Central Asia by rail

By Alice Albinia

Getty
L
eaning out of the train door as the final whistle blew, I watched my husband, Tristram, grab
the newspaper-wrapped package from the village girl on the platform and drop some coins
into her outstretched hand. Rachmet (thank you)! he exclaimed in such obvious delight that
she looked up at me with her dark brown eyes and laughed. The train gathered speed, and
soon she was left far behind, a small head-scarved figure standing in the middle of the central
Asian steppe.
On board, my husbands purchase was swiftly appraised by the band of men who had poked
at and murmured over everything he had paid for since leaving Moscow, from a bag of ruddy
apples to some woolly Kazakh socks. Nye dorogoy (inexpensive), they announced
approvingly, and so we stumbled back together to the six-bunk berths where we had been
sleeping, reading, sitting and watching the Eurasian continent sweep by for the past three
days.

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Everything from seats to sandwiches is considered common property on the train to
Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, and I alone of our Kazakh, Moldovan, Kyrgyz, Russian
and Uzbek fellow travellers was not in the least bit interested in sharing his lunch. The men

crowded round as Tristram unfolded the layers of cheaply-printed Cyrillic script, and the
strong odour of farmyards filled the carriage.

Since we boarded the train in London at the start of our 10-day journey see map at right to
Kashgar in western China, Tristram had been talking non-stop about kaze, the Kazakhs
pungent national dish of horse tripe stuffed with horsemeat. But I had tasted more than
enough train and platform food already on this journey; between Frankfurt and Moscow we
had lived on fat-flecked soup served up by a man who smelt of beer marinade; and the last
thing I did before leaving Moscow was walk to Red Square and buy myself a picnic of black
bread, salami and cheese from the plush GUM department store opposite the Kremlin. To the
travel-weary, the food hall of GUM is a cornucopian array of local and international
delicacies, from pickled cherries to Parma ham; and I parted gladly with my roubles.
Tristram, however, was thrilled by the rustic railway diet of horse and sheep offal. He loved
the clammy, sweet, sour-cream-stuffed buckwheat pancakes hawked by the old ladies who
shuffled up and down the train. He smacked his lips with joy as he told me of the broiled
sheeps head that some Kyrgyz labourers had shared with him on a previous journey (though
he lamented the cultural taboo on eating the eyes). And here he was now, slicing up
convenient medallions of kaze with his penknife, and handing them out encased in hunks of
spicy unleavened nan.
By now we were on the second leg of our train journey. The first stage had taken us from
London through Belgium, Germany, Poland and Belarus to Moscow. On the FrankfurtMoscow train, all our fellow passengers had been Russians, happy to be returning home.
Taking the train, they said, pointing to their huge suitcases and boxes of European goods, was
cheaper and easier than flying. Granitsa! (the border) shouted a cheery Russian returnee
called Vladimir, as the train drew up at Belarus customs.
Belarus, of course, is now an independent country, but for Vladimir it was part of the Soviet
Union of his childhood, and thus represented home. As if to confirm this, the train was
shunted into a siding and jacked up 6ft into the air so that oil-blackened mechanics could
disconnect every wheel-set and replace them. In the 19th century, when the tsars engineers
began the long process of connecting his dominion together by railway, they chose a broader
gauge than that used in Europe (which hindered the invading Nazi army during the second
world war). A similar process happens at the eastern end of this vast former empire, as the
railway line passes from Kazakhstan into China.
The Frankfurt train reached Moscow in the morning and we spent a day wandering through a
city slushy with snow. The train to Almaty left that night. At first, it passed through the forest
that stretches eastwards from Poland in an enormous frozen swath; but this soon gave way to
the awesome infinite expanse of the steppe. Everybody onboard was waiting for the moment

when we would cross the Volga River, a waterway as large as a sea and as significant to
Russians as the Channel is to the English. It wound across the vast landscape, shining in the
evening light, its banks dotted with fishing-boats and skiffs.
On the third day we reached the green rolling hills of Kazakhstan, where children on donkeys
raced their spindly beasts alongside the train. Snow-capped mountains appeared to the south,
shimmering their testimony to the approach of the South-Asian tectonic plate.
By the time we arrived in Almaty, on the fourth morning, we had travelled further east than
south. Having remained at a similar latitude, it was continuities rather than differences in
landscape and livelihoods that seemed most striking. Millennia-old herds of cattle, sheep and
horses roam the Eurasian landmass from the western tip of the British Isles to the eastern
seaboard of China. Wheat, rice and barley extend over an essentially continuous belt of
cultivated land. Willow trees pollarded for fuel line Kazakh homesteads, just as they do in
rural England. There is nothing like the train to Almaty for driving this biogeographical
lesson home.
After we journeyed on to Urumqi in north-west China, however, everything changed. The
plains gave way to desert, and from Urumqi we dipped south into the heart of Xinjiang, a
nomadic land of yurts and camels. This was far more foreign whatever Vladimir said than
the transition from Poland to Belarus.
More dramatic still, on a personal level at least, was the change in the quality of the transport.
Stepping from rusting Soviet rolling stock into a luxury 21st-century Chinese two-storey
mega-train was bliss: clean, comfortable, the restaurant car boasting a menu of 30 freshlymade local dishes. We arrived in the Silk Road city of Kashgar, the cultural centre for
Xinjiangs Uighur Muslims, happy and refreshed. Tristram, of course, fell upon the fried
chicken-feet and creamy yellow sheeps lung.
On the train you see the world go by before your eyes, and understand how cultures connect
and polities intersect. You glimpse something of the immense historical era that was Soviet
Communism. You spend days in the company of people unlike yourself, from villages and
towns you will never see.
In Kashgar, we met some cyclists who had just completed the same journey as us by
bicycle.
And I thought our journey was epic, I told them, humbled by their feat.
We saw a Frenchman in Kazakhstan, they replied. He was walking.
Alice Albinia is author of Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River