Laura Gozzi reflects on the beginning of her 10,000 km journey into the depths of Central Asia, on a third class train journey through the Kazakh desert…
Illustration by Mice Hell
Laura Gozzi
Staff Writer
I don’t think we fully realised what we were about to do until we stumbled into Moscow’s Kazansky Station, soaked after running across the huge Komsomolskaya Square on that rainy Saturday night in June. We were boarding a train which would take us all the way into the depths of Central Asia, across Kazakhstan and into Uzbekistan, where we would spend a week; from there, we would travel to Novosibirsk, in Siberia, and then to Lake Baikal, one of the biggest lakes in the world. In three weeks, we would cover almost 10,000km, cross five time zones, and – we were so sure of that – get killed or sold as slaves, or both. We’d joked about all this, of course, and we’d thought of what it would be like to spend three days on a third-class sleeper train with hundreds of Uzbek immigrants, and whether we’d catch some deadly disease that only exists in the remotest regions of Siberia. But it only started feeling real once I was standing under that board telling us that we had an hour till our train left to a region of the world that was known for being widely unknown.
The feeling I got at that moment was a bit like the feeling of being on top of a rollercoaster and looking down and suddenly remembering that I’m terrified of heights – terribly excited but also ridiculously scared. This was the trip I’d been dreaming of for so long that it didn’t feel like it could really be happening. We’d gone through so much, trying to organise it: inefficient embassies (the Uzbek one was full of hungover soldiers; to obtain a Kazakh visa, we had to wake up at 5am and sit outside the consulate for hours to beat the queues), warnings of mysterious illnesses waiting for us in the Uzbek deserts and the Siberian forests, tales of the magic madness that is a sleeping car. And as we stepped onto the train that night, we waved goodbye to our friends who had come to see us off at the station, undoubtedly sure that they would never see us again, and sat down in the carriage that was to become our home for three days and three nights we looked at each other and we laughed. It didn’t seem to make any sense that we were doing this.
An ex-Soviet sleeper train is structured in the following way. There are three classes – it never crossed our minds to get anything but third-class tickets, I think we were unconsciously trying to be adventurous – the lowest of which consists of a big dorm carriage with bunks arranged in blocks. (The lower bunks turn into tables and seats during the day.) While everyone tucks themselves in religiously every evening, as soon as the sun starts shining through the cheap nylon blinds, a great shuffling around beings, and the same noises you would hear at a big family gathering begin.
When we opened our eyes the next morning, we were in another world. It was like waking up in the middle of a busy, bustling market: there were men sitting on their beds drinking tea, women feeding their children, oriental music coming out of the carriage speakers; and all those people, who had presumably been going about their business until a moment before we sat up in our beds, stopped to look at us as soon as they realised we were awake. We examined them carefully, and so did they. We saw people with dark skin and bright clothes, young girls with golden teeth and beautiful black hair, and everywhere pots of tea and big, round flat breads. They, in turn, saw two Western-looking girls, in their big black band tshirts, rubbing their eyes and blinking, trying to take it all in. And everyone’s faces said: what are you doing here, this is third class, this is us Uzbeks going back to visit our families, are you sure you’re not on the wrong train? But we were very much sure of that, and so, a little slowly and nervously, we got out of our bunk beds, and began our life on the road.
We never figured out whether some of the people on that train actually knew each other, but considering the amount of chatting and laughing and paying visits to bunk neighbours and exchanging tea for mouldy biscuits, we figured that they’d either just found out that they were related (like they would in Ireland), or extremely friendly.
The four men sleeping in the bunk beds around ours, however, very much kept to themselves. One of them spent his days sitting on the top bunk, examining the surroundings in silence and occasionally, when the inspecting police came on at the borders, stuffing small packages inside his pillowcase. His travel companion was less alert: in fact, his eyes were almost always half-closed and bloodshot, and he had an uneasy expression permanently tattooed on his wrinkly, dark-skinned face. He may or may not have ingested a kilo of heroin to smuggle across Central Asia; we’ll never know, but we think it was a pretty good guess.
We didn’t see much of our other two travel companions, for they seemed to spend most of their time locked in an iron cupboard in the smoking bit at the end of the carriage, hidden in the dark with the light switches. When we asked why to a strange woman who claimed to be a doctor for the Russian freestyle team. “They don’t have travel documents or train tickets”, she said, puffing on her slim cigarette, “so they hide from the occasional police that comes on board”. Both men also got out of the train a couple of hours we got to our destination, Tashkent. The train stopped in the middle of nowhere, seemingly on their request, since no one else got off, and wandered off into the Kazakh desert.
