So Peace Corps had us practice getting around the country on our own. We self-selected/split into groups of four, and each group was randomly assigned a city in southern Kazakhstan. PC gave us money for transportation, lodging, and incidentals, and sent us off with no escorts and a list of tasks to accomplish. To help us become independent! My group drew a smallish town called Merke, about an 8-9 hour bus ride from Kapchagai. Our adventure started right away.
We decided to leave at night, so we could avoid traveling in
the heat of the day and maybe sleep on the (scary, non-air-conditioned) bus.
Well, I was having problems sleeping, and at about 2-3 in the morning, as our
bus was trucking down the road, the front door comes flying open—the wind
catches it and is pulling the bus so that we’re CAREENING back and forth across
the highway because the bus driver is not clever enough to let up on the gas.
So the “co bus driver” is clawing for the door when I suddenly see the
headlights of a large truck bearing down on us from the other lane – well,
actually, I shouldn’t say OTHER lane, coz our bus driver was making use of both
lanes. Finally, Einstein discovers that if he lets up on the gas, the bus will
actually slow down so the other dude can get the door closed. At this point, a
couple of other trainees from another group going to a town near ours wake up
and are all like, “What? What?” And I turn around and screech, “We were almost
killed! We were almost killed!” But we continue on our merry way.
The way the highway goes, we have to go through the northern
part of Krgyzstan and make a stop in their capital, Bishkek. So we stop there
about 4-5 a.m., and a Kirghiz militia guy gets on to do a random passport check
– and of course he heads straight for the group of Americans. This wouldn’t be so
bad except that Leo (from the other group) realizes he’s forgotten both his
passport AND kartochka. So while the Kirghiz cop is checking Michael &
Peter’s documents, Leo starts blubbering “Korpus Meera! Korpus Meera!” which is
Russian for Peace Corps – as if that is going to prevent the lot of us from
being hauled off to a police station to be beaten and robbed (standard procedure for
former Soviet countries if you give them half a chance – at least according to
our always scary safety & security lectures – even in Krgyzstan, the most
“Democratic” of the former states/stans). Anyway, “luckily,” gunfire
outside the bus forces the Kirghiz militia guy to dash off the bus and we’re able to
continue on our journey. That’s the good news. The bad news is we thus made it
safely to Merke.
You know how the streets sound after/during the rain? When cars are driving on them? That’s what they sounded like in Merke, but we couldn’t figure out why, coz it CERTAINLY wasn’t raining – it was horribly hot. Well, the reason for the noise was coz the tar on the streets was melting! Jenny had a shoe get stuck in it while trying to take a picture. It was between 115 - 120 degrees the whole time we were there. Our “hotel” had only one toilet and it was out of order. One shower stall and it was only cold water and it sprayed UP and not down. And of curse no A/C. We took a bus to the nearby mountains for a little diversion, but when we got out and asked the driver when the last bus back to town was, he said HIS was, due to “shortages.” So we went straight back.
We walked around town a bit and got all excited when we found a movie theater! We translated the “marquee” to say they were showing, “Live and Let Die” so we thought it’d be fun to see a James Bond movie dubbed in Russian—plus the matinee was only 20 tenge, which is about 30 cents U.S. Well, surprise, surprise, the movie was actually called “To Live and to Die” and had Gene Simmons from Kiss as an Arab terrorist who dies at the end when a grenade explodes in his mouth. For real. And the dubbing was a hoot – it was just one guy’s voice, even for the female characters, and a couple of times he screwed up and said half a line Russian and half in English: “Ya neez nayu where they went!” I slept through half of it and ripped my shorts on a nail sticking out of their crappy seats. But it certainly was an experience! There was also a full-sized 727 Aeroflot PLANE parked next to our hotel for some reason. Aeroflot is the Russian national airline that is so dangerous people call it Aerosplat—always crashing into the mountains.
Koni & I were so over the heat – one day I drank 6 liters of liquid and didn’t pee ONCE – that we decided to leave a day early as we’d accomplished all our tasks, leaving the “good” PCTs in our group (Jenny & Joan) to stay one more night as originally planned/scheduled. Again, we took an overnight bus to sleep/spare us from the heat, but there was a large hole in the floor of the bus right in front of my seat so I couldn’t sleep for fear of sliding out onto the street and being run over by the back wheels of the bus. Well, apparently, I did drift off, coz I wake up at who knows what time and see people getting off at the bus station so I wake Koni and tell her we’re there. We stumble off and notice the bus station looks just a little bit different before we see KIRGHIZ and not KAZAKH militia around, realized we’re pit stopped in Bishkek again, and barely make it back to the bus before it takes off for Almaty. When I got home, my host mom said it was just as hot back home – so hot her thermometer broke as it “only” goes up to 50 degrees centigrade.
Seriously, how can my site compete with this excitement?
Disclaimer: Any thoughts, observations, opinions, etc. are of course mine and not necessarily the views of Peace Corps.
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