The Long Hitch Home

by Jamie Maslin

  There were certainly wolves out here on the steppes, but whether the driver was trying to scaremonger me, or if wolf attack was a common real and present danger, I don’t know. Would the scent of a human repel or entice them, I wondered? I had no idea, and just hoped to strike it lucky like I had the previous night, where, following the touching hospitality of Cokeh in Aktobe, I received more of the same from my final lift into Atyrau, when an affable fellow called Mysufaliev let me sleep in the laundry room of his white-washed wooden house. Such luck had seen me escape pitching my tent at all so far in Kazakhstan, but would it last? My current lift had already made clear he would drop me when he turned down a side track for a remote village, so it hardly looked promising.

  A lone weathered building appeared in the distance, a solitary feature among a flat world of mud and dirty-colored scrub. It was no St. Paul’s Cathedral, but a visual respite amid a landscape that required vigilance to extract interest from its overall monotony, usually by way of its minor details. Set well off from the “road,” this remotest of road houses had two large articulated trucks parked out front that must have had a hell of a time negotiating the slush to get here. As we came to a halt next to one of these, and got out to venture inside the building, the most improbable sound greeted me.

  “Jamie!” It was none other than my old buddy Dmitriy, the trucker heading for Azerbaijan whom I had met roughly two thousand miles away to the east. I couldn’t believe it and was delighted to see him. Jumping from the cab of his truck, Dmitriy thrust his spare palm into mine. We hadn’t been able to communicate much on our first encounter, but from his mannerisms now it was clear he was asking whether I wanted to jump ship, to continue with him instead—and all the way to Aktau. I dropped my current cantankerous chauffeur and was led away by Dmitriy to meet two of his trucker colleagues, who were servicing their vehicle parked up next to his.

  They immediately stopped what they were doing, and welcomed me into the fold. An initiation began. A small off-cut square of carpet was produced, laid on the dusty floor and furnished with an offering: a tin of sardines, jar of gherkins, bag of bread rolls, several shot glasses, bottle of vodka and a soft drink made from birch sap. None of those gathered spoke English but it was irrelevant to us bonding; we were brothers of the road, comrades of the wild plains far beyond the familiarity of civilization. Vodka cemented our fellowship, sloshing into shot glasses and held aloft in unison. We drank as one, the liquid flushing us with warmth. Gherkins and sardines came next, robbing the vodka of its acrid taste, leaving only its blessed internal glow. Shot followed shot; afternoon slipped into evening and another truck driver joined our esprit de corps. Together we adjourned into the simple empty roadhouse. Sitting on the floor at a little table in the only room, illuminated by flickering candles, we settled in for the night. Meat, sautéed onions, and a soup served with pasta and a big dollop of cream arrived: holy sustenance after a day without food. I sat back and beamed with contentment. I was fully in the moment, the golden hour, the only place where life and true happiness can ever exist. Anything else is illusion. The road, its people, and moments like this, were becoming ingrained in my spirit, hard-wired into my soul. And I would cherish them forever.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Dog Fights and Departure Gripes

  I had seen it once from the northern shores of Iran, but the sheer scale of the Caspian still surprised me on my first glimpse of it from Kazakhstan. Larger than Germany, if I didn’t know better I would have concluded that the colossal body of water in front of me was the ocean. Multiple giant oil tankers and container ships dotted the coast, while sea birds drifted idly by and a thick salty aroma clung to the air, mixed, in places, with the rank stench of sewage. The largest landlocked country in the world didn’t look like one here.

  Aktau is no architectural Florence; on its outskirts sat rusting pipelines, decommissioned nuclear power stations, industrial plants and tall-stack chimneys belching fumes into the air. On the coast, empty seaside resorts were left corroding in the salty air alongside abandoned apartment buildings, several with their roofs collapsed and beyond repair. In the town center, gray concrete towers made up the staple residential fare. It looked like a place whose best years were long behind it, and those years had never been particularly good in the first place.

