I took a solo railway trip across the largest landlocked country in the world

It’s 90˚F (32˚C) as I drag my mud-crusted suitcase across the uneven pavement. In this heated state, it’s hard for me to admire the Soviet grandeur of the golden statues or gray polished Corinthian columns of the train station in front of me right now. My Yandex Go—the Russian equivalent of Uber—skidded off in the dust before we reached the ‘official’ taxi rank outside the Almaty-2 station, and my bag is heavy.

I’m here to take the train from Almaty, Kazakhstan’s former capital in the south, to Oskemen (Ust-Kamenogorsk) in the east. It’s a 26-hour journey to the edge of the Russian, Mongolian and Chinese borderlands and, as several Kazakhs have pointed out to me, a lot longer than the hour-and-a-half flight.

Reactions to my plan have varied. “You lose time,” Dinara Issabekova, a media consultant who I met camping in the Altai Mountains, told me. “Sometimes the ticket costs the same, or even more.” Another Kazakh said she refused to take the train altogether; the shaking made her nauseous.

But others are nostalgic. Dinara Beisenbayeva (Dinara is a popular name here) described it as a ritual. “As children, we traveled a lot with our parents. They made it feel like a fairytale,” she said as we ate a plate of greasy, charred shashlik (traditional kebabs from the Caucasus region) with our fingers. “We eat boiled eggs and drink tea, and I always sleep well because of the way the train shakes.”

In Kazakhstan, trains aren’t just a mode of transport: Their rails criss-cross its some one million square miles (2.7 million square kilometers) of steppes, deserts and mountains. Of its 9,940 miles (16,000 kilometers) of railway, I am about to travel 2,485 of them. But these rails run through more than just the land—their story also cuts through dark chapters of colonialism and catastrophe.

I walk beneath the gilded chandeliers of the station’s departures hall towards the enormous waiting room, where I collapse, sweating onto a row of plastic chairs.

Around me, passengers chatter and scroll on their phones; children cry; others make last-minute dashes to the tiny shop for lamb-stuffed manti and fried discs of baursak, a pillowy fried dough snack. The walls around us are wrapped in a mosaic of saturated reds and blues depicting folkloric and civic Kazakh figures. It’s pure 80s Soviet aesthetic.

I climb aboard the platzkart-class carriage: This budget-friendly, third-class carriage is effectively a giant dormitory on wheels that will be my home for the next night and day.

The delectable visuals are a result of Kazakhstan’s long, ‘It’s complicated’ relationship with Russia. After centuries of expansion into its territory, Kazakhstan was absorbed into its northern neighbor’s empire in the 19th century, before becoming part of the USSR following the Bolshevik Revolution. Today, Russian is still the most spoken language here, followed closely by Kazakh. English is not. For me, that means wherever I go in the country, I need to schedule extra time to figure things out.

As predicted, figuring out which platform to catch my train from is not a seamless process. I wander up and down. I try to bargain for three apples from a five-kilo bucket for a few proffered tenges. It’s rejected—communal food for large groups is the way here.

Unsurprisingly, a gold-toothed porter quickly picks up on the fact that I’m not from around here, and, after I stutter a few words of Russian, kindly points me towards my train.

There’s no path or bridge. I clamber over the tracks before showing my ticket and Australian passport to the conductors, who delightedly mimic a kangaroo, which makes me giggle. For me, it’s the first of many marsupial performances. For many of them, it’s the first time they’ve met an Australian.

I climb aboard the platzkart-class carriage: This budget-friendly, third-class carriage is effectively a giant dormitory on wheels that will be my home for the next night and day. Its corridor is made up of a series of bunk beds, stacked two high: Clumps of four on the left with communal tables in between, perfect for sharing those enormous buckets of fruit I missed out on.

I’m staying on a bottom bunk with window access. (I later learn this would also give running children access to me). No matter which bed they choose, everyone shares the space.

It’s this characteristic, along with communal samovars (traditional metal urns filled with boiling water to make tea which originated in 18th-century Russia) and occasional bursts of Russian, (a language I heard more of on the newer, more expensive trains), that reminds me that ‘slow’ trains like this were built under Soviet rule.

I’d decided against booking a bed in the smaller cabins, known as ‘kupes’. It might have been more physically comfortable, but the idea of paying for a space only to awkwardly sleep alone with a stranger—or worse, a creep who could lock the door—did not appeal.

An old man across from me is pulling out an enormous metal teapot to fill at the samovar … Meanwhile, my coffee bag has burst and solidified like frozen treacle across the lining of my backpack. My collection of dried noodle cups is also looking ultra-tragic.

