The Long Hitch Home

by Jamie Maslin

  “Yes, quite possibly,” I replied.

  Danilo echoed my fudging non-committal sentiment.

  We said “good night” and headed for the door, stepping outside into a snowy night.

  “Do you think they were really journalists?” asked Danilo.

  I wasn’t sure; but if they weren’t, then what were they, and what was it all about? Was it somehow tied with Danilo’s visit from the anti-terrorism squad in Osh? Could he be under surveillance, and the women a crude honey trap continuation of this to see if he possessed any information on a counter revolution? They’d arrived at the restaurant after us so it was possible he’d been followed there, and in a sense I wouldn’t have blamed them, after all, there was definitely a dash of the villainous about Danilo; the old bugger would have made a fine extra on a pirate movie, that’s for sure. But there was no way of knowing; although one thing was certain, we weren’t meeting up with the Russian beauties again tomorrow evening.

  Despite the women’s rather strange approach and odd manner, we discounted it as paranoia. Regardless, as we made our way back to Charlie and Marcin’s apartment, it was with a marked degree of furtive glances over our shoulders.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Raving with the Cops

  Danilo stood before me, naked as the day he was born, sweating profusely in the darkened room, flagellating his torso with a soaked cluster of oak twigs, letting out little yelps with every stinging swipe, while a group of blubbery Kazakh men in a similar state of undress looked on bemused.

  “What would your mother say if she could see you now?” I said shaking my head through laughter.

  For our last day together we decided to experience the delights of a Russian banya, or sauna. It was an odd establishment, not wholly dissimilar to what I imagined, where nakedness was mandatory and flagellation optional. Split into two main isolated domed structures akin to giant igloos, were large gender-specific ice-cold swimming pools where, after emerging from a super-hot and darkened stone sauna room, you cooled down by either tipping a great pail of cold water over your head or plunging into the rigor mortis-inducing pool. Over the last couple of hours Danilo and I had fluctuated from sauna to pool—a process said to promote blood circulation through the rapid opening and closing of the capillaries under extremes of temperature—and by now were thoroughly exhausted, although not without a marked degree of satisfaction.

  Several additional extras were on offer at the banya: large condensation-beaded bottles of beer, full body massages, and the sale of birch or oak twigs for use in self or group flagellation—something Danilo and I witnessed in the sauna where three men lashed the splayed and whimpering body of a third on the floor. Rather surprisingly, and for reasons I could not decipher, all of them wore a single item of clothing: knitted beanie hats. The massages available were from either professional-looking men in Soviet-style tracksuits who charged for the privilege and looked capable of ripping your arms off, or freebies from fellow naked banya users who operated on a sort of “you do me and I’ll do you” basis, scrubbing each other up and down with soap suds and gusto, administering the fullest of full body massages that reached within a hairs breadth of the most sensitive areas. We skipped the massage but purchased some oak and birch branches, soaking them for several minutes in a bowl of warm water to liberate the tannins, which could then be imparted to the skin when struck against it, thus transferring some medicinal benefit.

  After a marathon session at the banya we headed back to Marcin’s place. While getting packed for my big push on into Kazakhstan in the morning, I received a tempting offer from Marcin’s other couchsurfers, Caroline and Joris: to stick around a while longer and accompany them to a fascinating traditional sporting event called buzkashi. Often compared to polo, buzkashi’s similarities to “the sport of kings” ends with the riding of horses. The literal translation of buzkashi is “grabbing the dead goat,” and for good reason too, for instead of a ball, a headless goat carcass (or boz) is used. Slaughtered the day before, the goat is decapitated, has its lower legs hacked off, and entrails scooped out, before being soaked in water to toughen it up. The aim of the game is to grab a hold of the carcass and, amid a rugby-like frenzy of aggression from the other players on horseback, fight your way with it around a post at one end of the field, and drop it into a circular goal in the center. Believed to date back to the rule of Genghis Khan, the original version of buzkashi is said to have used not a goat’s carcass, but a human’s. It was a tempting offer to stick around and witness, but in the end the urge to push on won out.

