On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

More important for Murat than his tribal background, however, were his nomadic roots. Although he had an education in veterinary science, he had chosen to carry on the tradition of his family as camel herders. In fact, his family were herders of some local renown, owning somewhere in the order of five hundred camels—no small number, given that a large camel could fetch in excess of $1,500 at market. With a herd this size, it was crucial to migrate with the seasons, and Murat’s family had five different camps. Soon he would move with his family to the August camp, which lay far away from the riverbank to the west.

  I got along well with Murat, and he seemed to genuinely care about his animals. In light of this I decided to offer him the stallion that I had bought in Kyzylorda. My stallion was a tall, slender horse that many had offered to buy from me along the way because his build was seen as good for racing. Unfortunately, these same characteristics made him unsuitable for long-distance travel. In recent weeks he had been unwell, suffering diarrhea, and although I had wormed him and fed him more grain than the others, he had lost considerable weight. Murat promised me one of his horses in exchange—a quiet, fat little horse of Mongolian proportions—and made an additional offer that seemed like a godsend at the time, but which I would later regret.

  I’d long planned to say farewell to Cordell and Cara in Kulsary before carrying on alone toward Russia. The horses, however, were in desperate need of a rest, and it had come to my attention that I would need to apply for a Russian visa in Almaty well in advance of reaching the border. I had decided to look for a place near Kulsary to leave the horses for the month of August. Upon hearing this, Murat warned that it was even hotter in Kulsary, and there would be no fodder for my horses in the area. He proposed instead that upon our arrival in Kulsary—where an uncle of his would host us—he would send a truck to bring my horses back here for grazing until September. All I would have to do is pay the costs. What I could never have foreseen was that Murat’s plan would fall through, and so I would become trapped not only in a region without fodder, but the middle of an urban oil town with nowhere to go.

  That was in the future, though, and for now I was intoxicated by the majesty of Murat’s camp, where for two days more I drank in every detail, from the sound of the camels moving back under moonlight to the sensation of lying down under the stars at night and waking with not a drop of dew under an eternally blue and cloudless sky. There was a completeness, an intertwining of nature, animal, and man, that could not be replicated in an environment compartmentalized by walls and fences, and it reinvigorated Cordell, Cara, and me for the remainder of the journey together.

  From Murat’s camp, there lay just 150 km to Kulsary. One day south of Murat’s we met with his father, Guanshbai, and decided to sell him our little camel, Harvette. From there, the land became flatter, the pasture—as Murat had forewarned—grew thin and the ground metamorphosed into white clay pans with nothing but salt bush. The temperature climbed over 50°C, and the water became brackish—but still fresh enough to drink. There were times when we were so exhausted by the struggle to keep cool during the day that we’d saddle up the horses at night but then fall asleep until after midnight; when we finally woke, we gave up and unsaddled. It didn’t really matter, though, for the end of my journey with my Australian friends was drawing near, and we had experienced the essence of steppe life that we had come for.

  On July 27 we packed up for our last day of riding along the Zhem. I was thinking happily that my horses were about to be trucked back to paradise for a month of grazing. For the next month I could also look forward to some time away from the punishing routine of night riding, and come the cool of September, when I planned to return, my horses would be fat and rested. Never again, I thought, would I have to deal with the heat of the Kazakh summer.

  15

  THE OIL ROAD

  Since departing Akbakai in April, my journey had taken me four months across the unbroken steppe of central and eastern Kazakhstan. During that time, the challenges of each and every day had been defined by the rhythms of summer, when daylight was cheap and the cool hours of night precious. On the outskirts of the oil town of Kulsary, 100 km short of the Caspian Sea, however, the steppe abruptly began to break up. The open desert and saltpans on the flanks of the River Zhem that had so infused in me a feeling of inner peace gave way to mangled earth that had been bulldozed into a maze of mounds and ridges. Then came twisted, rusty pieces of steel, shattered glass, and burned-out cars. On the asphalt road leading into the center, heavy trucks and SUVs hurtled past at unchecked speed, spraying gravel and leaving us in a wake of dust and fumes. The brave, indomitable Taskonir trembled.

