Tales of the Train: Almaty to Aktau
Caroline Knowles*
Passengers arrive at the stunning Soviet era Almaty 2 station more than an hour and a half before the train is due to leave, just after midnight. The wide dark platform is crowded with people, expectation and luggage. As I climb aboard, passengers are already making beds and stowing luggage. I join in, collecting the sheets and towel I will use for the next three nights from the carriage attendant. The woman on the lower bunk opposite mine has already covered the table with bags of pastries, piles of flat bread, containers of meat and rice, hard boiled eggs and bright pink sausage, and is trying to sleep. I stuff my rather frivolous provisions — fruit, biscuits, chocolates, tea and coffee bags — under the seat. A further flurry of luggage stowing and bed making, as a middle-aged woman and her five children — aged 11 to 20 as I later discover, and all in pyjamas — join this section of the open carriage as we slide off slowly into the night.
Only to stop again at Almaty 1, the out of town freight station I visited the day before. We stop for some time in the darkness surrounded by containers. Some move off and others wait, like ghost cargo silently haunting the night. I assume cargo has some kind of track-priority and stops less frequently, but this train to Aktau is as close as I can get to these stories. This line carries high expectation. Kazakhstan is the size of Western Europe; it is landlocked and a vital artery in the Belt-Road’s middle corridor, an increasingly important alternative to transit through Russia. The rail system is state run, and the Kazakh government maintains a controlling interest in developing ‘synergy’ as the China Daily puts it with China’s Belt-Road plans. China is a vital partner in these developments that open up better connections for Kazakhstan but is not in overall control.
The woman in the opposite bunk, I’ll call her Bun on account of her hairstyle, snores loudly and I wonder if the family above think it’s me — the snoring Russian — as I am often mistaken for Russian in Kazakhstan, until I open my mouth! We pass a night of stopping frequently alongside the grey shadows cast by containers. In the morning, the woman with the family — a doctor as it turns out — hands round proper china bowls brimming with milk and coco pops to her children: four boys aged eleven to eighteen and twenty-year-old Ayesha. The Doctor has everything she needs to feed her family in style: proper spoons and china mugs, she even has ketchup for the sausages. Bun, a handsome woman in her late fifties with a broad smiling face, prepares bread and pink sausage for her breakfast as I sip my coffee and nibble on a biscuit.
Alongside exchanging stories of destination and situation, food is shared around the carriage. (Fermented horse milk is an acquired taste, I think.) I share my biscuits and chocolates and tell Bun, the Doctor and her children who ask, about my journey and the book I hope to write about China’s Belt-Road. They are curious about what I am doing here on this train travelling alone. Where is my family? Bun is going to Aktau for her younger sister’s wedding. She takes out her phone and shows us photos of her sister in traditional dress. The Doctor says they are taking a family vacation, visiting a brother she hasn’t seen for some time. Not to be outdone, Ali, the ‘baby’ as he calls himself tells us he is a Taekwondo whiz. Only Ayesha looks groomed, changing between dresses and jeans, her nails perfectly manicured, while the rest of us languish in pyjamas. I join Bun and Doctor for coffee, squeezing together around the table, an intimate huddle of women. We make ‘Google Translate’ conversation with the boys who speak English chiming in on the talk of old women when we get stuck. I gently decline Bun’s offer of a cold horse snack.
We quickly form the intimacies of strangers in a confined space. Our tiny section of the carriage works like a kaleidoscope, people move around somehow making space where there is none for eating, sleeping, card games and conviviality, and I try to learn the choreographies of the train — when and where to move. Some of these intimacies are overwhelming. It is hard to get used to having a bum or a foot in my face. On the third morning, as I sat up momentarily in bed to look out the window, a workman from one of the local oil and natural gas plants we were passing in Mangistau sat down where my head had been seconds before preventing me from lying down again and going back to sleep.
As the boys strike up a card game and share headphones the stories of the train stop and start as we slide past the snow-capped Tian Shan mountains in nearby Kyrgyzstan. Then we are in Taraz, again surrounded by freight containers. Women traders get on the train to sell shorts and T shirts, all made in China of course. A woman in the next section makes her son try on some shorts, decides they are not quite right and buys him a T shirt instead. I buy a small blanket made from baby camel hair as fellow passengers applaud this gesture of approval for their local handicrafts. Other women sell snacks. There is no buffet car. I had assumed there would be. I discovered this by walking through twenty carriages, my only form of exercise. I also discovered less crowded travelling conditions and better toilets. By late afternoon we are in Shymkent. More freight moving and standing still, and more passengers get on and off. The carriage is constantly reconfigured; large suitcases hauled into the overhead luggage rack. I write to pass the time. By evening we are in Turkistan where a large rural family fills the next section of the carriage. As I drift off to sleep, one of the mothers sings her eighteen-month-old baby to sleep. I love the change in soundtrack, and the baby is cute; until she sidles over and head-butts me.
After a second night on the train, we are all listless, sleeping more through the day, still in our pyjamas and socialising less. The boys have retreated into their phones. We pass beautiful green steppe stretching all the way to the horizon, sometimes with galloping horses. Later we pass sand dunes and dromedaries. I know I said there would be no camels because this is not the silk road, but there they are. At Beineu Granitsa a lively crowd of women on the platform wearing traditional dress sell food and we all dash off the train to buy some. As we head on into the vast bare wilderness of Mangistau there are more and dunes, and oil and natural gas extraction plants lit up at night. Industrial workers get on and off the train travelling short distances.
Finally, the moment of arrival draws near. There is a buzz of excitement and preparation in the carriage as we anticipate landing in Aktau after fifty-five hours of confinement — we were just an hour late. We have covered 2069 kilometres in fifty-five hours on vintage Soviet-era track, an average speed of under 38 kilometres an hour. And, while freight trains may move a bit faster and stop a bit less, these speeds hardly live up to the intermodal hype of both the Chinese and the Kazakh government. As we leave the train, only Ayesha looks good having applied full make up. The rest of us stumble onto the platform looking dishevelled. Bun and the Doctor and her family are met on the platform by relatives, and I head for the shipping office that organises freight and passenger transit across the Caspian Sea.
At last, my journey and the freight-in-transit along the Belt-Road will coincide and I can take a closer look. The ships crossing the Caspian Sea have no timetable, and, because they are intended for freight they take just a few passengers. They leave when they are loaded and arrive, well, when they arrive, which is usually more than 30 hours after they set sail. I eagerly await this part of my journey. I anticipate getting into the port — normally out of bounds — and collecting some of the workers’ stories on the journey across the Caspian. Except that I don’t. I am once more forced to rethink my route.
*Caroline Knowles is an urban sociologist and the author of Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, published by Penguin (2022) https://seriousmoneybook.com and Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.
