THE LAND OF NOMADS

A select group of TTPers will be joining Rebel and me this coming May for our third exploration of one of this world’s most spectacular and fascinating yet mysterious and unknown regions – all “Five Stans” of Western Turkestan.

Here we will find the ancient cities of the Silk Road still in all their splendor, and one of the glitziest cities you’ll ever see built yesterday in the middle of nowhere. Here we will find the Mountains of Heaven, the Door of Hell, and the Seven Pearls of Shing.

The entire region was progressively incorporated by military force in the 19^th century into Imperial Russia.  When Lenin’s Bolsheviks replaced the colonial empire of Imperial Russia with the colonial empire of Soviet Russia, all five stans desperately tried to break free. All were crushed in a slaughter of Communist Red Terror, and reincorporated into the Soviet Empire (the Soviet “Union.”)

For seventy years, Moscow kept one of humanity’s most glamorous and historical regions hidden from the world, reducing it to a forgotten and impoverished backwater.  With the thankful death of the USSR in 1991, all five stans were quick to declare their independence.

It has been a long and haltingly-trodden road ever since to their political, social, and economic recovery.  Nonetheless… I was first able to travel through the region in 1963 – 57 years ago at age 19 – and the differences between then and today are staggeringly exciting.

To personally encounter that excitement is one of the most profound travel experiences our planet has to offer – for there really is no place like it, historically, naturally, culturally, on earth.

This is the first of a series of introductions for you to each of the Five Stans.  We begin with Kazakhstan —  the Land of Nomads.

Kazakhstan is enormous, the 9^th largest country on earth, a little over one million square miles.  If placed over Europe, it would stretch from the Atlantic coast of France to Ukraine’s border with Russia, from the beaches of Normandy to Istanbul:

Yet only 18 million people live here – a few bit more than Malawi in Africa, fewer people than Chile, and 3 million less than Florida.

That’s because so much of the country is uninhabitable – the vast Kyzyl Kum (Red Sand) Desert, and even vaster dry wasteland called the Kazakh Steppe.

This is a land for nomads – and indeed, qazakh is ancient Turkic for “wanderer” or nomad.  Since “stan” means “land” in Persian, Kazakhstan literally means “Land of Nomads.”

It was here that a group of Proto-Indo-Europeans migrated from their homeland (the Pontic-Caspian Steppe), whom paleo-anthropologists call the Botai nomads.  In the area north of present-day Astana (see map above) around 3500 BC, they were the first people to domesticate the horse.

Three millennia later, over 500 years ago, Turkic nomads combined with the descendants of Genghiz Khan’s Mongols to form the Kazakh Khanate (1465-1847).  By the middle of the 1800s, it was conquered by and absorbed into the expanding Russian Empire.  By 1900, over one-and-a-half million Russians, Slavs, Germans, and Jews had settled into what is now northern Kazakhstan.

During the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Kazakhs tried to break free of Moscow’s rule – but were quickly and brutally reconquered by Lenin’s Bolshevik Communists, who recreated the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union.  The Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic was formalized in 1936 with the provincial capital at Alma Ata.

At the time of the Soviet collapse in 1991, it was run by Nursultan Nazarbayev – and he’s run Kazakhstan ever since.  So surprisingly well in fact, that he’s probably the best example in the world today of a “benign dictator.”

Shortly after independence, Nazarbayev changed the name of Alma Ata to Almaty, and decided to build a new capital.  Almaty was far to the east, he wanted something more central.  So right in the middle of nowhere, he constructs Astana – “capital city” in Kazakh.  And when you see it, you won’t believe your eyes.

Everything has been built in the last 20 years with money no object – for this country with a population smaller than Romania has gigantic natural resources – oil, natural gas, coal, iron, gold, copper, uranium, chromium, on and on.

Thus the most extraordinary sight to see in this giant country is its 20 year-old capital – so that’s what we do in our first Stan.  Oh, by the way – Astana has now been renamed in honor of its first and only president.  It’s now called Nursultan. Whatever you call it, you won’t believe your eyes:

The architecture is stunning – this in the middle of a vast nomad wilderness:

Yet while it’s business during the day, it’s fun at night with an overload of bars, nightclubs, and restaurants of every variety.  The Kazakhs know how to have a good time – and so will we.

It’s a different world when we get to Almaty.  Here we have shish-kebab barbeque picnics among the snow-blanketed peaks of the Tien Shan – the Mountains of Heaven – and learn how the Kazakhs hunt with eagles.

This is only the start of our exploring the Five Hidden Stans of Western Turkestan.  There are four more to go.  In just three weeks – May 16 to June 4 – you can explore them all with your fellow TTPers.

For now, you’ve had a glimpse of what we experience in the Land on Nomads.  If you want to experience this and all Five Stans of Western Turkestan yourself  – what we call Hidden Central Asia – then click right here and I’ll send you all the details.

And before you know it, I’ll be seeing your smiling face soon in Astana – that is, Nursultan.  Get ready for an absolutely life-memorably exciting experience.

Jack