  I’d long known about the oil economy of western Kazakhstan, and in the past few weeks we’d glimpsed something of the industry—permanent gas flares on the horizon, the odd truck—but nothing on this scale.

  Tanbai, the relative of Murat who had agreed to host us until the truck came to pick the horses up, met us on a street corner. As we came to a halt, he flicked his cigarette to the ground and looked us over.

  “Where are your cars?” he asked, concerned. It turned out that Tanbai had mistakenly understood from Murat by phone that we were wealthy tourists traveling by jeep.

  Tanbai begrudgingly led us to his house in the center of town, where we tied up the horses and took shelter from the heat. No sooner had we sat down for tea and bread than Tanbai’s twenty-year-old son, also named Murat, shuffled in next to me and leaned over with a new Nokia phone. With his parents across the table, he covertly displayed a porn clip, and then a gruesome video of an American soldier having his head severed by Taliban. Oblivious to this, Tanbai said to us with pride: “My son can speak English, you know. He is studying to be an engineer, and is already working for an American oil company.”

  In the light of morning it was clear that in the world in which the younger Murat had grown up, horses, the turn of the seasons, and grass held little currency. Tanbai earned a modest living as a bus driver and mechanic, and their simple mud-brick home was hedged in by new two-story townhouses. Pointing to the house opposite, which had a brand-new black Toyota Land Cruiser parked behind the gates, Tanbai said of his neighbor, “He supplies concrete for the oil companies.” Indicating another house, and then a third, he added, “And that one over there is a local politician … Him, his son is working for an oilfield.”

  A drive through the town of just over forty thousand people revealed mansions at all stages of hasty construction, most of which backed onto potholed dirt streets where camels wandered haplessly in the heat and piles of rubbish sat uncollected. There was little infrastructure for water or sewage—even the more luxurious homes had pit toilets in their yards. On the edge of town water tankers were lined up, ready 24/7 to deliver water at a rate of $200 for 3,000 litres.

  In the past, the vast, sterile desert on the northeast shoulder of the Caspian Sea—at the center of which lay Kulsary—had been renowned for its warrior tribes, who kept their land impenetrable to invading armies. Nowadays, the mishmash urban landscape was the hallmark of a region in the throes of an oil boom, which had attracted a relative invasion of multinational oil companies. The scale and pace of economic transformation were difficult to fathom. Little more than an hour’s drive south lay the Tengiz oilfield, which was built over the sixth-largest oil bubble on the planet and tapped by a joint venture between the Kazakh government and American-based Chevron. Tengiz was the single biggest contributor to the government’s coffers, and combined with the Kashagan field in the nearby Caspian Sea—the second-largest known oil reserve in the world, and at the time of its discovery in the year 2000 the biggest find in thirty years—it placed Kazakhstan in a position to become one of the world’s biggest oil exporters.1

  The oil reserves of western Kazakhstan set the country’s economy apart from many of its resource-poor Central Asian neighbors and had helped steer the country into a relatively prosperous and stable post-Soviet independence. Yet for all the potential and promise that oil
brought, there were signs that the industry was a source of social division and corruption. In the early days of the boom, the president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, had been implicated in a scandal when it was revealed that billions of dollar in proceeds from a 1996 agreement between Mobil and the government were hidden away in Swiss bank accounts—and that $500 million of it had inexplicably vanished.2 At the other end of the spectrum, the many herders and unemployed rural folk I had met in recent weeks were locked out of the oil economy and could only look on as their traditional livestock economy was pushed further to the fringes.

  It is true that the oil industry offered lucrative opportunities for many regional Kazakhs, as evidenced by the pace of development in Kulsary. The corruption and lack of trickle-down wealth, however, contributed to a common perception that most of the oil money was being funneled to the east, where it ended up either in the pockets of officials or at the president’s political disposal. Even among those workers employed at the coal face, there were recurring tensions over unsafe conditions and discrepancies of pay compared to that of foreign workers. There were instances when this had boiled over into violent rioting at the Tengiz field.3

  Aside from this, there was also the view that foreign companies such as Chevron were taking more than their fair share of the nation’s riches. “Back when the deals were made, Kazakhstan was desperate for money and the Americans paid too little,” said Tanbai as we pulled up to the central market. “We were cheated. We didn’t know the real value. Kazakhstan is a country surrounded by wolves on all sides—the Russians, Chinese, Turks, and of course the Americans!”

