by Tim Cope
Their horse tack was as appalling as their food. Bulat’s saddle was a crude construction of plastic and steel that left a permanent sore on his horse’s back. Without investment from his employer in decent equipment, and no sense of personal ownership of work, there was little incentive for Bulat to take pride in herding. It was a pattern I had witnessed time and again in Kazakhstan, suggesting that the capitalist master had no more interest in the well-being of people and their animals than did the Communist predecessor.
The true nature of this style of steppe farming became clear the day before I departed. A Toyota Prado hurtling across the steppe signaled the arrival of the owners. They were two burly men dressed in city clothes and seemed to have come out for a bit of fun. For an hour or so they roared back and forth in pursuit of a terrified herd of horses, tooting the horn and flashing their lights. When the horses began to tire, a lasso was dangled out a passenger window and the vehicle closed in on a fat specimen. After being caught—and nearly strangled—the horse was bound by the legs, pushed upside down, and hauled up an old door used as a ramp into the back of a waiting van. For good measure it was kicked a few times before the doors were closed.
In a land where nomads had been perfecting horsemanship for at least 5,500 years, it was a saddening image that stuck with me.
Over the next 500 km to the Russian border I took a direct route across the desert to the Volga River. It was a hard and gritty ride, characterized on one hand by the haunting beauty of the desert and on the other by the disruption brought by the oil industry.
In what proved a full month of travel, I spent the first two weeks picking my way through a morass of salt lakes, flats, and bogs known in Russian as solonchak. Following a web of narrow ridges I watched from the saddle as glassy shallow pools of water, glittering white crusts, and chalky plains unfolded, interspersed by carpets of yellow, pink and green plants. From this washed-out palette thousands of birds would lift in the distance like giant swarms of mosquitoes.
In the evenings we all rejoiced in the simplicity of our campsites—the horses rolling on their backs on the brittle, sun-bleached grass, and Tigon curling up asleep next to the tent. It was mid-September, and although the sky was pale and clear, the oppressiveness of summer had gone, meaning that for the first time since May, I was able to ride long hours through the day, and enjoy unbroken sleeps at night.
The downside of the barren landscape was that there was no fresh water to be found, and so I was forced to stray daily to local railway sidings and auls built around small-scale oil-extraction sites. These visits were invariably depressing, and when I rode out to reenter the open land I tried to leave the memories of them behind. Nonetheless, I couldn’t stop my mind from filling with a tangle of thoughts. The nomadic life that had defined the people for eternity had clearly been pushed so far to the margins by oil, by the Soviets, and by the new era of capitalism that it was no longer on the radar. The more I stewed over what I had witnessed, the more the image of Kazakhstan as a land of hundreds of interlocking grazing territories, within which each nomad clan had its unique pattern of seasonal migration, began to crumble. In place of this a very different picture emerged. If the farm that Aigul and Bulat managed was the model of the future, then it was not difficult to imagine the rise of corporate-run farms that could one day carve up the land with fences. If this happened, then herders and nomads could be evicted from their ancestral lands and either be replaced by cheap imported labor or be forced into employment and lose the very independence that was the heart of nomadic existence.
The halfway mark to the Russian border from Kulsary was the city of Atyrau, the oil capital of western Kazakhstan, built on the banks of the Ural River (a river historically better known by its Kazakh name, Yaik). Atyrau also represented the gateway out of geographical Asia into Europe.
After some preliminary work on veterinary documents for the border, I rode west, following the oil pipeline across flats and marshes on the northern fringe of the Caspian Sea. Next to me flowed untold riches on the way to powering the engine of economies in faraway countries. To me, what mattered was there were very few edible plants or grass for the horses. The only advantage of the oil pipeline for me was that every 20 km there were huts made of reeds and mud manned by security guards who were paid a pittance to patrol their stretch of pipe. Here I was usually able to find water and some advice about the terrain ahead.
