by Simon Reeve
It worked. The following morning, waking to snow on the ground, we made it to the station early, and we boarded a train that did not feature on a timetable. I stowed bags then hung out of the window as we left the town behind and rolled through a flat, ice- and snow-bound landscape that stretched to the horizon in every direction like an unending blanket. We were travelling across the vast Central Asian steppe, across which the Mongols and the equally terrifying Scythians had once roared. Now for mile after mile there was nothing to see but telephone poles. It was hard not to romanticise the scale and the distance. It felt like we were on the edge of the known world; in an area so vast and remote almost anything was possible.
I moved through the carriages, where people slept on bunks and slumped in chairs on either side of compartments. The train would roll for days across the enormous interior of the former Soviet Union. We chatted to a few of our fellow travellers and discovered many were ethnic Russians on their way to visit relatives in Moscow.
I talked to one elderly lady who was resting on a bunk with a pillow. I asked how life had changed since independence and the collapse of the Soviet Union. She told me that things were all right, at least at that moment.
‘Immediately after independence there was nothing. But now there is food, there are clothes, this means a lot for us,’ she smiled wanly. ‘Look, I survived the Second World War, now that was a difficult time.’
Two policemen on the train came to check on us and then stopped to chat. Ethnic Kazakhs, they were there to protect the country’s borders from drug smugglers and illegal immigrants. Kazakhstan was by far the wealthiest of the four ‘Stans’ and the policemen told us everyone wanted to live there.
One of the policemen was keen to know what I thought of Central Asia. I stumbled a reply, unsure how to tell them I was already finding Central Asia wonderful and eccentric, like a lost world. So instead we swapped stories about growing up on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.
I explained that for decades we had been told the Soviet Union was about to invade Europe, and that created a sense of fear and suspicion. They nodded in understanding and said they had felt the same on their side. Only when borders are open can reality dawn, said one of them. One of them pulled out his handgun to show it to me, I put my hands up, and we all had a little laugh. It was a brief but sweet little encounter. Clearly things were changing in Central Asia.
Outside the window the landscape never faltered. The view for hours was open, rolling plains. Kazakhstan is the size of Western Europe, with only a quarter of the population of the UK. I saw only the occasional herd of cattle and horses and an odd glimpse of the nomads who tend them. But it was a hypnotically beautiful journey.
Beyond the steppe and the train we rejoined Marat and his van and headed south-west until we found ourselves driving across a sandy desert. Not far from the border with Uzbekistan, we were actually on the bed of what had once been the Aral Sea. The further we went the more surreal the experience became. Camels wandered past the hulks of dozens of rusting ships trapped and then abandoned when the water drained away.
Spreading as far as the eye could see, the land seemed cast in a desperate beauty. I asked Marat to pull over so we could get out and take a closer look at the ghost-like shipwrecks. The Aral was once the fourth largest inland sea in the world. Back in the 1960s Soviet planners pumped chemicals into the sea and then deliberately diverted rivers to irrigate thirsty cotton fields. What resulted was nothing short of environmental disaster. The sea shrank to half its size. When I visited, it was fifty miles away. Parched, contaminated sand blew over villages and sickened unemployed fishermen.
‘I remember these ships crossing and the whole thing was full of life,’ said Bayan, sobbing gently at her own memory of glistening waters. She was dazed by what we found. ‘The whole thing is dead . . . just like being among ghosts.’
But the damage was not limited to the landscape. People were suffering physically. Appalling dust storms were ripping through villages around the old Sea, and the chemical residues in the sand were causing eye infections, stunted growth, reduced fertility, lung and respiratory problems and worse. One investigation discovered that rates of liver cancer doubled between 1981 and 1991. Another study found that by the end of the 1990s infant mortality in the area was much higher than in the rest of Uzbekistan and more than double the rate in Russia. It felt to me like the people had been left, like the boats, just to rot.
We followed one huge camel to a worn-looking village which used to nestle right by the sea. The place looked beaten, the buildings old, flaked and rotten. Villagers who used to catch five or six hundred tons of fish a year were now breeding camels to survive in a desert.
‘The people here believe that water will come back,’ said Bayan. Neither of us was hopeful. We were visiting a graveyard. For me the wasteland of the Aral Sea was a dramatic example of the power of our species to alter an entire landscape.
Early on in my TV travels, in Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Central Asia, I realised I was seeing the world at a time of incredible change, and that we are transforming our planet. Nobody should be in any doubt about that. In the years since, one of my biggest challenges has been trying to show the reality of what’s happening to our world. Even today I don’t think we quite understand the full extent of what we as a species are doing to the planet. For anyone who doubts the reality of climate change, consider this: how could 7 billion extraordinary humans not be having an impact on the climate? Since standing on that empty seabed I have been in dozens of situations around the world where remote and indigenous people have told me, unprompted, their world is changing.
In Kenya people from the Maasai community have warned me that the climate in their region is becoming more extreme, with more intense storms and longer droughts. They wondered how much longer they would be able to roam and herd.
