Most western expatriates in East Asia dream about taking the train that goes from Beijing to Moscow. It's six days straight cooped up on the train, although there's a travel agency in Hong Kong that can arrange short stopovers in Mongolia and Siberia for about $1500 (U.S. dollars). Basically, the consensus is that the only way to survive a train trip like this is to stay drunk the whole time. I'd thought about doing this trip, but I don't drink, and am at the edge of my sanity on a three-day train trip, much less six days. So then I got this idea--I had a pass from the Chinese government for teaching English in China that was still valid for a few more months. It would (supposedly) give me the Chinese prices (as opposed to the prices for foreigners) for train tickets and hotel rooms. I could speak enough Chinese to get around, so I decided that I would start in Xi'An, where the terra cotta warriors are, and travel along the northern Silk Route through Central Asia, and take the train from Uzbekistan to Moscow. I would get to stop and see a lot of neat places along the way, and the longest train ride would be a mere 60 hours. This is the story of my trip to Kazakhstan, my first and favorite stop in the Central Asian states of the C.I.S. (Commonwealth of Independent States, the ex-Soviet Union). I was living in Taipei at the time, so I was going to have to do some work to get visas to get through Central Asia. Did I mention this was going to be one of those "nine-tenths of the fun is getting there" kinds of trip? The C.I.S. embassies in Washington, D.C. all seemed to have really weird hours, like from 2 p.m. until 4 p.m. on Thursdays. This meant staying up until about 2 a.m. Taiwan time, using a calling card from the pay phone outside the 7­11 down the street, getting put on hold, disconnected, calling back, being transferred, and told to call back endlessly. I found out that to get visas for these countries, I'd have to pay about $50­100 per visa, and FedEx my passport back and forth from Taiwan to the U.S. embassies, which didn't seem like a good idea. However, if I got a Russian visa, most of the Central Asian countries would recognize the Russian visa as a transit visa, so I could stay in each country for up to 72 hours.

So, I got my Russian visa, and headed off for China. It took me about three weeks and $300 (half of which I spent on souvenirs) to get 2/3 of the way across China, from Xi'An to Yining. (Yining is the town in China's Xinjiang Province across the border from Kazakhstan.) I went to the long-distance bus station to buy a ticket on the bus that ran from Yining to Alma Ata, which was the capital of Kazakhstan at the time. When I arrived at the counter to buy my ticket, the woman selling tickets said something to me in Russian. It took me a second to realize that she thought that I was Russian since I am white. "I'm sorry, I don't speak Russian, I'm American," I responded in Chinese. She was a bit surprised, but she sold me a bus ticket leaving Monday morning at 6 a.m. One of the crazy things about Xinjiang is that all of China is in one time zone, so even though the sun rises several hours later in Xinjiang, it's still the same time as in Beijing. This results in there actually being two time standards, an official one and a local one. I thought that the bus would be running on the official time standard (which is earlier than the local one), since it was an international bus trip, but I wasn't sure, so I showed up at the earlier 6 a.m. We drove until we got to the border crossing, where we all filed off the bus to wait in line in this building with a weird Soviet space age architecture.

I was towards the back of the line. I was a bit nervous because the guidebooks had said that Kazakhstan officials often try to shake down Westerners for bribes. Some of the border guards looked like ethnic Kazakhs, but some were very Aryan-looking, young blond-haired Russians, who must have moved to Kazakhstan during Soviet times. They made me feel like I was in a bad Cold War movie, even though it was sunny, and we all know it's never sunny behind the Iron Curtain... One border guard spotted my American passport in my hand, and pulled me out of the back of the line. Everyone else in line looked at me, and I was worried because I didn't know what was happening, and even more worried because everyone else wasn't giving me the angry, who-does-she-think-she-is look. He looked at my passport briefly, and passed me through politely. I'm still not sure whether I got special treatment because I am American, or young and female, or what... After everyone had made it across the border, we got back on the bus. I could tell that we had left China immediately, because when one looked at the roadside stands out the bus window, suddenly there were Western goods that one doesn't see for sale in China. We drove through rural areas of Kazakhstan, which was dry but pretty. Suddenly, the bus stopped. The road was closed off, and there was a guard station to the left. Two men with machine guns strapped across their chests boarded the bus and all of the passengers got out their passports. The men went down the aisle, taking each person's passport and examining it. I thought, "Here we go, this is the part where they take my passport and refuse to let the bus move without me handing over bribe money." I had converted almost all my money into traveler's checks, figuring that most bribe requesters would consider them too much of a hassle to deal with. Also, apparently counterfeit U.S. money is rampant in the C.I.S.--my guidebook stated that in some of the C.I.S. countries only certain years of U.S. bills are accepted, even at banks. For example, a $20 bill from 1993 would be accepted, but one from 1992 or 1994 wouldn't be, another reason to wait until Kazakhstan to change over my money, so that I could be sure of getting the right years. (I think the bank tellers at the bank in Urumqi in China rightly thought I was out-and-out crazy asking for bills from certain "vintages".)

The men gave me my passport back, but left the bus with the passport of the guy sitting next to me. After some hassling, they eventually gave him his passport back. From then on, about once every hour there would be a checkpoint complete with armed guards. After about five hours, we finally reached Alma Ata. I took a taxi to the hotel, which was really nice. I hadn't been expecting much, because the guidebook had warned that most ex-Soviet hotels were huge, molding, cavernous, concrete blocks, with poor facilities, mean staff, and no occupants for about $50­75 a night!! The hallways of this hotel all had oriental runner carpets, my room was exceptionally clean, with two single beds, a window, patterned wallpaper and bedspreads à la the Central Asian Martha Stewart. The bathroom was shared with the room next door, but was extremely clean, and even had a deep tub. The floor lounge had leather sofas and a big t.v. All of this for only $4 per night!!

The guidebooks warn against staying out past dark, as there tend to be bands of drunken, violent young men roaming the streets. Strong alcohol seemed to be an integral part of the culture, as the newsstands also purveyed numerous, numerous types of vodka, including some that came in little plastic cups, like the kind you get orange juice in on airplanes. I guess you never know when you might need a little pick me up. The cars in Alma Ata had a graceful retro style, with wood fixtures inside, and came in funky colors, like aqua. Because gasoline is so expensive there, if you hail a car, the driver will usually stop and ask where you are going, and if the driver is going in your direction, you just give them a small sum to help with their expenses, and they'll give you a ride. Ex-New Yorker that I am, I was very suspicious of these "taxis" without meters. However, I tried it, and found you could get pretty much anywhere in town for $2 or less, and the people seemed very normal and nice. Some of them asked me questions in Russian, but all I could understand was, "student?" Alma Ata was surrounded by huge mountains, and I think if I were a rich Russian, I would want to have my summer dacha there. It seemed like a nice town to bring a pile of books to and read all summer. Alma Ata had a crazy mish-mash of architecture, ranging from Slavic to bad Soviet architecture, allowing me to snap some photos for my series on "Bad Communist Architecture." The streets were wide, and lined with a ton of trees. There was a G.U.M. store, which is the old Soviet department store, a market with tons of fruit, a small supermarket owned by a European company, a Middle Eastern restaurant, and a museum that had displays on the different Central Asian peoples, their lifestyles and textiles. And then my 72 hours were up, and it was off to Bishkek...