Altyn-Emel National Park

A golden eagle rose over the dusty plains as we rattled our way towards the Aktau mountains, following Genghis Khan’s path to that most sacred of locations: a decent lunch spot. He was on his way to invade China, and we are merely plundering the tiny ‘magazins’ of every one-horse town in southwest Kazakhstan for something, anything, to eat.

Fortunately the locals make a round flatbread (khleb), a hard cheese (syr), and they love pickles. We ate a breakfast of gherkins, flatbread and cheese in the shade of a 700-year-old willow tree mangled by radiation poisoning. Felt pretty Soviet.

On arrival in Basshi (or Kalinino as the Soviets renamed it), we were met by... no-one. This is a town of 1,000 souls, on the edge of the Altyn-Emel National Park, only 120kms from the border with China. After waiting an hour outside what we hoped was our homestay, a gnarled elderly lady appeared and began a three-day campaign of shouting cheerfully at us in a mix of Kazakh and Russian. ‘Mama’ as this esteemed personage insisted we call her, gave us apricot jam, fed us bread, and berated us to eat it by saying "NYAM NYAM"—we will love her forever.

We have a rental 4x4, named ‘Nash Mash’—short for ‘nasha mashina’, meaning ‘our car’ in Russian. Somewhat worryingly, Nash Mash doesn’t always start on the first try, but we persevere. We put her through her paces driving out to the Singing Dunes, 5,000-year-old sand hills which emit a sonic boom when the sand shifts. Dan hiked to the peak and ran back down, while Chelsea investigated the local wildlife.

There were a handful of other tourists here, but mostly our only friends were just lizards, hares, beetles, birds, domestic cows and donkeys, occasional gazelle in the distance, and (rogue) loads of huge eagles. They're everywhere, just sitting blithely at the side of the road.

Nash Mash was further punished on the second day as we drove on thoroughly rutted dirt roads to the rainbow mountains of Aktau and the volcanic sea floor rock formations of Katutau. Because of our Chinese visa shenanigans we never managed to get to the rainbow mountains in Zhangye, China. But these are striped mountains very much in the manner of rainbows, and unlike China, we had them all to ourselves. So we feel like this was a big win.

Back in Basshi, we went past the only marked shop on the map, and discovered the owner is a man who probably remembers the Romanovs, only sells alcohol, and calculated the bill using an abacus. Time travel is real!

We are so excited to be in such isolated landscapes, often the only people for kilometres. Now and then you might see a man on a horse shepherding cows, or a man on a cow shepherding horses, or a cow on a horse shepherding men, but that's Kazakhstan. Just the way we like it.Baca lagi