The Passage from Urumqi to Moscow via Almaty [Sikander Khan]
This segment recounts events
which took place two weeks after the previous segment,
"Incidents on the Karakorum Highway". The story
is about my attempt to reach Moscow from Urumqi, the
capital of China's Xinjiang Province, with a major
unanticipated detour to Almaty, Kazakstan's former
capital and still largest city. Here is a map which
traces my steps:
The blue indicates travel by rail, and the red, by plane. A quick note: Xinjiang Province is home to the Uighurs, a semi-Caucasoid Muslim people whose native language is Turkic, not Chinese. With those who proclaim that the journey itself is the destination, my passage from Urumqi to Moscow has a painfully blatant way of disagreeing. The experience was such as one is glad to have had in the past because it makes for a good anecdote, but it was sheer hell while it was happening. At around six in the morning of 26 June, I arrived at Urumqi International Airport. Although my flight was at noon, I was told to arrive this early for security reasons. There had been a series of riots in the city incited by Uighur separatists. So Chinese soldiers, those impassive little things with fierce faces and AK-47s, were positioned everywhere, quick to stop anybody they felt like. Twice I was accosted by one of them and my passport & effects searched. It was like Tel Aviv Airport. But I had slept well, I had taken a nice long bath, I was refreshed, I would be reunited with my fiancée in Moscow in less than twelve hours. Such trifles didn't bother me. After I wasted nearly two hours in the queue at the Siberian Airlines ticket window, a bored Chinese woman told me in a barely comprehensible Russian that that day's weekly flight to Moscow had been cancelled -- for reasons she would not go into. "But I have a reservation!" That was apparently not a relevant piece of information. So when was the next flight? A week later. That was too late: I had promised my increasingly impatient fiancée that I would indisputably arrive in Moscow no later than 28 June. Were there any other options? There was a flight to Moscow from Almaty with plenty of seats. I could take that. Was there a flight to Almaty? No seats. Xinjiang Airlines had a scheduled flight to Moscow the following day, but all the seats were booked. No seats to Almaty either. Kazakstan Airlines flies from Urumqi to Moscow via Almaty, but -- you guessed it -- it was all booked. Urumqi isn't exactly a bustling hub of transport activity. So what else to do? The Kazak woman at the Kazakstan Airlines office suggested in consolation that I could take a train to Almaty or a bus to Bishkek and then fly out to Moscow. The Bishkek option was attractive. Politically and economically the most liberal country in the former Soviet Union (other than the Baltics), Kyrgyzstan is easy to enter, the people are frantically nice to visitors, and the Kyrgyz officialdom actually welcome you with open arms, a novelty in the former Soviet Union (which I will henceforth refer to as the CIS). Moreover, the road to Bishkek from China traverses the Torugart Pass through the Pamir mountains, a route I've long wanted to add to my medium-sized list of mountain passes I'd already done. But that trip would have to wait, it takes too long. Train to Almaty? I had heard it was one of the worst rail journeys in all of Eurasia. But my real concern was the visa to Kazakstan, which, I knew from a previous trip there, required a preposterous amount of effort and nonsense for a country which reeled from an economic crisis and should be welcoming as many visitors with hard currency as it could get. "But I have no visa to Kazakstan", I told the sympathetic Kazak woman with a most beatific smile. "You have a visa to Russia?" "Of course I do. A one-year multiple-entry". "The Russian visa is valid for three days through Kazakstan". "Are you sure?" Never immediately believe anything you hear in the CIS. It's usually just an urban legend. "Yes. There is a reciprocal transit visa agreement among CIS countries". "Are you sure?" [The initial niceness on the verge of turning to irritation] "How many times must I repeat?" "Can I book a flight on Kazakstan Airlines, then?" "I'm sorry, no seats. Try Siberian Airlines". I rushed back to the Siberian Airlines ticket counter, spent another two hours and bought the Almaty-Moscow plane ticket. By now I had already spent six hours at the airport -- it was noon and the overnight train to Almaty was leaving at three. So after sending an e-mail to my fiancée (the airport has a well-appointed internet café) I got in a taxi and sped off to the Urumqi Railway Station. The massive station was new, still in various stages of construction. The hurly burly of Uighurs hawking fruits and vegetables, the army of