I begin to unpack. I have a clean, silky scarf to drape over my squishy neck pillow, freeze-dried coffee, a diary of which I have a zero percent chance of writing in, and toilet paper. Best of all, I’d picked up a mini electric fan in Almaty’s Green Bazaar. Sure, I could only get one shaped like a Labubu, but the grinning gremlin would keep a steady stream of air on my face.

It wasn’t long before my trusted scarf was put to the side. Some 10 minutes into the journey, fellow passengers begin pulling giant blue cloth bags from the racks above, in which are rolled-up mattresses, pillows and sheets. Having been handed one by a conductor who seems to smile at my confused face, I’m initially impressed at how clean and starched the sheets feel, until I find a worrisome brown smudge on them. But then I realize that I’ve already dropped my melted chocolate biscuits onto it.

As we leave the orchards and peaks of Almaty behind, I begin to settle, pulling out my book. The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years is one of Central Asia’s most revered novels; a strange, hypnotic blend of sci-fi, history and Central Asian folklore.

It follows Kazakh railworkers on the steppes in the years after the Second World War. As we pull out onto the grasslands, I read how the main character of Burranyi Yedigei sets out to bury his friend in the desert; as he rides his camel, he recalls the disappearances of those who were dubbed ‘wealthy kulaks’ (relatively prosperous peasants) during the Stalinist purges in the aftermath of the disastrous push towards collectivization, the attempt to forcibly consolidate individual farms into state-controlled farms, between 1929 and 1933.

Later, in a museum thousands of miles away, I’ll learn that this campaign is now thought to have cost almost 40 percent of Kazakhstan’s population their lives through famine and executions for those who did not comply. It was also the USSR that sanctioned the vast construction of the Turkestan–Siberian railway that cuts through this country. But for tonight, I can’t keep reading. My head begins to nod in time with the carriage.

I wake around midnight. My sock-clad foot is being gently pushed away from where it migrated towards my neighbor’s nose, while a newly walking, nappy-clad baby struts up and down the aisle, shrieking intermittently to make sure no-one misses his gains, cutting through the decent chorus of snores like a particularly annoying turntable scratch. My MVPs are my earplugs and the Labubu, which loyally whirs beside my face all night.

I wake around 10am the next morning. The crosswords are back out, and the tables across the gangway are folded down. Three women have spread out a feast of apples, chocolates from Kazakhstan’s beloved Rakhat candy factory) and hard kurt cheese—a salty snack made from horse, sheep or camel milk, born of Central Asia’s nomadic tradition of fermenting food for long journeys.

An old man across from me is pulling out an enormous metal teapot to fill at the samovar, and everyone seems to have brought their own tea bags and cups. Meanwhile, my coffee bag has burst and solidified like frozen treacle across the lining of my backpack. My collection of dried noodle cups is also looking ultra-tragic.

But soon, women in colorful bandanas with blue bags swinging off their arms jump on board. Seemingly unbothered by the handles digging into their forearms, they begin selling blinis stuffed with curdled cheese and fresh rounds of baursak.

With nothing else happening, I open ‘The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years’, and start again at the stanza that opens each of its chapters.

Passing me by after enquiring looks (like the Almaty apple sellers, they only sell in bulk), I get off at one of our platform breaks and buy one or two snacks, hoping the train won’t leave without me. I try to keep my crumbs to a minimum, but cleaners roll through every few hours—my toilet paper, an essential on European trains, remains unused.

For most of the rest of the journey, I’m left to myself. I’d read tales online of flasks of vodka proffered by friendly Kazakhs, and had indulged in visions of merrymaking with them. But I’d since found out that alcohol was now banned—probably because of said merrymaking.

Instead, a few nods and smiles aside, a shared tea or two among neighbors, travelers seem to keep to themselves. So I lie back, watching the dry lands and the occasional small town go past. One time, I spot what I’d hope is an endangered steppe eagle, swooping down onto a tiny graveyard by the tracks. Another, some purpling clouds have me worried about rain.

We’re almost at Oskemen when I see a group of horses—not an uncommon sight in a country where many people own (and eat) domesticated horses. Locals tell me they leave them to run free, spending their days among the yellow scrub and dry riverbeds. These ones are in a circle. To me, it seems like they are dancing in delight around one in the middle, taking turns to nuzzle its neck, tails flicking like mad. It’s over in a matter of seconds, 15 at the most, before they disappear from my sight, and the steppes continue as if nothing had happened at all. I feel that, had I not seen them, the moment might never have existed.

With nothing else happening, I open The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, and start again at the stanza that opens each of its chapters:

“Trains in these parts went from East to West, and from West to East…
On either side of the railway lines lay the great wide spaces of the desert—Sary-Ozeki, the Middle lands of the yellow steppes.
In these parts any distance was measured in relation to the railway, as if from the Greenwich meridian.
And the trains went from East to West, and from West to East…”

And outside my window, the steppes keep going.

****

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