KAZAKHSTAN!

Derka Derka from Kazakhstan! If you'd have asked me a week ago to name this country's largest city I'd have been at a total loss, but today I write from Almaty, Kazakhstan. Work brings me here to participate in a roundtable at an industry conference. My first visit to a country ending in “-stan.”

If Borat is your only cultural reference of what this country is like, cast it aside because it is anything but accurate. I’ve seen no peasants, pitchforks or horse drawn carriages but I have seen my fair share of modern glass skyscrapers, well heeled citizens and high-end luxury goods. Oil drives the economy, and post-Soviet privatization has left some extremely wealthy people here. As a result, Almaty is by far the most expensive city I’ve ever visited in my life, more than London, Tokyo or Moscow. Granted, the Hyatt Regency is not the best lens thru which to judge -- the small tin of Pringles in my hotel mini bar costs $14 and the Gillette Sensor razor in the sundry shop downstairs is $38 – but this place ought only be visited on an expense account. The cost of living here leads you to believe puddles of oil bubble to the surface throughout the countryside.

Chalk it up to my ignorance to all things Kazakhstan, but I’d feared a white knuckle experience on KZ’s national airline (Air Astana), perhaps a bumpy ride on an old Soviet Tupolev cargo plane with rusty props. But I was pleasantly surprised by leather seats, spacious leg room, tasty food and when you order a beer they hand you a full 24oz can of the local brew called Tian Shan. Very niiiice. The flight path brought us over the Gobi Desert on the way, which might as well have been Mars given the red sand and utter emptiness.
After flying over northern China where power plants are so plentiful you’d think they were the national flower, the Gobi showed nothing for hours on end, just miles and miles of sand. The return flight over the Himalayas into Indian airspace held great promise but cloud cover proved a buzzkill. Everest will have to wait.

The other funny thing about the flight was that I shared it with the entire Kazakhstan Olympic wrestling team. The team ranged in size from puny to gargantuan, and all shared the same set of cauliflower ears. I had a brief feeling of concern that the flight would be a sequel to the film "Alive" where the rugby team crashes in the Andes and is forced into cannibalism prior to being rescued. Flying with sports team always gives me that flash thought. I can't help it, despite the amount I fly I'm still constantly inside my own head about the dangers. But I rationalized that the danger of crashing was balanced by the protection the wrestlers would provide were we were hijacked. I'll be rooting for them come August.

The ethnic Kazakhstani people are strikingly attractive people. You hear about these supermodels who are plucked from obscurity in far flung places by talent scouts - they ought to take a look in KZ. I saw some of the most uniquely beautiful people of any country I've visited. My driver Nurzhan should have been on the runway opening the new season for Ralph Lauren, not steering me around the city. The guy barely spoke a word of English yet listened to American hip-hop music nonstop, totally and blissfully unaware of how foul the lyrics were. He drove a tinted Mercedes and was flagged down by police 3 times in the 2 days he drove me because his window tint was deemed too dark by the arresting officer. All three times a small palm greasing of the officer sent us on our way. Baksheesh still speaks loudest. Emerging market yet still corrupt.

I was stuck in traffic behind this bus and had fun playing peek-a-boo with this little girl in the window for a good 5 minutes. She would giggle and disappear from view and then pop her head up. I must have taken 10 pictures and only caught her on camera in this one. Very cute.

Just outside town is a spectacular mountain range that will play host to the 2012 Asian Olympics. There is an Olympic caliber outdoor speed skating loop that saw its glory days in the Soviet era when altitude-enhanced world records were frequently broken and rebroken. The fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of indoor skating arenas have left the stadium with an effortlessly retro-chic look. Didn’t bother the locals though who were there in droves. We also visited a beautiful onion-domed Orthodox church and monuments to WW1 and WW2, or as the Kazaks call it “The Great Patriotic War,” where they lost 1 million people beating back Hitler’s invasion of Russia.


Continuing on the Olympic theme of my trip, in another week the Olympic torch will be jogged thru the same mountain pass I visited, no doubt followed by Tibet related protests. But Kazakh police seem to take their jobs quite seriously and are not long on sense of humor.…..i wouldn’t want to mess with them so maybe the protesters will sit this leg out.
Work crews were fast at work in preparation, painting Olympic murals and touching up guard rails along the road. By "work crew" I of course mean one guy with a paint brush and ten guys standing around watching him paint. Hey, the government's paying.

KZ was eye opener to say the least. Far from Borat, far more developed than I'd anticipated, but still far from my view of normal.