  Sandwiched between the Caspian and the desert, Aktau only survives as a town thanks to water derived from desalination, which from 1973 to 1999 was supplied by a plant powered by a nuclear-reactor, BN-350. Seriously cut off from the rest of the country, Aktau sprang into being in the 1960s after the discovery of nearby uranium deposits. This rather uninspiring raison d’etre is reflected in its grim utilitarian address system, where, instead of names, numbers are given to residential areas, streets and apartment buildings—so a typical Aktau address reads: 7, 4, 87 (district 7, building 4, apartment 87.) It might not have been the inspiration for U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name,” but if anywhere matches that literal description, then it’s Aktau.

  A public holiday saw the Azerbaijan consulate closed and any hope of me picking up a visa dashed until it reopened in the next few days. It seemed my race to reach Aktau had been futile. If the cargo ship left before the consulate reopened then I would miss it. What was open today, and located just down the road, was the Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce. It seemed a good place to make inquiries as to the consulate’s opening times, and while there I used their computer to log onto couchsurfing.org to check the status of an accommodation request I had sent a local English-speaker, Timur. I received good news in response: he had a place for me to crash. Through a combination of luck and charm I managed to transform a simple inquiry on how to get to Timur’s workplace into a free ride there in the back of one of the Chamber of Commerce’s official shiny SUVs. Recently valeted and with a fresh-off-the-production-line aroma, its interior smell stood in contrast to my own honking scent—the consequence of not washing for four and a half days. Driving along the coast road to the center of town, we passed an old MIG fighter jet mounted on an angled plinth, making it look as if blasting off into the sky, and pulled up at an ugly gray tower block. The driver pointed me towards its metal door, where half-hanging off the wall, was a battered-looking intercom. Thanking him, I grabbed my pack and headed out. A quick double-check that I had the correct number, and I pressed the buzzer, setting off a brutal electronic retch. Moments later, an indecipherable Kazakh voice answered on the speaker.

  “Hello, is that Timur?” I responded.

  There was no reply but the door buzzed open and I was in, stepping inside a short dark entrance hallway. Standing in the doorway at its end was a generously proportioned Kazakh man in a gray sweater.

  “Welcome to Aktau,” said Timur. A quick handshake and he led me through to a little ground floor office with a single desk, two PCs, a filing cabinet, and leather sofa.

  “I’m sorry, but I have some work to attend so can’t spend today with you,” apologized Timur. “I have an American staying with me as well who will be here in a minute, you can wait for him if you like or go straight to my home.”

  I decided to stick around, crashing on the sofa while Timur got down to business, picking up the phone and making several animated calls. Fifteen minutes later the American arrived. In walked a well-groomed, mustachioed young explorer, with Harry Potter-style spectacles and the sort of handsome good looks that made you sick. Dressed in a combination of modern Indiana Jones meets lord-of-the-manor attire, he was the epitome of a dashing gentleman adventurer—the sort of person you could equally imagine negotiating the Sahara on camel back in a Lawrence of Arabia-style Keffiyeh headscarf, or donning some fresh pressed whites to play a spot of gentlemanly lawn tennis at the All England Club.

  “Hi, I’m Ethan,” he said in a velvety-smooth east coast tone, reaching out his palm.

  We shook, and, it’s fair to say, hit it off from the start.

  A New Hampshire native, Ethan had traveled to Kazakhstan overland by train, sh
ip, and bus all the way from Korea—a place he’d spent two years teaching English—and was continuing overland to Europe, where he planned to take a boat back home across the Atlantic. Like me, Ethan was in need of a visa for Azerbaijan and would be catching the cargo ship across the Caspian.

  “You’ll need to put your name down for the ship, would you like me to show you where?” offered Ethan.

