In Yangon I said goodbye to Eero. We gave each other big manly hugs, the kind where you squeeze with one arm and pat firmly with the other. Four, five, maybe even six pats.
He took a flight back to Finland and I took a night bus to the Thai border town of Mae Sot, a town that I’ve come to know pretty well. The distance from Yangon to Thailand is only some four hundred clicks as the crow flies but, like all the roads in Myanmar, it’s a windy circuitous one (turned to mud now that it’s monsoon season) and it was well into the next day when I finally arrived in Thailand. The guesthouse in Mae Sot is comfy and only costs five dollars a night, so I stayed the night. Besides, my Californian friend I’d met the last time I was in town, who teaches at a nearby refugee camp, was still around.
I was more than a little tempted to stay longer and soak in the nothing-to-do atmosphere, lounging by the stagnant brown pool eating mangos and tom ka gai. But, in my eagerness to hunker down somewhere and cultivate some qualities other than transience, I’ve (somewhat paradoxically) transformed myself into a hyper-efficient travel machine. There was no time to waste on nothing-to-do locales. The road loomed large ahead – I still had to hitchhike across Thailand, Laos, and cross into China. After that there’s a three day train ride before I’m near the Kazak border. So much to do! When did my life become so structured?
If I can summarize so much into just a little paragraph, the hitchhiking went smoothly. I never had to wait more than a few minutes and was offered many meals. I made it to China in three days and hopped on a bus to Kunming – there I stayed at Caity’s place, an English teacher and homebrew enthusiast I’d met in Yangon. We tore up the town and before you know it I was curled up in my sleeper berth with Murakami’s longest novel, 1Q84.
It was six days ago that I got off that train in the dusty capital of Xinjiang, Urumqi – home of the Kazak embassy.
Ah, yes, the Kazakhstan embassy. The raison d’être for my trip to Urumqi. I’d been warned by Lonely Planet’s forum that the “consulate is the worst ‘organised’ place [one dude’s] ever been to.” That “it’s a battlefield… absolute madness.” I was prepared for a headache, but I had to take the hyperbolic imagery of “a surging formless crowd trying to get up onto a concrete stoop and into the steel doors” with a grain of salt.
It was with these warnings in mind, at the sober hour of eight in the morning, that I took a bus from my hostel, walked down the street, turned a corner, and caught my first glimpse of the embassy.
An inchoate mass of people seethed at the fortified steel gate of the concrete walled embassy in some sort of a cruel, twisted imitation of a queue. A depraved variety of Darwinian bureaucratic logic was at work, separating the wheat from the chaff. Clearly only the strongest can earn the privilege of visiting Kazakhstan.
“It’s a battlefield.”
“It was absolute madness.”
The ghosts of travellers past echoed in my head. I resolved to not join the legions who have squandered weeks in Urumqi, paying the embassy multiple and increasingly desperate visits. I pushed, I shoved, I stood my ground. I watched callously as the woman in front of me, who’d helped lead me to the embassy earlier in the day, got pushed behind by a conniving older man in a doppa who’d squeezed his way through a gap along the fence. This was no time for heroics, I’d already been in “line” long enough to know the rules. Any sign of weakness and you’ll be expelled from the queue – not unlike the momentary relaxing of one’s sphincter muscles when you’ve really got to go.
A fight broke out near the steel gate and a policeman was brought in. If he brought any order to the system, I didn’t notice.
By the late afternoon, hungry and tired, I’d passed the test. My passport was in the hands of the consulate and in another week I could pick it up.
Not keen to spend the week Urumqi, I packed my bags and headed to the Bogda Shan mountains, part of the Tian Shan range some forty kilometers east of the city. I hitchhiked to Tianchi, a glacial lake in the mountains and a major Chinese tourist trap. The entrance to the park is blocked by a behemoth gate where they charge twenty dollars a head to enter. Incensed, I did a little scouting and discovered a conspicuous path around the corner. Reasoning that the mountains don’t belong to whoever built the gate, I Robin Hooded my way around the gate, toward the mountains.
A lift to the end of the road and a few hours hike further, I found a quiet spot in a grassy meadow between two tall spruce trees where I hung my tarp. For three days I ate Uyghur naan, apples, canned beans, and the Chinese version of salami. I filled my canteen from a glacial stream than rushed through a boulder strewn gully. During the day I went on scrambling missions up the scree slopes of the Tian Shan that bounded me in on either side of the valley. Peopled with towering spruce and classic sub-alpine shrub, it could easily have been anywhere in the Rockies – were it not for some ineffable quality that subtly but persistently reminded me that I was in the dead center of Central Asia, about as far from the Rockies as you can get.
Now you’re caught up. If I’ve been incommunicado, I’m sorry! Blame China, they’ve blocked all the good internet here and I only just discovered that I can still use wordpress here. Tuesday I’ll pick up my visa and take a bus to the former Kazak capital, Almaty. In Almaty I’ll apply for a Russian visa and, once I’ve got it, take a four day train to Moscow (the latter half on the famous trans-Siberian route).
Gnarly Travels 