all- Chinese construction crew banging and sawing away at their toil, passengers gadding about anxious for their trains, and the constant Mandarin caterwauling over the loudspeaker, produced more noise than was healthy to be subjected to for more than ten minutes. The security was tighter at the station than at the airport: it seemed as though every third person was a policeman. This sort of made sense. Uighurs ride trains more often than fly. No one had seen fit to make signs the first order of business, not even those in Chinese, let alone in English or Uighur. During my two weeks in Xinjiang I had already made a habit of asking Uighurs and not Chinese for directions, not because of any feelings against the Chinese but because I preferred phrasebook Uighur to phrasebook Mandarin. Moreover, the face of a Uighur incandesces with delight when he is greeted, especially by a foreigner, with salaam aleikum. In response to my inquiry, a kindly Uighur took me by the hand and led me down to the basement. It was a poorly lit, dank, swampy sort of locale whose concrete walls and cracked linoleum floor were stained with curiously brown splatters, making it look less like any wing of a railway station than a den of tortures and executions. There, above a window, was a sign which read in English, Chinese and Uighur: "Foreigners and Compatriots from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao Ticket Office". But that was closed. The only open window, presumably meant for locals, was actually no more than a vent about 3 inches by 6 inches, about a metre off the ground, through which one shouted a request, fed the money, and received the ticket. Furthermore this window was surrounded by a dozen frantic locals, all pushing and shoving and trying desperately to get their mouths close enough to this crack to bark their order. It was clear I'd never be able to even approach that window without my clothing being torn to shreds. So the Uighur volunteered to display the local's savoir-faire and do all the talking. Thanks to the good offices of my benefactor, I got the hardsleeper ticket at the price for locals. Grateful and overjoyed, I decided to finish the one roll of film I had been nursing since I left Munich nearly six weeks earlier. The object of my interest was as much the funny trilingual sign as the Uighur. But as soon as I took out the camera, the Uighur grew alarmed and began sputtering "kamra yak kamra yak kamra yak!"; and within seconds there appeared from behind the window a policeman with the usual high-pitch emission of Mandarin palaver. Apparently taking photos in the train station was forbidden. After babbling something to me he realised the futility of this parley and decided to start yelling at the poor Uighur, who though much bigger than the Chinese fellow began cowering. I have no idea what was said, but five minutes later, grasped at the arm, I was taken back upstairs by the policeman. In the bright light of the central hall of the station, we were joined by another officer. Except for the presence of two officers, it appeared to be a routine check of passport and bags, no more or less than any other previous harassment of the same kind. Without even being prompted I opened my bag and presented my passport for inspection. But this time it was apparently a bit different. They didn't seem too interested in the passport, but the scrutiny of the bag was more thorough, more intense, than usual. One of them even frisked me and then shoved his hand inside my pockets without any warning. Perhaps it was my coziness with the Uighur samaritan that made them so suspicious. Then THAT THING came up again: rifling through my things, the second policeman found the second passport, the Pakistani one. Just like two weeks earlier, the policemen were utterly and completely baffled. Naturally I had to weather yet another sustained barrage of Mandarin, presumably inquiries about the mysterious second document. When the one from the basement grabbed my arm again, I thought I might get hauled off to some office for further searches and questioning, where things could only worsen, not improve. I might even miss my train! So I resorted to the trusty method of communication in the People's Republic of China, one which had worked moderately well during this trip and the one many years earlier: communicate rudimentary meanings by way of kanji scribbled on a notepad. Please bear in mind that Japanese and Chinese, though totally unrelated languages, share a writing system often just called "Chinese characters". Whereas French and English use a common alphabet to convey mutually unintelligible meanings, individual characters in Chinese and Japanese carry exactly the same meaning despite having completely different sound values. This means that both the Japanese word for "China" chugoku and the Mandarin word jungwo (or whatever) would be represented by precisely the same pair of characters. So I took out my notebook