  We headed out to a small travel agency around the corner that handled the bookings. The moment we walked through the door, the three attractive young women working there were swooning over Ethan and his debonair ways. Punctuating his charismatic discourse with tentative little nods and just the right amount of eye contact that lingered ever-so-slightly, he made the girls melt like ice cubes. I had to hand it to the bugger, he was a smooth operator and knew how to carry himself. I put my name down for the next departing cargo ship that carried only a handful of foot passengers, and asked when it was leaving. The girls were in the dark as much as we were, and could only advise us to check in with them several times a day—possibly so they could flutter their eyelids at Ethan, but apparently because the first they would hear of the ship’s arrival was after it had actually docked. It would then be loaded with train carriages containing coal and depart again. If we left it too long before checking in again, then we would miss it. With up to two weeks between crossings, it looked like we’d be stuck in Aktau for a while.

  We went in search of food, and found ourselves near the coast surrounded by rows of gray Soviet tower blocks, whose depressing uniformity was only broken by the total clash of “styling” to exteriors of individual apartments, particularly their built-in verandas. Standing nearby in a little park, in stark contrast to these eyesores, was a rather fetching mass of interconnected colored metal bars, jutting out all over the place to form a cross between an adventure playground and a cryptic work of modern sculpture, whose center piece was a large cylindrical metal tube that flared at the end like an oversized musical horn.

  “It looks like a 1970s version of the future in steel,” commented Ethan.

  A bit more walking and we located a McDonald’s rip-off called McBurger, where we ordered enormous burgers that were practically impossible to eat without a knife and fork, or in my case, without dropping the sloppy filling on my lap.

  Over our food Ethan filled me in on his experiences in the country, including an interesting conversation he’d had the night before with a Dutch guy based in Aktau who worked with heavy lifting equipment in the oil industry.

  “I went for a beer with him and Timur,” said Ethan, somehow managing to eat while maintaining his decorum. “He used to live in a serviced apartment that was looked after by a local woman who always neatly folded his clothes and tidied his belongings, so after a while he bought her some flowers as a little thank you. Poor woman began crying buckets and told him no one had ever bought her flowers before. Anyway, he tells her that he’s heading back to Holland for a while and asks if there’s anything he can get her over there, and she says a pair of boots, and sketches out their design for him. When he returns he gives her the boots but refuses any money for them, and afterwards he always sees her wearing them at work, so he says to her, ‘You must really like the boots, what does your husband think of them?’ And she tells him that he doesn’t know about them, that she keeps the boots at her sister’s place and leaves her home every morning in her normal boots, walks to her sister’s, then changes into the new boots to go to work, then goes back to her sister’s afterwards to change into the old ones again before going home.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s what the Dutch guy asked too, and she told him: ‘If my husband knew about the boots he would kill me’—and she wasn’t being metaphorical.”

  Lunch complete, we made our way back to Timur’s home, located outside town at the end of a dirt track lined with cinder block walls. It was a simple single-story house with a gray rendered surface and a front yard full of sand and stones. Chained up to a post in the middle was a fearsome guard dog. The moment the yard’s metal gates groaned open, the dog erupted into barks and growls, lurching forward until restrained by the limit of its chunky chain. Edging well outside its range towards the front door, we made our way through a yard strewn with old carpet, random bits of wood, a crude handmade kennel, and a discarded metal sink.

  Unlike its exterior, the inside was surprisingly clean and up to date, with comfy sofas, decorative rugs, and a modern fitted kitchen. After dumping my pack and taking a long overdue shower, Ethan and I set off to visit Dmitriy and the other truckers. Despite plenty of cargo ships visible on the Caspian, there was only one that accepted paying passengers. Since this ship’s cargo consisted of wagons from coal trains, it seemed likely that Dmitriy and Co. were waiting for a different ship, which, were we to travel with them in their cabs, might just permit us on board. If it was leaving soon then it might get us to Azerbaijan without any undue hanging around for the proper passenger one. We’d still have to secure visas first, but it seemed prudent to make some inquires, nonetheless.

