The Mongol Rally:
Crossing the Endless Steppe
What is the steppe?
Steppe: a large area of flat, unforested grassland.
A Kazakh burial ground on the steppe
The Eurasian steppe stretches from Eastern Europe, in a band across Central Asia, to Manchuria on the Pacific coast. It covers many countries in this region and has historically been home to a host of nomadic peoples and their herds. These people roamed the grasslands, intermittently invading the adjacent settled areas over the centuries, laying waste to civilisations and creating new ones.
Kazakhstan’s empty steppe
Sadly, for Kazakhstan, that excitement has now passed. Forced by Stalin to give up their nomadic ways and move to collective farms, in a process dubbed denomadisation, the Kazakhs now live a settled life. As a result, the Kazakh steppe is an empty land of grass, interspersed by occasional end-of-the-world wooden-house settlements. These appear more dead than alive, the life slowly leaching out of them, their people drifting towards the cities instead.
Exploring Almaty before hitting the steppe
Kazakhstan is vast (the size of Western Europe), and we started our journey from the attractively European city of Almaty, a short (for Kazakhstan) four-hour drive from the Kyrgyz border. With time to kill before our Russian visas became active, we decided to stay two nights in Almaty. There’s not much else of interest until well into Russia, a four-day drive to the north.
Having a great time in Almaty
Almaty is pleasant. It’s built in a European style, and the wide tree-lined boulevards have a certain elegance and sophistication we hadn’t experienced for some time. It’s pleasant but not terribly interesting. With few sights to speak of, we spent half the day in our hostel and the other half seeing what sights there were.
After ogling the few recent monuments around the presidential palace, we made a beeline for the Arasan Baths. The baths were built during Soviet rule, and the imposing facade conceals an elaborate melange of Turkish steam rooms, Moroccan hammams, Finnish and Russian saunas, galleries of showers and a cold water pool for when the heat gets too much.
Almaty architecture
Into the steppe
If Almaty was pleasant but not terribly interesting, the rest of Kazakhstan followed in the same vein. As we struck out north of the city and into the steppe, we trundled through gently rolling dry grasslands for hour after hour, day after day.
The only breaks in this monotony were the occasional half-derelict wooden village, a small stream, the occasional cluster of trees, and maybe even some hills in the distance. Once or twice, a few snow-capped peaks peered over from the East. But mostly, it was grass.
We spent three days in this manner, the road gradually deteriorating as we moved further from Almaty, improving again as we neared the Russian frontier. We passed occasional agricultural zones with sunflowers and wheat, wild camping down the tracks that take workers to the fields. One evening, we stumbled across a roadside lake, rare blue amongst the endless greens and browns of the grasslands, and camped by its shore.
Camping on the steppe
The steppe makes you crazy
Someone has to do it, washing up on the steppe
Kazakhstan’s steppe was used for Soviet nuclear testing
As time wore on, we began to appreciate beauty where once we had seen none, even commenting on the varieties of grass and their merits, a sure sign it was time to leave. Passing by the town of Semey, close to the main Soviet nuclear testing site, we stopped by the memorial to its victims. Many local people live with the consequences of the secret atomic testing to this day, and it was a poignant reminder of this.
Semey Nuclear Memorial
A short distance north of Semey, the beginnings of a forest heralded the approach of the Russian border. At the point where the steppe morphed into Siberian forest, we crossed into Russia, happy to be approaching the final stage of our Mongol Rally adventure.
This Leg
Days: 5
Countries: 1
Distance: 939 miles
Time in car: 1 Day 4 Hours 30 Minutes
Total
Days: 41
Countries: 23
Distance: 8,533 miles
Time in car: 10 days 10 hours