  Come the evening, Danilo and I shared a farewell meal at a Chinese restaurant, and said our final goodbyes, with promises to stay in touch and provide updates to the other on our travels. It had been great to spend time with him in China and Kyrgyzstan, and his humble, self-effacing company was going to be sorely missed.

  “Don’t get shot in Afghanistan, you hear me,” I said on departure.

  “I’ll do my best,” he replied with an optimistic smile.

  * * *

  I was on the road at dawn, making my way out of Bishkek with a wrestling coach called Adilet, who had an alien life-form of a “cauliflower ear” stuck to the side of his head—the tell-tale sign of a seasoned wrestler—and had stopped to give me a lift because I had, as he put it to me, “happy eyes.”

  Three more rides and I made it to the border. It was a rather undramatic affair with scant guards on either side and minimal infrastructure, making for a smooth and rather painless passage through to the other side where I stepped into the biggest of the Central Asian republics, the ninth largest country in the world, and the very largest landlocked nation of all—Kazakhstan. Trekking down the road from the border, it was hard not to think of spoof Kazakhstani reporter, Borat, and I wondered whether the country bore any semblance to its backward fictional portrayal. I would soon find out.

  Although the film is obviously nonsense, albeit extremely funny nonsense, one aspect of it that I knew had a basis in reality—after reading up on it in Bishkek—was the scene where Borat tries to kidnap Pamela Anderson to be his bride. Amazingly, bride kidnapping, or alyp qashu is actually practiced in the region, and to a staggering extent. In Kyrgyzstan it is unfathomably common, with a third of all modern Kyrgyz brides entering marriage through a kidnap,168 which, according to the country’s former interim President, Roza Otunbayeva, amounts to 15,000 abducted women a year. 169 In Kazakhstan it is less common, but since the fall of the Soviet Union it has seen a resurgence, particularly in rural areas.

  Sometimes brides are kidnapped by people they know, sometimes by complete strangers prowling the streets for a wife. Typically, a man enlists the assistance of friends or male relatives, who help bundle the woman into one of their cars or, if they don’t have one, a taxi hired for the event. She is then taken, kicking and screaming, to the man’s house, and held captive by his female relatives who apply psychological pressure on her to comply. This can be long and brutal, with the kidnapped woman often pinned down by force for many hours, while the older women threaten her with a curse if she does not submit to wearing a traditional white headscarf signifying her “acceptance” of the marriage. Often they simply tie the headscarf onto her while she is restrained. When the scarf goes on it’s game over; an imam is summoned and the following morning the couple are wed.

  Most are persuaded to stay for fear of scandal and resign themselves to their fate. With virginity greatly prized, if a woman ends up spending the night in a man’s house then she is considered tainted, whether raped or not. If she leaves, then often her own family will not accept her back, leaving her with nowhere to go. Even if her family is unhappy with the marriage and the way it came about, they will often bow to traditional pressure and endorse it. Domestic violence, rape, and suicide are, unsurprisingly, not uncommon consequences of the practice.

  The traditional roots of bride kidnapping are unclear, but it is thought to date back into the region’s nomadic past. Some believe it o
riginated with tribes who, when low on horses, sheep, and women, would simply ride into a village and take whatever and whoever they needed for their clan’s survival. Others think its inception lies with couples who, because of class or clan differences, would have been unable to secure their parents’ approval to tie the knot, and so staged kidnappings by mutual consent as a way of eloping; if the guy kidnapped and incarcerated the girl, then her family would consider her unclean and so agree to the marriage. Still others believe it originated as a way for the groom’s family to avoid paying excessive traditional “bride wealth” fees to the family of the woman, or to sidestep the cost of an expensive ritualistic wedding.

  Whatever its roots, since the collapse of Soviet rule, cases of bride kidnapping have sky-rocketed in the region, in part because many see it as a component of their national identity which was denied and outlawed by the Soviets. Today the practice is officially illegal in both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and indeed outlawed by the dominant Islamic religion; but in a region where tradition trumps both religion and the law, it is rarely prosecuted, and as a result is unlikely to die out any time soon. And so for many women their lives will not be dictated by their own dreams and free will, but by whomever decides to thrust themselves upon them. If a woman is a student in the city with high hopes after graduation, and is kidnapped by a shepherd from the mountains, then a life of tending sheep, making bread, and producing babies awaits. (For more on this thoroughly baffling and shocking tradition see the excellent PBS documentary: Kyrgyzstan—The Kidnapped Bride: www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/kyrgyzstan).