and began scribbling away the Japanese word for
"dual citizenship", which is nijyu kokuseki,
or Curious about my labours, both policemen took one look at my notepad, and, pointing to the last character, burst into laughter. Almost a guffaw. But apparently it saved the day, for they kept at it with their laughter and eventually let me go. Not much afterward, the train arrived surprisingly on time, and I got on board and into my "compartment" -- in reality an open hollow with cots stacked three high on each side. Clean but cramped. My compartment mates were all Chinese who were, unsurprisingly, engaged in a riot of Mandarin conversation. Thinking that I might as well spend the time boozing, I took refuge in the dining car hoping to run into Kazaks or Uighurs, or at least people who spoke anything other than a tone language. No such luck. Some kind of music-video machine displayed images of men and women singing Chinese songs, modern and classical, against the background of the Grand Canyon and other natural scenery. Just why could I find no Kazaks? The whole dining car appeared to contain none but Chinese, and I shared a table with an old couple. Now, as long as they are not police, the Chinese are embarassingly nice. This couple offered some of their food and showed me every single picture in their family photo album. We also tried to start some kind of conversation, but they didn't even have pidgin English, and I had nothing more than phrasebook Mandarin. So after half an hour of gesticulations, botched Chinese phrases and attempted scribbling of kanji on notebooks -- try writing Chinese characters in a small notebook in a train which rattled during its entire course over the Uighur/Kazak steppe -- we were all exhausted and understood tacitly that we would henceforth simply smile at each other. I read most of the rest of the evening. The Chinese cannot abide silence. They live in a noisy world and by God they will contribute their share. Virtually half that night I was kept awake by the seven (?) Chinese men in my compartment chattering and cackling. I would occasionally turn from my bed (I was on the top one) and glower at one of the assailants. Then the volume would dwindle out of consideration for me, but soon enough it would rise again naturally of its own momentum. I think I slept at most two hours. Otherwise, the train ride was uneventful. But the early morning border crossing was anything but. Certainly before seven the next morning, our train came to a halt at the China/Kazakstan border, which made itself glaringly obvious by the indecorous combination of barbed wire, soldiery armed to the teeth, watch towers, and the usual loitering predators sprawled across the yellow-green hills of the Uighur/Kazak steppe. Perhaps fifteen minutes after the halt, Chinese border guards began piercing their way through the train carriages and ordered everyone to get out. (Or so I inferred from the violent arm gestures accompanying their Mandarin.) The only element missing in the commotion with which we were thrown out of the train was German shephards. I wondered, why didn't the Kazak guards just enter the train and collect the passports, just as happens in every other frontier crossing by train? The reason was made clear enough: although the Urumqi-Almaty "express" had opened a few years earlier and was touted as a quick direct service, in this particular case we were being made to switch to a Kazak train. The Chinese exit formalities were conducted appallingly. Only a few of the exits on the train had been flung open. In front of each open one, a border guard stood no more than a couple of feet away and met the coming passengers to inspect their passports. Naturally this caused a massive bottleneck in all the train cars. But if the Chinese guards weren't much more than inconsiderate louts, the Kazak ones were absolutely predatory. After being freed at last by the Chinese border guards, each passenger walked out perhaps twenty metres into the no-man's-land carved out of the grassland we were in the middle of and queued up before a duo of Kazak border officials seated at dainty little picnic tables. Behind us was the Chinese train, in front the connecting Kazak train, and beyond both the vast open steppe of Central Asia and the Tian Shan mountains. Because the border guards were only two catering to the hundreds and spent twice as much time causing us grief as the Chinese, the stream of travellers straggling through the Chinese gauntlet accumulated into a higgledy-piggledy throng. The "queues" were no such thing. They were more like two fully open Japanese fans which were stuck together