by Simon Reeve
As the sun set I was the guest of honour at the village dinner in a huge traditional Kazakh yurt. It was lit by candles inside and looked completely ethereal, like walking into an elvish kingdom in Lord of the Rings, or travelling back in time to a feast on the eve of a medieval battle. I wasn’t comfortable, but it was nothing to do with the food or hospitality. The problem was my hands. The only way I’d been able to hold the headless goat and keep it close to my saddle was to grip it by its rancid and slippery testicles. There was nowhere to wash my hands before I ate, and the only cutlery was fingers.
I woke in the morning with a dose of food poisoning. I was sick a few times and Bayan arranged for a doctor to see me in my room at our guesthouse. I was drifting in and out of sleep and woke to find a very large woman flanked by two sizeable younger women standing at the end of my bed. None of them were smiling. I had no idea who they were or why they were there. Grabbing at the sheet, I half sat up.
‘Who are you?’ I squeaked.
‘Doctor,’ the woman poked a meaty thumb at her chest. ‘Daughters,’ poking at each of them. They regarded me as if I was a rat in a medical experiment.
‘You sick. I make better.’ Her accent was heavy and priceless.
‘Really?’ My tone suggested doubt. I looked from her to the two daughters. I wasn’t sure why a doctor would show up with her girls in tow. Perhaps she had thought I might have marriage potential.
They started to fuss over me and tugged at the nylon sheet which was all I had to cover myself. It was my shelter and dignity. I held tight.
A wilting plant was struggling to survive in a large yellow plastic flower vase the size and shape of a bucket on the windowsill. One of the daughters took it in her hand, pulled out the potted plant inside and placed it on the ledge, then emptied the remaining water out of the window without checking what was below, and went to the bathroom and gave it what sounded like a rudimentary clean. Then they filled a kettle, let it heat a little and poured the entire contents into the vase.
I stared at them with increasing alarm.
The doctor produced a chunky sachet the size of a Cup-a-Soup and poured a fluorescent purple powder into the tepid water, then gave it a swirl before handing it to me.
‘Drink,’ she instructed. ‘Drink it all.’
Even at the time it worried me that I did what she said without questioning her further. I just thought it better to do as I was told or she might produce a nozzle to force it down me. So I drank. Not just a sip, I had to keep drinking on and on and they made sure I did by urging and chanting at me. I gulped and guzzled till my stomach couldn’t take any more. I could feel an inevitable eruption beginning and dashed to the bathroom just in time to vomit an entire bucket of purple puke into the bath. While I slumped on the floor, the doctor looked satisfied. There was a lone piece of meat amid the mess in the bath.
‘There,’ she said triumphantly. ‘It stuck in stomach. Make sick. Now you better.’
And do you know what, she was right. Immediately I started to feel more comfortable. I talked to Bayan about it later. The doctor was a Chechen friend of hers. They were followers of the same Indian mystic called Sai Baba. Bayan looked a little sheepish when I described the scene and questioned whether her friend was an actual medical doctor with an actual medical qualification. But then Bayan reassured me the Chechen had used a remedy from Soviet times, which ‘always worked’. The powder was a potassium mix used in vomit therapy. Certainly effective, but I tell you, it makes a terrible mess.
The following morning, Marat was driving us close to the Chinese border. Nature blesses Central Asia with spectacular scenery usually untouched by tourism or development, and nowhere is this truer than the Sharyn Canyon, a few hours east of Almaty, which we finally reached after travelling the full width of Kazakhstan.
Marat took us to the floor of the canyon in his four-wheel drive. We slid down a steep, dusty track and crawled slowly around a towering boulder the size of a block of flats and perched so precariously over the track I held my breath as we passed. The canyon is second only to the Grand Canyon in scale, grandeur and natural beauty, but I found Sharyn infinitely more impressive, partly due to the complete absence of other visitors.
