UPDATED July 8, 2016

BY Henry Gold

IN Company, Silk Route

no comments

UPDATED July 8, 2016

BY Henry Gold

IN Company, Silk Route

no comments

Looking For The Soul Of The City

I have arrived in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Now, if you do not know where Almaty is or even where Kazakhstan is, and need to look it up on Google Maps I would not be surprised. After all, it is not like Kazakhstan is either a superpower or has a civil war or indeed, any world-renowned point of interest. Kazakhstan does, however, have Borat and his character has been busy making the world aware of this exciting and wonderful place.

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Since some people might claim that Borat has been known to seek publicity rather than objective reporting, I will tell you that Kazakhstan is a very large country, the biggest of the former republics that went independent when Soviet Union dissolved. Though the country is vast, it only has 16 million people. It is also a country that has turned out to be rich in natural resources such as minerals and oil.

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Almaty, according to my guidebook, is the largest and the most cosmopolitan city in the country, if not the region. I am here not because I want to add to the cosmopolitan mix of Kazakhs (not to be mixed up with Kozaks of western Russia), Ethnic Russians, Ethnic Germans, Ukrainians, Koreans, Uzbeks, Western businessmen trying very hard to get a piece of the riches in the ground and a smattering of tourists. I am here simply to join our intrepid group of cyclists who have been cycling the Silk Route from Beijing to Istanbul.

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After crossing Mongolia and Russia – in sand, wind and rain storms – the cyclists have arrived here to briefly rest, before stepping back into the saddle and continuing on to Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Iran and Turkey. And, as I always like to do when I come to a new city, I walk the streets left and right, forward and backward, trying to get a sense and the beat of the place. To begin with, the most charming aspect of the city is the “wall” of peaks some reaching over 4,000 meters high that are either behind you or before you depending where you facing. Even now when I am looking out of the window of my hotel room, I see that some of the peaks are snow capped.

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Unfortunately Almaty has no charming ‘old city’ as every building but one was destroyed in an 1887 earthquake. Ever since then the politicians running the city have been building ‘monuments’, to themselves, to their political goals or to the prevailing urban planning approaches. What that means in practice, for example, is that the city has a grid of wide boulevards designed for fast moving vehicles of which there are plenty moving at high speeds. With limited possibilities of crossing the streets available only at the end of each long block, this design ensures that there is no intimacy nor sense of community. Almaty does not have a real downtown. It is filled up with huge, should I say at times monstrous, concrete buildings from the former Soviet era, to which now have been added even bigger glass-sided high-rise office buildings, hotels and condos befitting a country living off its oil and mineral wealth.

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When one walks one block after another looking for the soul of this city, one is left with really only two options; to enjoy the large variety of lovely parks and greenery or to inhabit the even larger variety of cafes on which the cosmopolitan denizens of this city, chain smoke and discuss the most important events of the day.

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So as one advertisement I saw when I walked the streets (no, not the one where a human being turns into a drunk pig) put it  – ‘Almaty – a comfortable place to live and do business in’. Comfortable it may be, especially if you are sitting in a big SUV stuck in the daily traffic, but if you are looking for ‘soul’ you are much better off listening to some James Brown.

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