Only a couple of days out of Atyrau my cooking stove broke and I went for the next eleven days without hot meals. The only comforting thoughts I could find lay in the nature of the harsh land around me. With such thin pickings of grass and limited fresh water, this kind of land would never be suitable for fixed farming. There were surely only two choices for land users of the future—abandon such steppe or return to some form of nomadic herding to utilize what little pasture there was.
My journey from Atyrau to the Russian border was broken by one unexpected discovery. Just beyond the aul of Isatai the land spread out into a sea of wavy sand dunes speckled with tussocks of grass and other desert plants. I had reached the southern edge of a desert known as the Naryn Kum. At a railway siding a gray-bearded herder took me in and spoke with passion about the land he had grown up in.
“I was raised as a nomad way out there in the dunes,” he said, pointing to the north. “When I was young all nomads wintered over in the dunes and then migrated to the Caspian coast for summer. I didn’t see a Russian until I was eighteen years old! In my day the best musicians in the area would turn up and volunteer for a wedding, not only looking for pay, like nowadays.” There were few people who still lived in the Naryn Kum. According to rumor, this was partly because oil and gas exploration had destroyed many natural springs.
In the evening I retired to his home, and he brought out a remarkable-looking saddle blanket loosely woven with horsehair. “This is called a kylterlek,” he told me. “My father’s father taught me how to make it, and he was taught by his father. We make them by cutting off the tails and manes of three horses in early winter when the horses no longer need to swish away the flies. In all my life using a kyl terlek, I have never had a sore on my horse … even in the heat of summer!”
I fondled it carefully, the significance beginning to dawn on me. In this blanket was a genius I could now appreciate.
“In the past, all Kazakhs used a kyl terlek. It drains away the sweat, allows air in, and is the most natural fiber available. When crossing a river, or in the rain, unlike wool felt, this blanket doesn’t stay wet for long, and is never heavy!” he said.
Throughout my journey, I’d been asked whether I had ever seen or heard of a mysterious saddle blanket made from horsehair. No one had seemed to know how to make it, although everyone, from Kazakhs on the Betpak Dala to Mongolians in the central Khangai Mountains, knew that a horsehair blanket was the best option for long distance travel.
I had always wondered how campaigning Mongolian armies were able to swim across rivers with their horses, then get back on and keep riding. Although there were known methods the Mongols used, such as bundling clothes and saddles into a buoyant sack of leather that was tied to the horse’s tail and towed across the water (such as is described by Carpini), it was inevitable that their saddle blankets would have often become wet in this process. And, as any nomad of the steppe knows today, a soaked felt saddle blanket remains wet for days and can rub a horse’s back raw within hours. A kyl terlek, on the other hand, would drain almost instantly, allowing horsemen to continue without detriment to the horses. Could this kyl terlek—a term that coincidentally approximately means “summer deel for horse” in Mongolian—have been one of the Mongolian nomads’ secrets to their long campaigns?7
It was a long bow to draw, but later when I informed CuChullaine O’Reilly of the Long Riders Guild about it, he was overcome with excitement. Only months earlier he had received a report from Swedish long rider and adventurer Michael Strandberg, who had made the same observations about horsehair blankets made
by indigenous Siberians for Yakutian ponies. Had the horsehair blanket once been used throughout Central Asia and the steppes of Eurasia? If so, why had the knowledge disappeared?
From the Naryn Kum I dropped down onto flats near the town of Ganushkino. There, on the verge of the Volga River’s vast delta, the Kazakh steppe I had known for so long came to an end.
A year earlier, and more than 4,000 km to the east from here, I had set out from the Altai with Ruslan and my new troupe of horses. With winter bearing down and the colossal steppe of Kazakhstan yawning, I’d been overwhelmed by the bare nature of the landscape, which seemed to have been scoured clean through sheer exposure. Since then I’d become accustomed to the arid, sharply continental climate of the Kazakh steppe, where the air was dry enough to parch the throat and clouds evaporated before they had a chance to germinate. Now I was descending into a warm breeze that brought thick, humid air. The smell of wetlands was all around, and the sky carried clouds in full bloom.