We stopped on a gravel precipice and my jaw dropped as I stared into the vast, deep canyon. I was determined to savour the moment, knowing it was somewhere I was unlikely ever to visit again. The canyon seemed to go on forever, stretching miles in each direction and coloured warm rust and golden by the setting sun.
The Sharyn Canyon was a perfect metaphor for the entire region: vast, unspoilt and unknown. The Stans had been a backwater of the Soviet Union, and the Canyon’s proximity to the Chinese border rendered it off limits even to Kazakhs. It did not appear on maps, and to this day many Kazakhs remain unaware it even exists. I was falling in love with Kazakhstan. We had been welcomed, embraced and entertained. Everyone had a story to tell, and the rugged scenery carried a drama all its own.
We had wanted to head south from the Canyon, but the road took us back to Almaty, and sharing a few drinks gave us a chance to bid farewell to wonderful Bayan. Late dinner was followed by a bar called Heaven, which shared the design aesthetics of a counterpart in London or New York but was empty when I arrived at 11.30 with Dimitri. The only other foreigners were a couple of young Australians in town to sell tennis nets. Together we bemoaned the $10 entry fee, a month’s wage for most in Central Asia, and then went to leave, but a tank-like Soviet bouncer stopped us by closing the exit just as we approached.
‘Nyet,’ he said forcefully, which even I could understand. ‘You do not want to leave.’
I thought we were about to be fleeced or roughed up. But with what passed for a smile in Kazakhstan, he added: ‘Stay till after twelve.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It will get . . . better.’
We decided against arguing. Sure enough, the upstairs dance floor opened at midnight, and the club began to fill with a collection of the most glamorous women and men I have ever seen. By 1 a.m. there were confetti cannons firing over a dance troupe from Moulin Rouge, and I was doing the can-can while arm-linked with a bunch of lads who appeared to be the Gucci-wearing local mafia.
It was a long road south from Almaty the next day into Kyrgyzstan, the most obscure of the Stans, a land of gorgeous meadows and jagged peaks. Our new guide Kadyr was a twenty-two-year-old local journalist who looked even younger. He had a bright energy that made me feel old. I suddenly felt I had been through a complete transformation since I was his age. Intelligent, thoughtful and enthusiastic, he spoke English with an American accent and told us he’d spent part of his childhood in the United States. We’d found him through our research back in London and he was supremely excited Kyrgyzstan was going to be featured on the BBC.
We hired vehicles and Kadyr took us straight towards the Fergana Valley, a huge area of Central Asia nearly 200 miles long and more than 40 miles wide, which sprawls across eastern Uzbekistan, southern Kyrgyzstan and northern Tajikistan. Home to more than 10 million people, it is by far the most populated area in the region and at the time had a difficult reputation as a hotbed of discontent and developing militancy.
In the early 2000s unemployment was rampant in Central Asia. Poverty, censorship and government repression were the norm. Partly as a result, but also because of funding and encouragement from Saudi Arabia, militant Islam was on the rise. American political support for authoritarian regimes in Central Asia was further fuelling anger and hatred of the West and driving more young men into the arms of new and established groups that supported al Qaeda.
We made for Osh, a small city in the south of Kyrgyzstan where unrest was beginning to spread. We stopped on a bridge when Kadyr spotted illegal posters pasted to lamp-posts calling for the establishment of a Muslim Caliphate across Central Asia. This was long before the emergence of so-called Islamic State. Kadyr was shocked and told us that even to be caught in possession of such material would mean ten years in jail.
Kadyr a
nd other contacts arranged for us to meet an activist in Osh from the shadowy banned militant Islamic group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which was becoming active across the whole region. One of their stated ambitions was the destruction of Western democracy. Kadyr was nervous. We hired a small bus with curtains and blacked-out windows so we could talk to the activist discreetly without risking taking him back to our hotel. We had no way of knowing who he was, or what he was capable of doing.
Arriving at the agreed contact point, we found a heavy-set, dark-eyed and grim man waiting for us. He was keen to talk despite the fact we were Westerners and, as he kept reminding us, therefore his enemies. We drove out to the edge of the city to avoid any attention from the authorities.