In the mountains of Colombia I have stayed with an indigenous people called the Kogi, who live in huts and wear white robes. Men carry gourds which they stand around coating with their saliva, almost as we would twiddle our thumbs. They are a deeply spiritual people who are the most intact surviving civilisation of the Americas pre-Columbus, and are said to be the inspiration for the peaceful folk in the movie Avatar.
The Kogi have survived invasion by the Spanish, by missionaries, and by drug cartels. They are extremely wary of the outside world. But they agreed to let me and a small BBC team visit because they are seeing their patch of the planet changing: mountain caps are melting, rivers have stopped running, there are new diseases, fewer insects, and the climate in their mountains is more unpredictable. The Kogi are very isolated, but they think of themselves as stewards of the Earth. They believe they are ‘Big Brother’, we – the rest of humanity – are ‘Little Brother’, and they are horrified by what we are doing to the world. They told me they have tried to warn us we are destroying our home, but Little Brother isn’t listening. Whether it’s in Africa, Asia or the Americas, remote people who don’t read the New Scientist know that something terrible is happening. The climate is changing, and they are frightened.
On the bed of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan the situation was stark. We left the area feeling very solemn, a feeling accentuated when we came upon an abandoned Soviet missile testing site nearby. It looked like the set of an apocalyptic movie. There were torn-down fences, broken concrete buildings and a few villagers scavenging for scrap iron among the ruins, most of which had already been stripped away. What with that and the Aral Sea, it felt as if Kazakhstan had been invaded, pillaged and abandoned. Despite the oil reserves in the ground, I wondered what the future would bring.
We drove on, and Bayan began to open up. We passed through the remote town where she’d grown up. She told me her parents had been intellectuals banished to the wilds of Kazakhstan by Stalin, along with scientists, writers and musicians from across the Soviet Union. She had grown up surrounded by artists. As a child she’d been taught to play the piano by the aristocratic daughter of t
he former Russian governor. We popped into a store to buy some meat and cheese for lunch and one of the middle-aged women started flapping around trying to get someone else from the store at the back.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked Dimitri, who could hear what was being said.
A stunning, tall, young woman appeared at the back of the store and strutted down the aisle as if she was on a catwalk. She was wearing a white baker’s outfit. The middle-aged woman was fussing around her and talking loudly.
‘Ah,’ said Dimitri. ‘Bit weird. They think we might be model scouts.’
Apparently the young lass was descended from aristocracy, and the middle-aged woman was telling her we might be able to rescue her from the town. She looked gutted when we said we were making a TV show and there were no spare seats in the van.
An hour or two further down the road and for the fourth time that day we suffered a puncture. We were all out of spares. It was almost dark and freezing, but we were told by passing drivers that a police checkpoint was a brisk walk ahead. It was our only hope, and we walked through the darkness until the Kazakh traffic police took pity on us and, thanks to Bayan’s persuasive charm, gave us a ride onwards to the town of Kyzylorda, a sleepy provincial capital in the Kyzyl-Kum Desert.
By the time we arrived at a hotel in the town it was 2 a.m., but we had rooms and a special treat waiting up for us. Bayan had arranged for us to meet the Kazakh Beatles, a tribute band who suffered years of state harassment during Communist rule. Striking up on electric guitars and a bass, and with the percussive note of a snare drum, they seemed to know every line, chord and drumbeat of every song, and they played with raw passion.
It was extraordinary to see Western icons in a small hotel in the wilds of Kazakhstan. After they worked their way through the classics we sat in the back of the restaurant, cracked open beer and bottles of vodka, and talked late into the night with Bayan and Dimitri translating. Each of them seemed to adopt the mannerisms of the Beatle they mimicked on stage. They didn’t speak much English but every now and again they would inject the conversation with a lyric from their repertoire of songs.
Formed in the darkest days of Soviet oppression, ‘Paul’ told me he had found an old bootleg tape of the Fab Four that had been smuggled into the country and wound its way to the middle of nowhere, having been passed from hand to hand and no doubt copied a thousand times. The music blew him away. It was like nothing he had heard before, because the only music allowed back then needed to be cleared by the authorities.
It was hard for me to imagine. I grew up with Radio One and vinyl, tape decks and then CDs. I used to record Top of the Pops onto a tape player held up to the TV, shushing my family when they dared to enter the room. That was all alien to the Kazakhs. When they came across that Beatles tape they were living in a cardboard box of a world where what they could watch and listen to was carefully monitored. I heard it again and again in the former Soviet Union: there had been no colour in life, no taste in the food, and the music was usually soulless and chosen by the government. For those guys discovering that old Beatles tape had totally inspired them. Long before they learned to play, the music transported them to a different reality.
