3.6. Chess game in park, Bishkek
5.1. Traditional Russian house, Karakol
5.2. Russian Orthodox cathedral, Karakol
5.3. Chinese Dungan mosque, Karakol
5.4. Bus shelter near Karakol
5.5. On the road to Osh—with Jorobev outside truck stop
5.6. Kyrgyz man on horseback, Osh Harvest Festival
5.7. Kyrgyz herders, Osh Harvest Festival
5.8. Competitors in Ulak Tartyshy, Osh Harvest Festival
5.9. Competitors in Ulak Tartyshy, Osh Harvest Festival
5.10. Competitors in Ulak Tartyshy, Osh Harvest Festival
6.1. Mels Yeleusizov, the “can’t win candidate” in Kazakhstan’s 2011 presidential election
7.1. Lenin’s commercial arm
7.2. Pastor Gennadiy Khonin and Aleksandr Riel outside Lutheran church in Turksib district, Almaty
8.1. Bayterek monument, Astana
8.2. Palace of Peace and Accord, Astana
8.3. Ak Orda presidential palace, Astana
8.4. Nur Astana Mosque, Astana
8.5. Khan Shatyr, Astana
9.1. Trudarmiya survivor Maria Litke in Karaganda
9.2. Temirtau, city of metallurgy
9.3. Tonya Golubsova at her dacha
10.1. Traditional Russian house, Semey
10.2. Traditional Russian house, Semey
10.3. Dostoyevsky Museum, Semey
11.1. Viktor Simanenko knows his vegetables
Maps
2.1. Kyrgyzstan and Fergana Valley
2.2. Russian conquest of Central Asia
5.1. From Bishkek to Issyk Kul and Karakol
5.2. From Bishkek to Osh
6.1. Kazakhstan
6.2. My Almaty
8.1. My Astana
10.1. Northeastern Kazakhstan and Polygon
11.1. Western Kazakhstan and oil fields
Preface
I wrote my first travel journal at the age of nine. It had a circulation of precisely three—my father, mother, and sister. I’m not sure they actually read it, although they encouraged me to keep writing. It was run-of-the-mill stuff, a prosaic accounting of towns and sights visited, meals eaten, weather, and beach conditions—the predictable literary output of a nine-year-old. However, I would not have written anything, or asked my father to have my notes typed (with carbon copies), if I had not had the opportunity to travel.
In Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, most middle-class families took a summer vacation at the seaside, hoping the sun would peep through the clouds. Usually it did not. I have memories of cold, rain-swept South Coast resorts, with families huddled in their cars, the parents drinking tea from a thermos and reading the tabloids, glancing occasionally at the grey skies and the cold waves crashing on the stony beach. The children fidgeted and fought in the back of the car. There were no handheld gadgets to distract them; after they got bored with their toys, there wasn’t much else to do but start destroying the upholstery or tormenting the family dog, if it was unlucky enough to be on the trip. Occasionally, a parent would say: “Children, we’re at the seaside. Aren’t we all having a lovely time?” No one was, but no one wanted to admit it. On rare sunny days, the kids could play on the beach, perhaps even finding a patch of sand, but most days it was too cold to swim; the main seaside attractions were the funfairs on the piers.
Most years my parents headed for France or Spain, where the weather was predictably better. We strapped the family tent—a heavy, complicated canvas affair with many poles, pegs, and guy ropes, which looked as if it had been salvaged from a M*A*S*H unit—onto the roof rack of the Vauxhall Velox, and set off for Dover to take the ferry across the English Channel to Calais or Boulogne. We drove south, buying baguettes, butter, cheese, and tomatoes for picnic lunches and camping every night, my parents enjoying a bottle of vin ordinaire over dinner. I sat in the backseat, noting the kilometer posts, the terrain, and the historic landmarks, and taking notes. “Rouen,” I earnestly remarked, “has a large cathedral.” I helped navigate, a serious responsibility in the days before France built its equivalent of a motorway or interstate highway system. I was fascinated by the road maps and the names of towns, villages, and rivers, and I loved to plot our route. Often I enjoyed the trip—reading maps, getting lost, and asking for directions in shockingly bad schoolboy French—more than the destination.
I made my first solo trip at the age of seventeen, spending three months at student work camps in France, hitchhiking across the country and religiously writing postcards home. Unlike the typical “Weather lovely, wine cheap, pate de foie gras gave me indigestion, wish you were here” greeting, my postcards were crammed with details of my observations, now more insightful than “Rouen has a large cathedral.” I bought cards with the largest possible writing space, and usually managed to cram more than one hundred words into the left-hand side. Over the next decade, traveling with my then-wife, Claire, through France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, Turkey, and Morocco, I wrote many more postcards. Looking back, I wish I had sent some to myself because they were the only records of our trips to Fez and Marrakech (where I picked up both a full-length Berber djellabah and head lice) or of lingering too long on a Greek island, missing the bus at Thessaloniki and having to hitchhike the 1,250 miles back to Ostend on the Channel.
In the early 1970s, I worked as a newspaper reporter for the Evening Post, a large-circulation daily in Leeds, the main industrial and commercial center in West Yorkshire. My work travel was largely confined to mining and textile towns, with two trips to Northern Ireland, not exactly a tourist destination in the 1970s. I wanted to write about what I’d seen in Southern Europe, but my editor wasn’t interested. People didn’t want to read about the Basque Country or the Bosphorus, he said. Perhaps I could write about bed-and-breakfasts in Scarborough or renting a cottage at Skegness? Neither was on my holiday list, so my dream of being a travel writer was stymied. In 1978, I moved to the United States for graduate school, and in 1980 took a faculty position at Ohio University. It would be another fifteen years, after my first trip to Central Asia in 1995, before I started travel writing again.
When I did, I had more to say about cathedrals or mining towns or railroads or architecture or just about everything I saw about me. Credit goes to my teacher, mentor, and friend Hubert Wilhelm who taught cultural and historical geography at Ohio University for thirty-five years. His courses and our later collaboration on three video documentaries on the settlement of Ohio taught me to ask questions about the landscape. Who settled the land, where did they come from, and why? Why were houses and barns built in distinctive styles? Why was the