  Rides came and went from the border, as did plenty of refusals from drivers who, on reading the new note I’d obtained for Kazakhstan, discovered I wasn’t paying, and so drove off. An interesting feature of two of today’s rides were bribes paid to policemen. The cops would flag the driver down, point out what appeared to be an arbitrary problem with their vehicle, and then the money would come out—it was something I would see repeatedly across the country, and brought to mind a remarkable article I had read a few weeks previous in the Times of Central Asia, which revealed the malleable and opportunistic nature of Kazakh officials, this time at the border:

  A study completed in 2008 for an international firm seeking to invest in Khorgos identified a glaring discrepancy. According to the Kazakh customs’ statistics, 3,000 trucks passed through Khorgos from China to Kazakhstan in 2007. Yet, Chinese customs authorities put the figure at 36,000 trucks. The difference, the firm concluded, was rooted in black market activity.

  The difference being a mind-boggling 33,000!

  Soon the landscape transformed. A distant parallel spine of mountains stretched from east to west along the southern border with Kyrgyzstan, where the last remnants of the mighty Tian Shan range died against the flat grassland steppes that cover much of this huge country. Agricultural land dominated now; vast flat fields stretched northward, irrigated by run-off from the mountains. Villages with cozy-looking wooden-slatted homes passed by, their walls whitewashed, and window frames highlighted in various shades of blue—a popular Kazakh style.

  By mid-afternoon I found myself riding in a large articulated truck with a cheerful middle-aged Russian called Dmitriy. Although Dmitriy spoke no English, I managed to ascertain where he was going—Aktau, my final destination, not of the day, but of the country. This was one hell of a long distance. By way of my map I conveyed that I was going there too, and continuing across the Caspian Sea (actually a lake) to Azerbaijan. He nodded enthusiastically, then pointed to himself, confirming that he was doing likewise.

  “How long? Err, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday . . .” I continued through the week, making progressive step-like motions with my hands, before switching to counting on my fingers.

  He held up nine fingers—nine days of solid driving. This seemed incorrect. Surely, I reasoned, it wouldn’t take that long. Kazakhstan is a huge country, for sure, but the point I entered it meant I’d cut out at least a third before I’d started. I asked for clarification. Dmitriy sketched out his route on my map with his finger. It bypassed the most direct line of travel to Aktau, taking a preposterously long detour north, right up to Kazakhstan’s border with Russia, before heading all the way down south again to the Caspian Sea—a detour in the order of 1,300 miles.

  I needed some convincing, and it took some doing by sign alone, but apparently the more direct road on my map was so bad as to be practically undrivable. Both this and Dmitriy’s route went through a vast desert, but despite the added mileage from heading north, surface quality made all the difference, with the longer of the two being by far the quickest, and the only feasible option. Dmitriy offered me one of two comfy-looking bunk beds behind the cab, and clearly had no issue with me hanging around with him for the next nine days, but as tempting as this offer was, I couldn’t quite justify sticking to only one lift across the whole of Kazakhstan. Being a long distance trucker, Dmitriy would no doubt be pushing on at pace, leaving me little chance to stop off at sites of interest along the way. And so, as we pulled up at a remote and deserted truck stop in the early evening where Dmitriy planned to spend the night, I decided to say goodbye and push on alone.

