I walked to school this morning in light rain.  The sight of a weedy plant that looked so much like North American goldenrod carried me home in an instant.  Suddenly, I longed for the back roads of upstate New York in August and September.  I felt my heart go out expectantly toward those late summer blossoms.

________________________________________

*quotations are from Willa Cather, Song of the Lark

          While staying in Taraz, we learned through a local publication of a site, Zhaisan, which contains over seventy Turkic stone monuments.  We had seen several examples of these, which date from around 500-650 A.D., at various museums, but thought it would be worth a trip to view some at their original sites.  The problem was to locate Zhaisan.  We found that there was a village by that name somewhere near Merke, a city about a hundred miles east of Taraz, and hired a taxi driver to take us there.  He claimed to know the location, but once we got to Merke, everyone he asked directions shook their heads.  One local man, however, offered to come along as our guide.  He led us to the Merke museum, where someone, it seemed, would certainly be able to direct us.

          A few minutes later, a middle-aged woman came out, rather excitedly, speaking good English.  It turned out that one of the foremost eperts on these stones happened to be visiting the museum.  Aiman Dosymbaeva, of the Margulan Institute of Archaeology in Almaty, had studied the Zhaisan site and written articles about it.  She was excited to meet us, assuming we were American archaeologists or specialists on the subject, and offered to take us on a two-hour ride to the site and then back to Taraz that night. It was very tempting to take up her offer—how often, after all, do expert, English-speaking guides happen to show up right at the moment one needs them—-but, because of the logistical problem of returning to the hotel in Taraz on time, we reluctantly declined her offer.  Our consolation was a visit to a sanatorium in the mountains south of Merke, where there is a single standing stone, and we had a meal in a nearby yurt.

          Dr. Dosymbaeva generously gave us a copy of a glossy, color-illustrated archaeological journal, Madeni Mura, full of articles on these stones and about archaeological explorations of sites relating to the Western Turkic Khaganate.  The Khagan (Khan) ruled over most of what is now Kazakhstan during the 6th and 7th centuries, controlling a substantial part of the Silk Route between China and Byzantium.  The few historical sources about the Khaganate that exist are Chinese, Arabic, and Byzantine.  The culture of the people was partly sedentary, but mostly nomadic, and its people developed runes to write their language. 

          Over a large area, stretching from Mongolia and the Altai Republic in Russia in the northeast, south to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, the chief surviving evidence of the Western Turkic Khaganate is the presence of numerous carved stone monuments.  The largest number, over four hundred, is in Kazakhstan.  The photographs displayed here will do more than any attempt I can make to describe them. 

          What is striking is that the Kazakhs today, when they visit more recent, but still quite ancient, mausoleums, they still must be practicing a form of memorial or ancestral worship that existed at the time these stones were built.  Even though the prayers are ostensibly Islamic, they are largely in the Kazakh language, and the act of visiting them seems to hark back to a pre-Islamic practice.  If we imagine  what the landscape looked like one or two hundred years ago, we can see that it consisted mostly of moveable residences.  The only permanent structures were cemeteries.  After death, bodies were taken to  these sites, which acted as permanent, fixed “homes.”

Semey Museum

Museum at Shaulder, near Turkestan

Museum at Shymkent

Museum at Shymkent

Museum at Merke

 

Stones in Western Mongolia have rounded sides - Bayan Ölgi Museum

At Tekturmas, in Taraz, still used as cemetery and pilgrimage site

          Taraz, the guide at Zhibagly warned us, is a “criminal” city, full of gangsters and drug smugglers.  They say that in southern Kazakhstan corruption is rife, and certainly its location near the Kyrgyzstan border, one country away from opium-producing Afghanistan, would lend credence to that view.  It may be true that such elements have influence in the city, but we found it a pleasant, friendly place.  Several people seemed very surprised to meet foreigners.  It is about the same size as Semey, and, like Semey, doesn’t seem as economically healthy as other parts of the country.  We spent four nights exploring the place and its environs.

Interior of recently restored 11th-century mosque

          Taraz (it received its current—and ancient—name in 1997, following a series of Soviet names, most recently Zhambyl) has few buildings that date before the Soviet era, but it lies on the site of an ancient city.  Near the center of the modern city is an area with two old mausoleums and a recently restored mosque, dating from around the 10th-11th centuries.   The mosque certainly has the feel of the era, and, in contrast to what would have been done to it in Soviet times, it has been in use as an actual mosque for three years. 

Mausoleums of Sultan Makhmud Khan and Mambet at Tekturmas

          On the southeastern outskirts of the city is Tekturmas, a hill full of mausoleums.  The Muslim mausoleums of Makhmut Khan and Mambet are the focus of the area and the object for pilgrims and for wedding processions (we saw two while we were there).   Down the hill from these mausoleums were two yurts, which, we were told, were used as “hotels” for traveling pilgrims.   Tekturmas is a remarkable cemetery, since it has been in use since the 7th century at least, and it contains memorials ranging from the pre-Islamic period to the present.