He wagged his finger at me as he was speaking. ‘America wants to dominate the world but it’ll never happen.’
‘You think that’s really true?’ I asked him. ‘You think that’s what America wants – to rule the world and crush you?’
The man answered with a sneer. ‘America will die. Why? Because they’re 25 million gays, more than 4 million lesbians, 17 million drug addicts and many people who live in poverty.’
He told me that, although he and other militants didn’t have an atomic bomb, they had ideas, which were far more powerful. Perhaps one day, he mused, they would get their own bomb. All the talk of bombs was unnerving Kadyr, who was translating. Three times during our talk the militant said he wanted to martyr himself against the West, making Kadyr nervous he was about to blow himself up in our van.
Even as the guy left our van he was ranting. Kadyr told me that as he shook hands, he was repeating that we were his enemies. Kadyr was visibly relieved when he left. He said he had looked closely at the man’s clothes to see if he could spot any sign of a suicide vest.
‘I was getting ready to jump on him,’ he said to me earnestly.
Despite goat testicles, militants and sickness, I was loving my time in this forgotten corner of the world. But I had and still have a nagging concern it might still be a future flashpoint for militancy and conflict. I hope I am wrong. But militancy has raised its head in Central Asia before. In the 1990s the battered neighbouring state of Tajikistan, the poorest of all the former Soviet states, endured a violent civil war between government forces and Islamic militants in which tens of thousands of fighters and civilians died.
That night I slept fitfully. So much had happened. How would we fit weeks of intense filming into short late-night programmes? What on earth had we been doing with a militant in the back of our van when this was supposed to be a travelogue? I started to doubt how we would show the madness of kokpar one moment, and then a guy who wanted to martyr himself.
But these programmes were always supposed to encompass the extremes of life. The light and the shade. Ironically, one of my favourite moments in Kyrgyzstan was the night after we met the militant. A pirated version of the movie Titanic was showing on the single Kyrgyz TV channel. It was shown almost every single Saturday night for a year, despite the fact it clearly had a banner caption running across the bottom of the screen which stated: ‘For the consideration of Academy Award voters only’.
We were amazed. Imagine a clearly pirated movie showing in peak-time on BBC One. Then Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet started to speak, and we all had a bout of hysterics. The fact they were showing a bootleg film was bad enough, but it had been dubbed into Russian with just one actor speaking all the lines in a completely emotionless, monotonal male voice.
‘Jack! Jack!’ cried Rose as she ran through the ship, as her true love answered.
‘Tchack, tchak, rows, rows,’ said the dubbed voice loudly.
Ageing posters and Titanic memorabilia were everywhere in Kyrgyzstan. The Kyrgyz version of Titanic deserved its own award. It was certainly more entertaining than the original.
Just down the road from Osh was another legacy of Soviet rule. Above the broken former mining town of Mailuu-Suu were more than twenty unstable radioactive waste dumps and pits for uranium waste tailings. Uranium had been mined in Kyrgyzstan for the Soviet nuclear weapons programme, but there was only a cursory clean-up of the sites after the Union collapsed.
There were environmental concerns about the waste dumps, of course, but some experts were also worried people could get access to the sites and be able to steal some of the material and include it in a radiological or so-called ‘dirty’ bomb.
It was definitely a darker side to the story of Kyrgyzstan, and something we all felt we should include in the programme. But of course you can’t just mention something like that in a TV show; you actually have to go there, and you have to see and film it.
We drove out towards one of the dumps with a local scientist who had been trying to monitor their condition.
‘My method of protecting myself from the radiation is two-fold: milk and vodka,’ he told me with a fatalistic smile. ‘Milk to counter some of the effects of radiation and vodka to forget about it afterwards.’
Ours, by contrast, was full nuclear, biological and chemical containment suits. They wouldn’t protect us from excess radiation, but they were supposed to protect us from contaminated radioactive dust, which could lodge and linger in our lungs. The site was part of the reason I had been required to do a chemical weapons course before heading out to the Stans.