As gulls, ducks, and swans tracked above, the horses dipped their heads, stealing mouthfuls of luminous green grass. Tigon porpoised through reeds near the edge of a stream, and as if to mark the milestone finally cocked his back leg to urinate on a grass tussock instead of squatting on all fours.
In the scheme of things we had not yet technically reached the end of the arid steppe zone—that still lay ahead, about 300 km to the west of the Volga—but the natural riches of the delta signaled that the bulk of the harsh center of the Eurasian steppe was nevertheless behind us. From here onward to Hungary the conditions promised to grow milder and more fertile.
The next day, only a short distance from the border with Russia, I left the horses in the care of a man named Muftagali and took a taxi back to Atyrau to finalize my veterinary documents. Initially I thought things were looking up—my passport had arrived with the Russian visa, and I met with the director of the local Ministry of Agriculture, Kosibek Erzgalev, who promised to help. After a week, however, the permits were not yet ready, and being in the city forced me to confront issues that I had been conveniently avoiding while in the saddle.
In a city where the oil boom was giving rise to flashy new hotels and apartment blocks, my daily budget of $10 was looking particularly feeble. The cheapest accommodation I could find—an old Soviet-era studio apartment plagued by mosquitoes—was $250 a week. Recent repairs to my video camera had cost $487, my Russian visa had been $229, and I was accumulating a daily debt for the keeping of my horses. At this rate, even if I could pull my horses through as far as the Danube, my budget would not stretch that far.
Beyond my financial worries, though, there was a greater anxiety that had been welling up in me for months, and which was now impossible to ignore. In an Internet cafe I read an email from Kathrin with a sense of dread: Why is it that I feel sick in the pit of my stomach and hollow after our phone calls? she wrote.
After saying goodbye to Kathrin in Mongolia, I had long clung to a dream of reuniting with her in Hungary and spending some weeks getting to know her again. The journey would be behind me, and I could be present in a way that I hadn’t been, even since before I left Australia.
In recent months, though, it was a dream that had faded, and the truth was that underneath I had always harbored some sense of unease about remaining with Kathrin. It would always be challenging to maintain a serious long-distance relationship such as ours by relying on satellite phone connections, but it also felt incongruous with the very nature of my journey. There was a tinge of irony that the very shared attribute that had brought us together—passion for travel—was also the thing drawing me away from her.
As time had gone on and the journey had become more uncertain and drawn out, the feeling of unease in me had grown, and in the process it had become abundantly clear that keeping our relationship alive was not among my priorities—that much had become obvious when Kathrin had been admitted for brain surgery and I remained riding through the desert instead of abandoning my journey to be with her.8
There was another feeling that had grown, too, though, albeit a selfish one—I had come to feel that I did not want or need any fixed horizons. I was happy to be dedicated to my journey and immersed in the experience. Not only could I not envisage life after Hungary—at this stage I couldn’t even imagine getting there—I simply didn’t want to.
After one of many sleepless nights I called Kathrin and told her that I wanted to break up. It was a difficult and painful conversation, and I was riddled with a feeling of guilt that I had entered into a relationship promising more than I could have given.
I spent most of my remaining time in Atyrau shuffling between the Ministry of Agriculture and an Internet cafe where I traded emails with Kathrin. Being unable to see each other in person must have been so much harder for Kathrin, especially in the midst of her recovery from surgery, and also because she had already waited so long. To add to the feelings of being apart, Kathrin planned to spend her upcoming school vacation in a remote village in northern Italy where there was no Internet or phone. We would each have to deal with everything in isolation, and in the circumstances I desperately wanted to get back out on the horses, where I hoped the sense of movement, the feeling of progress, and the company of my animals would make the pain easier to deal with.