  We found their trucks parked up in the same spot that I’d arrived with them in Aktau at 3 a.m. this morning, on the side of the road just outside the town’s gritty port with its towering rusty cranes, random industrial infrastructure and rows of cargo-train gas carriages backed up on the railway tracks outside. Two of the trucks were empty, and the third, Dmitriy’s, had its black curtains drawn across its windows and windshield. Clambering up its outer steps I knocked on the door. Dmitriy pulled the curtains back and broke into a broad smile, welcoming us into a crowded cab. All four truckers were here, squeezed in on the seats and lower bunk bed, watching a film on a small portable television. It was a tight fit but we managed to join them. No sooner had I introduced Ethan than out came the vodka. My friends, it seemed, were here for the long haul. It took some doing, but Ethan and I established that they had no clear idea when their ship across the Caspian was arriving either, but when it did we were welcome to join them—giving us a second place to regularly rendezvous, in our quest out of the country.

  We stuck around for a while, and after conveying to Dmitriy that I no longer needed to take him up on his earlier kind offer of accommodation, Ethan and I headed back to Aktau’s town center, making our way there with a rather interesting taxi driver.

  “I can lift you, but must stop at my house to collect dog and take to animal doctor.”

  “Sure, no problem,” said Ethan. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He get into fight with pit bull.”

  “Oh dear, I’m sorry,” I said at the thought of the man’s beloved pet getting mauled.

  “No,” he replied emphatically. “I win five hundred dollar!”

  Thus began our introduction to the bizarre world of Kazakh dog fighting.

  We came to a halt on the outskirts of town next to a scruffy little house on a sandy track, whose surface rose on the wind into swirling coffee-colored clouds. Out jumped the cabbie, making his way to a set of ornamental metal gates that seemed far too grand for the basic residence beyond. He returned with another man and the biggest dog I’ve ever seen in my life; it was like a bear, with vicious teeth and a powerful muscular frame. It was seriously scary, a look accentuated by a torn nose and a face covered in blood. With Ethan sitting comfortably in the front riding shotgun, there was only one place it was going to go, and that was crammed in the back with me. There was no way I was snuggling up close and personal with a bona fide fighting dog, so when the cabbie returned and stuck his head in the front door window, I waved my hands at him and exclaimed, “No room!” He shook his head as if I’d misunderstood the plan and, reaching beneath the dashboard, popped the trunk.

  “In back,” he said.

  I hoped he wasn’t referring to me.

  Moments later he and his associate heaved the dog up and then into the trunk.

  We were off.

  “What sort of dog is it?” asked Ethan.

  “It i
s Alabai and Caucasus cross. Alabai is only dog good enough to fight with wolf.”

  “You fight them with wolves?” I asked with a mixture of disgust and morbid curiosity.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Where do you get the wolves from?” queried Ethan.

  “We catch with motorbike. Traditionally we use horse, but now motorbike. If you ride behind wolf it will run with head turned around to look at you but will never get tired; it run all day. After much time, wolf’s head will be fixed in place and cannot turn. When this happen another man on motorbike rides to wolf from side it cannot look and throws net on it.”

  “Do the wolves ever win the fights?” I asked.

  “Yes. My father, who was real fighter man, had own wolf, and won many time, but it is not animal pet. It bite family members more than one time, when my brother taken to hospital, my father get very angry with it and take iron bar and break every one of its teeth before killing it.”

  “Jesus!” I exclaimed under my breath.

  When Ethan and I stepped from the taxi on arrival in town, Ethan turned to me, and with a disbelieving shake of the head said, “The longer I’m in Kazakhstan, the longer I think that Borat might be true.”

  After a good stroll around, we popped in to check on Timur, who put the kettle on and brewed us up a couple of teas. Over these he confirmed for us the popularity of dog fighting, which was, he said, common, despite officially being illegal. When we mentioned the breed of the taxi driver’s dog, he echoed the cabbie’s comments.

  “Other dogs, they smell the wolf and become scared but not Alabai. It is the only dog that can fight wolf. If you want to train other dog to fight wolf, you should nail wolf skin inside puppy house so it becomes used to smell, and later when it fights it will not be scared.”