Getting dressed in those NBC suits felt surreal. We were standing by the side of a dusty track in an unknown corner of an unknown country in an unknown region of the world, and I was putting batteries into a Geiger counter, used for detecting and measuring radiation, and explaining to the camera that we were going to walk into an abandoned Soviet radioactive waste dump to check its condition and assess the security around it. I suddenly thought, This is completely mad!
But it was for TV, and I was learning that in front of the camera what otherwise would be absurd can rapidly become normal.
Will and I prised the shiny grey suits from sealed polythene wrappers and pulled them on as we stood by the van, then had our only row of the entire trip when we realised we had forgotten the instructions for the Geiger counter. Kadyr looked on in amazement. We insisted the local scientist wear a suit despite his protestations that he had never bothered before. He produced an ancient map outlining where the various dumps were and which were the most dangerous, and that was it. We adjusted our full-face respirators, or military gas masks, and set off up the hill towards the dumps, sealed in NBC suits and carrying the Geiger counter.
We looked like three alien beings, and within seconds of us starting to walk the sun emerged and we began to bake. Not just swelter, but steam. Within 100 metres we crested a small hill and through the fogged glass lenses of my respirator I could see a couple of locals ahead on a dip in the track trying to push-start a Lada. One glanced round and saw us, then did a double take, tapped his friend on the arm and they backed up against their car in bemused horror.
‘Zdravstvuyte [hello],’ I tried to say as we walked past in slow motion, but through the mask it might have come out as a strangled alien war cry. They gawped at us. I gave a cheery wave and we walked on, past a couple of perfunctory signs warning of radiation. There was no fence and no guards. I looked over my shoulder to see the guys with the Lada still watching. How long had they lived here? Probably decades. Perhaps since they were children, and with no protection.
I pointed back at the men and gestured to our scientist. I thought he should shoo them away, but he just shrugged, as if to say: ‘What do you want me to do?’
Then I realised there was a village just across the valley, on the edge of the radioactive site, and later the scientist said people had been told the area was safe. But that wasn’t what the Geiger counter indicated. It began clicking away, slowly at first, then faster. The whole area was a huge pit where the Soviets had buried radioactive waste, despite the fact the entire region was prone to earthquakes. The dump had been covered in a thin layer of earth and grass, but far from being safe, there were places where the levels of radiation were sp
iking to more than a thousand times what was normal. We chanced upon a hole somebody had been digging at one radioactive site. Villagers were grazing their cattle on the dump. A few years later Mailuu-Suu was found to be one of the ten most polluted sites in the world in a study published by the Blacksmith Institute.
Radiation wasn’t the only hazard, though; to be locked inside one of those charcoal-lined suits for any length of time is like being shut in an oven. The sun was high in the sky, and we were bakingly hot. We all had to stop and have a rest, sitting on the ground on top of the radioactive waste dump. Unbelievable. But the alternative was collapse.
We turned back to the van where Dimitri had been tasked with making sure he got a good shot of our return. As we came over the hill we were clearly arriving much earlier than expected. Despite heat exhaustion I had a giggle as he flapped around trying to find a spare battery for the camera. Will was still filming as we walked, his arm stuck at a permanent right angle. When he finally put the camera down, a strong stream of pure sweat poured from the cuff of his NBC suit.
We finished the last of the water in our packs as we tore off our suits, and then headed to a nearby town, where the delightful Café Rich Man resembled a small Spanish villa. Their water supply had been switched off because it had been raining hard for a few days and the river was muddy. They couldn’t draw more water from the river until the sediment had settled.
‘So, what should we drink then?’ I asked Kadyr.
‘There’s only one thing for it,’ he said with a smile. ‘Soviet champagne!’
Such a bourgeois indulgence didn’t seem to fit with the principles of Marx and Lenin. Champagne was produced and Kadyr went to pop the cork. It rocketed out of the top and the champagne erupted everywhere, leaving just a glass or two to drink.