  By the time we made it back to Tanbai’s home it was 40°C, and the horses stood tied and sweating in the shade-less yard. I had paid for a water truck to fill Tanbai’s tank, and hay was on its way, but Tanbai was unhappy about the growing pile of manure. In a town where I had long imagined that I could spend some time recuperating, it was becoming clear that while the most challenging terrain of Kazakhstan might have been behind me, my journey—like Kulsary—was at an awkward intersection between a life dominated by the natural elements and one in which survival would increasingly require navigation through the thickets of trouble brought on by industry, bureaucracy, and the every-man-for-himself attitude of the oil economy. Somewhat symbolic of this, my route from Kulsary to the Russian border—500 km of desert, punctuated by the central oil city of Atyrau—lay alongside the $2.2 billion oil pipeline that now pumped crude to the west as far as the Black Sea throughout the very untamed land once trodden by Mongol warriors and Silk Road traders.

  Before I could ride out of Kulsary I needed to travel 3,000 km to Almaty to apply for a Russian visa. To do this would first involve arranging for the horses and dog to be transported to Murat’s farm for a month of grazing and finding buyers for Cordell’s horse and the short, fat horse I had acquired from Murat. As a replacement for my third mount, I had settled on a gray horse named Kok, which Cara had been riding.4

  In the end the agreement with Murat did not work out, and so instead I left the animals under the watch of a herding family in a nearby aul, Karagai. It was a community set in a mustard-yellow dustbowl with no grass to be spoken of. A herder there named Albek offered to buy Cordell’s horse and assured me that, for a price, he could take the other horses out to graze at a summer pasture. Albek’s elderly father promised to guard Tigon.

  Five weeks later, I returned from Almaty pessimistic about my chances of finding the horses alive. I had been away longer than anticipated, and the only correspondence I’d received from Karagai was that the horses remained in the aul—they had not been taken out to summer pastures for grazing as agreed. Problems I had encountered in Almaty contributed to my gloomy outlook. The Russian embassy had refused my visa application. After much waiting I had mailed my passport to a travel agency in Finland instead—a risky move, since by law I had to carry my passport at all times.5

  When I jumped out of a buckled old Russian jeep and landed my backpack in the dust and sand of Karagai, it appeared my worst fears had been realized. I found Taskonir tied up at the back of a corral with his head hanging and ribs resembling the corrugations I had just driven over to get to Karagai. The other two horses were missing, and the only person to be found at Albek’s home was an emaciated shadow of a man who reached out to me from the doorstep for balance, then crashed drunkenly into the dirt.

  After a tip-off from a neighbor, I was directed on foot east of the aul, where I found men cutting up two freshly slaughtered horses. They weren’t mine, but the men knew who I was and waved me on further. I found Albek and a friend of his in the midst of a gallop—they were riding none other than Kok and Ogonyok, and explained that my horses had been entered in a baiga—a horse race—that was to be held the next day!

  Back in the aul, the removal of saddles and blankets revealed fresh sores. Albek shrugged sheepishly and admitted that the 300 kg of grain I had left with his family had vanished within a couple of weeks—this, he explained, was why the horses were skinnier than when I had left them.

  Albek’s elderly mother tried to lighten my spirits: “Those sores are in memory of us! You will never forget us!”

  Although I was angry, I was genuinely grateful that the horses were alive. I paid Albek the promised $300 and thanked him. Any mistakes were forgiven when I found Tigon. I spotted him from a distance dug into the sand under a wooden platform-cum-deck near Albek’s house. On top of the platform, sitting cross-legged and guarding Tigon, was Albek’s father. As I approached, Tigon’s dusty ears sprang to life and his tail flopped about uncertainly. When I was nearer he sprinted to the end of his lead and leaped up with his paws on my chest. The old man straightened out his chicken bone legs, a smile opened up between his hollow, sun-blackened cheeks, and he rose to embrace me. “See! Everyone thought I was mad. They were sure you would never come back, but I didn’t forget you!”