After two weeks in the city, I was able to pick up my veterinary permits, and I returned to the border. Although the Ministry of Agriculture was adamant that I had the right documents, riding horses into Russia was an untested thing, and I was nervous.
Nevertheless, things at first appeared to go smoothly. Not far beyond Muftagali’s aul, Kuegen, I passed through a police post just before the border, where my only issue was that Ogonyok ate the roses from the post’s one and only flowerpot. At the border, the presence of a familiar veterinary official from Atyrau put me at ease. “What took you so long?” he said. He arranged for the processing of my documents, took me to lunch, and then escorted me through immigration.
The customs officer showed no concerns. “Now, what model horse do you have? What year is its release?” he joked, waving me through.
Come afternoon I had left Kazakhstan, been ferried across a branch of the Volga River on a barge, and was approaching Russia. Tigon led from the front, bristling with optimism.
At first the Russian border personnel were friendly. I was led through to the customs inspection bay, where an officer called out in jest, “You know we will have to take the wheels off to check for narcotics!” The inspections were all over in a few minutes, and then all that lay before us was a simple boom gate leading into Russia.
It was just as the guards began to wave me through that my luck changed. From an office in a shipping container marked “Vet Control and Transport on the Border,” a woman who appeared to have none of the joviality of her colleagues came my way. I broke the ice with a handshake and a smile, but as the horses edged closer her eyes widened, and the shaking of her head, which had begun hesitantly, became vigorous and full of conviction.
“I don’t know what to do! I am in shock! My God, what problem has fallen on me tonight?” she cried.
I followed her to the shipping container, where she sat under a framed portrait of Vladimir Putin and made a phone call.
“I have a Hungarian traveling from Mongolia on Mongolian horses without documents!” she yelled. There was no opportunity for me to intervene and correct her misapprehensions. I could hear the reply that came down over the line from her superiors in Astrakhan: “What a nightmare!”
The woman hung up and regained some composure. “I must impound your horses! I cannot grant you permission to pass!”
I reassured her that I had all the right papers and that she had misunderstood my story, but she wasn’t listening, and several hours later I knew I was in serious trouble. The only official means to export live horses from Kazakhstan to Russia was to process them for sporting events or as meat. Even if I could overcome this issue, there was a crucial document I didn’t have: a transit
permit from Moscow that would allow me to follow a strict route through Russia to Ukraine.
I called my contacts in Russia—Anna Lushchekina of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and her friend and colleague Liudmilla Kiseleva in Astrakhan—but to no avail. According to the vet official I had two choices: “You can leave your horses and dog impounded with us, and go alone into Russia … or you can go back to Kazakhstan, where you came from.” It was nearing midnight by the time I gave up and rode back into the no-man’s-land between the two borders. The Kazakh border would not reopen until eight o’clock the following morning, and so I found a grassy hollow and made camp.
Come morning I was confronted with a fresh shift of Kazakh immigration, veterinary, and customs officials who accused me of horse rustling and illegal export of the horses. An eight-hour stand-off ensued, resolved only by negotiations between customs and the head of the Ministry of Agriculture in Atyrau. After this I dove back into the core of the problems from the day before.
My horses were again left in Muftagali’s care, and within twenty-four hours I had returned to my purgatory in Atyrau, where I was warned that to get transit permits from Moscow could entail a two-month wait. Given that my visa was only valid for six more weeks and I no longer had the funds to pay for rent, my situation was all the more tenuous. Additionally, unlike any other time on my journey, there would be no sympathetic ear from Kathrin—even if she was prepared to listen, she was in Italy and unreachable.
I got through the first week or so consumed by my frustration at the bureaucracy, which at least fueled my determination to beat the system. I spent hours each day at the Ministry of Agriculture learning about the laws and protocols, sending faxes to Moscow and Astana. Soon I was fluent in the kind of bureaucratic jargon used by the staff. During the daytime I was spurred on by the feeling that I was actively doing something about my situation. Each evening when the ministry closed its doors, however, I felt helpless and lonely.