  A biting wind followed me down the thin minor road as I walked to an appropriate spot. Standing here, staring at the empty road and then back towards Dmitriy’s inviting-looking truck, I wondered if I had just made a very poor decision. Since Dmitriy was, like me, going across the Caspian, I wondered too if he knew something about the schedule of a notoriously sporadic cargo ship that crossed this gargantuan lake, the largest land-locked body of water in the world. The Aktau cargo ship was the only way to get from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan without flying, and was the big unknown of my sojourn through the country. According to Danilo’s guidebook on the region, it was impossible to predict when the cargo ship arrived or departed, with waits of up to two weeks between crossings. This worried me. Should it take me fourteen or more days to reach Aktau, then I was at risk of my Kazakhstan visa expiring before the cargo ship arrived. Dmitriy’s estimated time of arrival was nine days from now so this seemed a distinct possibility. I made up my mind to only briefly stop off when checking out sights on the way, to have a quick look around and then get moving again. If it was taking Dmitriy nine days, then that was what I had to aim for. I doubted I could match his pace, but I wanted to get close to it on the off chance he possessed some insider’s knowledge of when the cargo ship left, and had planned his journey to coincide—something I had attempted to ask but failed miserably to convey.

  There was, in fact, one further unknown, at least for tonight—whether I had accommodation awaiting me in the city of Shymkent. Being an oil nation, accommodation was apparently seriously expensive in Kazakhstan, and so, in an attempt to make my funds last through the country, I had messaged a couchsurfer the night before from Marcin and Charlie’s apartment, asking for a place to crash. The recipient of my request was a twenty-four-year-old American girl, Sipra, who was stationed there in the Peace Corps, but with no access to the Internet in the back of beyond, I had no idea whether my request had been accepted. To find out, I would have to reach Shymkent and locate an Internet café.

  To get moving again took about thirty minutes, achieved by way of a small farming truck that dropped me in a little settlement about fifty miles from Shymkent. By now the sun had disappeared, the temperature dropped further, and a howling wind arrived—a wind that induced shivering flashbacks of my freezing night in China. As darkness enveloped the world, my earlier optimism of reaching Shymkent tonight diminished. Getting a ride in the dark is always tricky, but out here, with no street lamps revealing my presence to approaching drivers, it was even harder. Had I accepted Dmitriy’s offer, I would be stretching out in bed now, not standing in a cold and dark Kazakh backwater, scanning about for a place to throw a tent in case I failed to get a ride.

  I waited on the opposite side of the road to a small dilapidated village store to maximize my visibility. Out came four
local guys in their early to mid twenties, who, by the looks of things, were drunk. The odd sight of a backpack-carrying foreigner trying in vain to hail a ride served as a source of laughter and derision. I did my best to ignore them. It began as gawking my way while sniggering among themselves, but graduated to them calling at me, saying god-knows-what in Russian or Kazakh. A vehicle appeared and they were throwing out exaggerated hitchhiking gestures of their own to the approaching driver. They found this hilarious. After a couple of minutes, one of the group with a mouthful of gold-colored teeth and a face that looked like it had been set on fire and then extinguished by way of a beating from a cricket bat, stumbled over and began talking at me with a detectable air of disdain. I had no idea what he was saying but in an attempt to shut him up, thrust one of my hitchhiking notes into his hand.

  “Kazakhstan, no free!” he said aggressively, pointing with a bony finger, presumably, at the bit stating I had no intention of paying for a ride.

  Shouting across the road, he informed his buddies of his discovery. They continued yelling at me until one of then upped the ante. Reaching into the pocket of his jeans he dug out a wallet and began waving it in my face. I was tired, cold, and annoyed at myself for not sticking with the warm and comfy accommodation Dmitriy had offered me, and so was in no mood to deal with this sort of shit.

  I wasn’t really sure what to do, but thankfully he swaggered back to his mates. Another car approached, eliciting the same response from the group as before. That was it, I wasn’t sticking around here. Turning on my heels, I continued down the road towards a gas station at the far end of the village, leaving the pricks behind.

  I waited and waited, getting colder and more demoralized by the minute. On several occasions I considered bailing, finding a spot to throw my tent and crawling inside my sleeping bag to shiver out the night. But the thought that I might, just might, have a delightful couchsurfing bed awaiting me in Shymkent was motivation enough to push on. “One more car,” I kept telling myself, and when it had passed I’d say it again, repeating it like a mantra until finally one stopped. Euphorically I ran on over and handed the driver a note. He took one look at it and drove off again, leaving me in a cloud of dust, staring into the cold night air at the ever diminishing glow of his red tail lights.