Mausoleums of Aisha Bibi and Babadzha Khatun

          Not far from Taraz is the mausoleum of Aisha Bibi, who, legend says, died on this spot in the 11th century after coming from Samarkand to fulfill her vow to marry Karakhan, the ruler at Taraz.  Next to it is that of her nurse.  The similarity of style of the conical domes to those of the Seljuk mausoleums and mosques in Konya, Turkey—a long way away—-suggests the close cultural ties between the Turks who lived here and those who left for Anatolia.  The number of vendors selling Islamic items nearby indicates that it ranks high in the second tier of Kazakh religious pilgrimage sites. 

View towards Kazan Chukur (the peak in Aksu-Zhabagly Nature Reserve)

          Zhaylau is a Kazakh word that refers to nomadic migrations to summer pastures in the mountains.  Traditionally, it was a festive occasion when women wore their best clothes, children ran around jubilantly, and the dombra was heard nightly.  Because our visit to Aksu-Zhabagly Nature Reserve in the Talas-Karatau mountains is a holiday from the travail of travel, I compare it to zhaylau.  In the Kazakh language, aksu means “clean water” and zhabagly means “year-old horse.”  Although there are supposedly 2.000 people living in the village along two main roads, there are many more cows, horses, sheep, and donkeys in the surrounding grassy steppe.  We are learning that the Kazakh steppe is far from uniform and varies from region to region.  We are encamped behind the walls of what was originally called Zhenya and Lyuda’s Boarding House but is now Aksuinn.com.  It is run by a very bright-eyed sixty-year-old Russian ornithologist turned entrepreneur, Yevgeny.

Yurt in inspector's yard, near Reserve entrance

Yevgeny, ornithologist turned entrepreneur

  Katya has found his six-year-old son (by a second, Kazakh wife), Sasha, to play and play-fight with.  They howl until late at night, when the village dogs begin their own chorus.  The villagers cut the dogs’ ears off so they are not at a disadvantage when they fight with wolves.  Meals are provided (Russian-style meals with many courses!), and we eat late in the evening (eight o’clock, like Russians do) and pass the time drinking and talking with Americans (our first since January!).

          In contemporary Kazakhstan, it is possible to observe something like the historical progression of different kinds of travel going on simultaneously.  Kazakh “tourists” make pilgrimages (engaging in what for Westerners is an ancient mode of travel); Russians (and modern Kazakhs) go to “sanatoriums” and take healthful waters (like eighteenth-century English people); and foreigners from America, England and Western Europe come to the mountains of southern Kazakhstan drawn by advertisements online and on paper that market the experience as “eco-tourism.”  Eco-tourism must have its roots in the English romantic love of landscape and nature.  But it is difficult to see exactly how it differs from the car and nature tourism that has been going on in America for eighty years.  It strikes me that it is the latest ploy to market foreign places to affluent, environmentally and culturally aware Westerners.

Cashing In?

          This is our first experience with eco-tourism and Western tourists in Kazakhstan.  It is also the first place we have been identified as “tourists.”  In multi-ethnic Semey, we sort of blend in.  Semeyan friends have told me that when they see foreigners, they assume they work in the city because “who would want to come just to visit?”  In Zhabagly, during Soviet times, a chicken processing plant employed the villagers.  Now, Yevgeny’s boarding house is the only going concern.  It creates jobs for local men who work as guides (it is mandatory to have a guide accompany you into the Reserve), drivers, and leaders of horseback riding trips.  Yevgeny told us that he brings approximately 85 groups to the village every year on tulip tours (the tulip originated here in Kazakhstan!), bird watching and flower expeditions, and Silk Road tours.  The business was conceived in “Perestroika times, when we needed money.”  Yevgeny, who was born in the Ukraine and lived in Turkmenistan, had come to southern Kazakhstan so his son could attend a Russian school.  His Lithuanian friend ran a business that specialized in bringing English people to places of interest in the former Soviet Union.  His only regret about being self-employed is that “everything depends on me.  What if I get sick?”  When he wasn’t arranging trips for the guests, he darted around his well-tended backyard garden, pointing out irises from the Volga delta and Siberia, and about ten different species of birds.  He pulled us under a grape arbor and pointed directly to a laughing dove on her nest, which I failed to spot, until I was pierced by two little black, very alert eyes.  Wonderful!  In American I grew up with mourning doves.  In Kazakhstan, the doves laugh!