Some of the many characters in the great tragicomedy that was our first train journey included a kind woman with two rows of golden teeth who ordered us to “drop by” (go sit on her bunk bed) and proceeded to show us two hundred photos of every single one of her family members who had ever come from Uzbekistan to visit her and her children in Russia. Her husband and the Kremlin, her brother and the Kremlin, her husband, her brother and the Kremlin. That went on for a while, and although our jaws were sore from all the “ooh”ing and “aah”ing and smiling, it felt strangely homely, to be sitting on a train in the middle of the night and having lots of children crowding up around us, pointing at their various class photos and dropping casual comments of baby racism – “that boy, he’s in my class, and he’s so patronising and always wants to decide everything and is so bossy. Such a Tadjik!”.
The cooks of the “restaurant” carriage were also quite something. The “restaurant” carriage itself, actually, was quite something. Both carriage and cooks were filthy but welcoming; we would go there and sit at a sticky table to take a break from the staring men and the Uzbek children who desperately wanted to teach us how to dance “like older girls do in Samarkand”. It was the only place with air conditioning, too, and we spent hours sipping cold beers, smoking cigarettes while looking at the vast plains of Central Asia, and eating whatever the cook had prepared that day – usually amazing, fattening Uzbek dishes of vegetables and spices and rice and lamb, accompanied by a few slices of bread that tasted like cardboard. We were almost always the only girls in the restaurant carriage; we would walk in in the evenings and have the few men in there raise their eyes from their glass of tea and look at us through a cloud of smoke. They all knew we were “the foreign girls” – the whole train did – but it only took them a couple of seconds to lose interest, and they all went back to watching the old Soviet soap-opera playing on the half-broken tv in the corner.
I wouldn’t be able to say whether the train was “fun”. I guess you could call it an appetizer for what came later; in many ways, I guess it prepared us for the madness of Central Asia. On our first day, we lifted the mattress of my bottom bunk and reached for our bags underneath it, and promptly shrieked as soon as we saw a little brown mouse running up and down our things. (This, and the fact that everyone around us burst out laughing, ensured that the whole train knew about us. “Ah, the two Western girls! They’re afraid of mice!”). On our second night, we were woken up at 4am by the Kazakh border military, and spent the next four hours in a surreal haze of sleepiness and terror – they’d told us that our documents weren’t in order, and that we’d have to be questioned by the police before being allowed into Kazakhstan. Of that night, I remember constantly falling asleep and being shouted at by the soldiers patrolling the carriage – “sit properly!” – and looking out of the window at the Kazakh desert; the moon was very low and almost red, and it flooded the flat plain with the oddest light I’ve ever seen. Everyone was awake, waiting for passport control, but the carriage was completely dark and silent, apart the sobs of a few tired children, and I’d never felt so far away from home, and it was scary, and it was horribly exciting. But there were more border checks and general inspections to come, and those, which were mainly carried through during the day, were less magical and more nerve-wrecking. The train would stop in a shabby, run-down Kazakh village, under the midday sun, and wouldn’t move for two, three, four hours; and in that time, we would sit as still as possible, trying not to think of the heat, doing our best to forget that we hadn’t showered in a long time – and, even worse, that the fat Uzbeks around us hadn’t, either. It was incredibly frustrating, having to wait that long just to be asked a few questions from the border police, who couldn’t get over the presence of two European girls on a third-class train to Uzbekistan. Why were we going there, what cities were we going to visit? Where are we going back to next? Are we carrying any drugs? Weapons? No, we’re not. Good, enjoy Uzbekistan, it’s a fantastic country. We never doubted it for a second, but during those endless controls, we did wonder more than once whether we’d ever get to see it.
We arrived in Tashkent over seventy hours after having left Moscow, on a warm summer evening. Just before getting there, the train had stopped for a few hours right outside the station, for reasons unknown. The entire carriage had decided to have a party to pass the time while waiting; Uzbek pop blasted out of a young man’s phone while a group of girls were dancing around the suitcases that had already been dragged out in the corridor. Their mothers were looking at them, laughing and clapping their hands in delight. Everyone was happy – they were practically home, what did it matter if they were a bit late! – and trying to drag us into the party, but by that point we were so wrecked that we wouldn’t have any of it. We’d been on that train for three days, and so much had happened since! So many people, so many incredible landscapes, so many kilometres and hours to get where we finally were, and where our journey through the continent would begin. We eventually stumbled out of the train exactly like we’d trudged on it a million hours earlier, in Moscow. We breathed in the heat of the desert, listened to the dry sounds of the Uzbek language, watched all those large women we’d shared a carriage and numerous cups of tea with running into their husbands’ arms. We stretched our legs, took a deep breath, and, slowly but surely, we started making our way into the wonderful, mysterious, and completely unpredictable country that is Uzbekistan – not even coming close to imagining half of the things that would happen to us in the following weeks, but already knowing – feeling – that it would all be absolutely unforgettable.