  Departure from Karagai was one of the more vivid farewells of my Kazakh journey. Albek’s father had gotten hold of a pink plastic gemencrusted hair band and wore it over his bald scalp from ear to ear. As I saddled up to leave, he rose from a blanket on his platform, resplendent in this headwear, holding out a glass of vodka. As I went to accept, he pulled the glass back and fell back on the dirt in laughter.

  “Whatever you do, don’t rush!” he said, his eyes rolling as he slipped into another world.

  The aul passed by in a series of wafts of dry dung until it had been eclipsed by the horizon and I was breathing in fresh, clear air. Then came silence and the empty steppe.

  It occurred to me that the openness was like a big blank canvas, and being here after the turbulence of the past month allowed me to rebuild my picture of the world from the tiniest details. I closed my eyes, felt the swaying of the saddle and waited for the first sensations to bleed back in. It came as the sound of the horses brushing gently against the wormwood plants. Then came the feeling of the breeze lightly cooling the sweat on my back, and when I opened my eyes, I saw the saksaul trees coming and going like driftwood floating aimlessly by on the ocean.

  After a short ride I made an early camp on the Zhem River. Tigon ran circles in the sand, pausing momentarily at times to come in close, roll onto his back, and demand a pat on the belly. The horses rested their necks on one another. Ogonyok let out long, breezy farts that tailed off lazily. Taskonir’s condition was bad—he was all skin and bone—but at least he now looked at ease. I let my clothes drop to the ground and lay in the ankle-deep water watching the pink moon rise like a lamp into the sky.

  In the morning I had ridden only a short distance when I slumped from the saddle with a banging in my skull and my stomach writhing—probably a consequence of the vast quantities of horsemeat I had consumed the previous day in Karagai. I managed little more than 13 km before heading for a herder’s hut, where I feigned interest in finding water for the animals and swiftly collapsed on the floor inside. For the next three days I lay in a fever. I ate almost nothing but even so made frequ
ent sojourns to relieve my stomach and bowels. At first I made an effort to do it discreetly, but eventually I let go of all pride.

  I stayed a week in all, but only as I began to regain strength was I able to get to know my hosts and through them the curious farming arrangement they were part of. Aigul was a twenty-year-old woman with an open, round face, long brown hair, and a mischievous smile. The rigors of life on the steppe hadn’t yet taken away the beauty of her youth, although her hands were wrinkled and callused, and the skin on her cheeks was freckled and dark from a lifetime of sun. During the day she brought me water and tea and in between chores scrutinized my photo album. She knew very little Russian. When her husband, Bulat, returned from herding each evening she would shrink away into the background and avoid eye contact. Bulat was a strong, handsome man in his late twenties with a thick mop of hair and light green eyes.

  From a distance, the herding station that Aigul and Bulat managed, with its large herds of camels, horses, sheep, and goats, appeared like a traditional nomad camp. All was not as it seemed, though. The hut was neither a summer domain or a winter one but a permanent base, and Bulat and Aigul were not indigenous to the area but hired farmhands from neighboring Uzbekistan.6 The owners of the farm and livestock were Kazakh businessmen from Kulsary who had taken out a forty-nine-year lease on the land.

  “Kazakhs won’t do this work—it’s too little money. But for us, well, there is no work back home,” explained Bulat, who spoke fairly coherently in Russian. I had heard about this type of farming from many Kazakhs, who complained the government was offering long-term land leases affordable only to city businessmen who didn’t have skills or interest in animal husbandry.

  This explained some of the glaring oddities of life at the hut. Every meal was a bland serving of rice or pasta mixed with a bouillon cube and onion. “Our employer won’t let us slaughter sheep—we have to buy our own food. Meat is too expensive for us,” they told me, as excuse for the fact that they had no meat to offer.