The Other Tourists

           We didn’t realize that most visitors book tours to this place well in advance from their homes in San Francisco or Cornwall, England.  Alex and Katie are here giving PowerPoint presentations on recycling to officials in Almaty and Astana.  He is from a White Russian family but never felt connected to the Russian community although he speaks fluently, danced in his other’s folk ensemble, and jokes about following in his immigrant Russian grandfather’s footsteps.  His grandfather made a small fortune in the garbage business.  There are also two British tourists who, we were told, are “flower enthusiasts.”  They are preparing to ride horses up to the snow line, where they will camp for six days and explore nature.  We meet them at a small cabin four miles inside the Reserve, where we break our hike for lunch.  Martin (a shy thirty-something bachelor) had his binoculars trained on an elusive ibex, and Maggie was sitting on the cabin stoop in full khaki regalia writing in a notebook.  When I asked her why she’d chosen Kazakhstan, she said that she’d seen an advertisement in a Greentours brochure and “just had to do it.”  A self-described “very retired, old granny,” she was embarrassed when I asked if I could photograph her on her horse (“I have to be heaved on”) and was flattered when I compared her to Gertrude Bell.

British eco-tourist Maggie about to explore the depths of the Reserve

Our Adventure

Uphill towards the entrance of the Reserve - the inspector let Katya ride his horse to the entrance

          We climbed four miles up a mountain toward the peak of Kazan Chukur, which is over three thousand meters high.  We walked for seven and a half hours in total with our Kazakh guide, up and over a succession of ridges.  We felt the temperature drop considerably, the breeze kick up, and the grass-covered hills change to juniper-covered hills.  It was an interesting experience to be completely in the hands of a guide who carried a pack with our water and lunches, pointed out plants and discussed their uses, warned us not to pick up the snakes we found (and later discovered were poisonous), identified bear scat and distant ibex.  We never knew exactly where we were going or what our destination was.  This turned out to be just fine, since we were left in suspense to become enamoured of each new beauty.  As our muscles adjusted to the incline and our hearts pumped steadily, we were alternately warmed by intense sun and cooled by mountain breeze, and we discovered so many new sights, colors, flora, and smells that, as Paul said, it was “invigorating almost to the point of intoxication.”  Our favorite things were:  a big snake and a lizard (Katya); the smell of the wild roses, sight of alpine meadows filled with flowers, and the waterfall (Paul); and the grasses with silky, curly tendrils and the cloud shadows on the hills (Mary Jo).  But there was a climax — the Kshy Kandy ( Little Birch) gorge with a waterfall.  It was stunning mostly because of the vertical drop; in the States such a natural site would have barricades to protect tourists and viewing platforms.  Not so in Kazakhstan.  In fact, the guide encouraged us to stand on the very brink.  Katya and I declined and worried about Paul from a safe distance.  But the gorge also provided a study in contrasts:  It was reassuring to see the texture of hard, rough rock – the bones of the earth that lend strength and support to the blanket of life which covers them so gracefully.

An unidentified, but rare and poisonous, snake snapped at us

Flowers everywhere!

 

 

Feathery grasses

Waterfall (Kshy Kandy "Little Birch")

A Taste of Freedom

          Horseback riding completed our zhaylau experience.  We had a gentle four-hour ride through high grass and ascended a small hill to a small waterfall, where we waded in the icy water and drank our fill.  Katya never did manage to teach me to roll my “r’s.”  The command to stop the horses is drrr.  I mounted my mare after she’d drunk from the stream, and she took off immediately, leaving the others waving their arms and yelling directions “Say drrr!”  I tried desperately to roll my “r’s,” but I couldn’t.  When the guide jumped on his horse and rode fast to grab mine, my mare galloped.  Oh joy!  What a feeling of freedom, but it only lasted for a few seconds.  Because “this horse will gallop on the way home,” my horse was tied to Paul’s stallion.  “Now, no problem,” said our guide.

In the foothills, before Mary Jo's horse galloped

          Eco-tourism is meant to keep money in the local economy and employ villagers.  It seems Yevgeny’s business is doing that.  Our horseback riding guide told us that he had a certificate in tourism from a school in Astana.  Later that afternoon, we saw him walking in the village eating bread and holding his young son Ramadan by the hand.  Other young boys regarded us amicably, shook hands like miniature Kazakh men (the two-handed handshake) and spoke English with us.  Guides in training, I thought, or even future small businessmen of Aksu-Zhabagly.  Although some people complained about unemployment, it was apparent to us that Yevgeny is not interested in e lifestyle of an oligarch.  Due to his success and his example, people are working and businesses are increasing.  In the days we stayed, he was obsessed with a large colony of rose-colored starlings nesting in a rock pile that was going to be used for construction materials.  He even built a blind and photographed the resourceful birds.  It occurred to me that this colony of starlings nesting in the rock pile could be something like a metaphor for the village of  Zhabagly — a world watched by the alert eyes of a scientist and a capitalist.