That night in Kyzylorda was exhaustingly inspiring. It was a powerful demonstration to me of the wonder of travel, and the joy to be had from a strange encounter. One by one the Beatles told us how music had changed their world. They had been determined to get hold of instruments and learn the songs and perform for themselves. But they were living in the Soviet Union. For the next few years they managed to keep their love of the real Beatles both secret and alive, even when there was no outlet for their passion. They were not living in Moscow or St Petersburg, where occasional musical dissent was allowed; they were living in a largely closed area of the Soviet Union that was so remote it was used for nuclear tests and missile launches. In Kyzylorda, local scrutiny was much more obvious and clinical than in one of the cities. Yet, somehow, those four Beatles managed to maintain their secret until the walls came tumbling down.
I was tired, but the conversation was fascinating. They told me music was how they were able to stay mentally and emotionally alive, until their world opened up and they could play the songs without fear of being discovered by the state. They poured out their hearts and shared their lives with us that night. We drank and drank and then they played us another couple of songs before we finally went to bed. I didn’t find it easy to sleep, and it wasn’t just me who was affected. All of us were deeply moved by their story.
A couple of months later, after we’d flown home, Will pulled every string possible and managed to persuade a Kazakh airline to fly the group to the UK so they could play two gigs at the Beatle Week Festival in Liverpool. They actually played at the Cavern, the legendary spot where the Beatles first came to the attention of an adoring public. Their proudest souvenir? They had their photo taken crossing Abbey Road.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Polo with the Corpse of a Headless Goat
We rolled out of Kyzylorda with sore heads, and trailed through one broken town after another in a Soviet-era Lada, on a dirt road and across rivers and waterways on makeshift bridges constructed from planks that appeared to have nothing but hope holding them together. On and on we travelled until finally we came to an isolated village where we found people dressed in traditional clothing and a large carpet laid on the ground outside a yurt. Bayan explained she had wanted us to see a traditional baby-naming ceremony, a very special occasion for semi-nomadic Kazakhs. The child himself looked none too pleased. He was bawling his head off.
Beyond the houses, I could see more of the traditional yurts and dozens of small horses saddled and waiting on a patch of open ground. I asked Bayan what was going on.
‘It is called kokpar.’
‘And what is kokpar?’
‘Ha! You will find out, Simon. Just you wait.’
I was mystified, but before I could quiz her further the family of the toddler asked Bayan if I would do the honour of naming their child.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Are they absolutely sure?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Bayan. ‘I think they have had some alcohol, but they are sincere, and your role is just ceremonial, don’t worry.’
It was a little absurd. They didn’t know me but were affording me a huge honour. I was discovering the power of travelling with a camera crew. Even in a remote corner of Kazakhstan being filmed by the BBC makes people think I must be important. It gifts privilege and access. Alcohol was thrust into my hand, by the villagers rather than by my team, and I tried to play to the gallery by giving a short but still faintly ludicrous and theatrical speech in which I thanked the people of Kazakhstan for their welcome, hospitality, history, culture, and possibly their weather, transport system and caviar as well. There was a surprising amount of applause, perhaps because the Kazakhs were used to ordeals, and I waved a scarf around as instructed and proclaimed the name of the baby, who continued to scream through the entire experience.
Then we had a few more drinks and waited for the mysterious kokpar to appear, or begin, or descend – it was initially a bit unclear. Meanwhile neighbouring villages had heard we were filming, and a large crowd began to gather. They treated us like a royal visit.
Finally Bayan explained the kokpar. It was a contest between two teams of men on horses (like polo without the champagne) where they would fight over the headless corpse of a goat. When I first heard that last bit I was sure something had got lost in translation.
‘Sorry?’ I said to Bayan. ‘The corpse of a headless goat?’
Bayan explained that kokpar is as old as Kazakhstan. Some think it was used by the Mongol hordes to train their warriors in the finer techniques of horse warfare. Goats are beheaded, disembowelled and soaked in water for a day or two to toughen them up.
I am not making this up.
Then Bayan explained there was another jolly game called the Kyz-Kuu, which mercifully we would not be involved with bec
ause it was the wrong time of year. Kyz-Kuu is basically a violent form of kiss chase on horseback. A woman sets off on a galloping steed, and then a moment later a group of men on horseback gallop after her. The aim is to catch the girl and give her a kiss while both are still on horseback and at full gallop. A man who tries to catch and kiss her but fails can then be horse-whipped by her all the way back to where they began.
Again, I am not making this up.
Despite being a hopeless horseman, I was invited to play kokpar. I have had bad experiences with horses. Because I’m six feet three I am usually given huge and powerful beasts called Storm, Thunder, or Lightning, who rarely do anything I ask, and instead either stand around munching daisies, or race off through trees in an attempt to behead their rider.
Fortunately, my kokpar horse was the size of a tough pony. I leapt into the saddle. The other players were delighted. One of the men on the opposite team had the goat partly tucked under his leg just in front of me. The corpse had already been trampled under hooves and dragged around the field. It was in a desperate and bloodied state. But I didn’t want to insult my hosts by pointing this out. So I grabbed the body of the goat and tried to take off across the field. My skittish horse seemed about as sure of me as I was of him and kept threatening to buck me off. I managed to stay in the saddle long enough for honour to be satisfied, and for Will to capture a little of the antics on camera. It was an experience that still today ranks among the most bizarre of my life.