at the lower angle. Every now and then a Kazak officer with tattered epaulettes and a sweat-stained green uniform, would come over and order us into proper formation, sometimes even shoving people in the back. I don't want to cause offence to anybody, but if this scene had been taking place at night and there'd been blinding beams suspended from watch towers 50 metres high, it might have looked rather like a scene of Jews being herded out of the train at Auschwitz. My turn came only after a couple of hours of starving, thirsting, drowsing and otherwise languishing on the steppe. The Kazak highwayman compared my features minutely with the passport photo, and the following dialogue took place in Russian. My turn came only after a couple of hours of starving, thirsting, drowsing and otherwise languishing on the steppe. The Kazak highwayman compared my features minutely with the passport photo, and the following dialogue took place in Russian. "Where's your visa?", the Kazak guard demanded. I pointed to the Russian visa folded neatly inside my passport. This document was little more than a scrap of toilet paper with my photo fastened by a staple which weighed more than the paper itself. "This is not valid. You need a Kazakstan visa". "But I was told the Russian visa allows me transit through Kazakstan". "No. You need a Kazakstan visa". "How about the reciprocal visa agreement?" "You don't think you can enter Kazakstan with that worthless piece of shit [govninka], do you?" "Yes. Here is my plane ticket from Almaty to Moscow". "How long do you plan to stay in Kazakstan?" "I will be out of Kazakstan in less than a day". "You don't want to stay longer?" "I want very much to stay in your country longer, but I don't have the time". "You might stay longer in Kazakstan? Then you need a visa". "No, I'm leaving tomorrow!" "You need a paid hotel reservation or an invitation by a citizen of the Republic of Kazakstan to get a visa. And you can only get one in Beijing". "I'm only staying one night in Almaty! Please, I just want to get to Moscow". "I can issue you a visa here". [Naively welling with hope] "Anything, please let me through". "You need a letter of invitation to get the visa". [Just as suddenly deflated of hope] "Please! Could you make an exception? I already have a Russian visa!" "I can personally invite you". Shit, I knew it would come to this. "$200". "¿¿¿$200???" "Yes". I wasn't going to pay that much. I had $100 in my wallet and the rest was ingeniously hidden away on my person. "I only have $100 and I need to eat and sleep in Almaty". "$200". Then the most extraordinary
thing happened. A pair of Westerners several paces behind
me in the queue, whom I hadn't earlier noticed, came up
to me and shoved into my hands a sheet of letter-sized
paper. In English one of them whispered, "This will
khelp yoo. Dhon't pay them anything. They are bloffing.
They are famus for bloffing". It was a photocopy of
something in Russian, and it betrayed signs of being
fifteen generations removed from the original document.
It read: "An Agreement on the Reciprocal
Acknowledgment of State Visas of the Members of the
Commonwealth of Independent States", or "Where the hell did you get this?" "We got them in Spain from our tourist office". "Amazing! Thank you very much. Let's chat after all this nonsense". (Later I discovered I was about the only Western traveller in the area who didn't have a copy of the treaty.) I showed the Kazak border guard the copy of the treaty. Of course he had known about it all along: he took one look at the document and threw it back at me with a facial expression which could be interpreted as saying, "tell me something I don't know". Dashed chicanery. He still claimed there was an entry tax of $20. I paid it and he stamped my passport without further ado. But as though in seething vengeance for foiling the scheme to supplement his income, he babbled something, not in Russian, presumably in Kazak, to another border guard. His order became clear soon enough. It was the customs official. It seems the poorer the country, the more numerous the police and Kazakstan had gone from among the most industrialised area of the former Soviet Union to one of the most deinustrialised. A shifty-looking character in plain clothes claiming to be a customs official flung a declaration form at me and proceeded to ransack my belongings. In n
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. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten the
stroke order for the last character, a 20-stroke mesh of
scratches. Then I really wished I hadn't been such a
truant at the summer school in Tokyo that my mother used
to send me to as a child to learn kanji. Nonetheless,
improvising on the stroke order, I generated what looked
like tarantula roadkill. 