Currently travelling through Mongolia in a rented 4X4, we don’t have much access to WiFi. Here’s a quick entry into our latest doings.
From Semey, we take another overnight train to Karaganda. Probably our final railway trip.
Karaganda is a coal-mining town. Even our guide’s father was employed in the mines. (We hire a guide to access places that are hard to get to on our own.) The Miner’s Glory monument takes pride of place in the city.
We visit a mining museum attached to a college that specializes in the mining sciences.
We also visit Vvedenskiy Cathedral, an Orthodox church in Karaganda. Maria needs more modest accoutrements to enter and is provided with a scarf and full-length skirt of heavy material.
The area is also infamous for its history as an enormous Gulag (one of many in the USSR) known as the Karlag In the nearby town of Dolinka, we visit the Museum of Memory of Victims of Political Repression.
Really, to hear citizens speak of Canada these days as a ‘settler colony’ built on the crimes of genocidal maniacs is pretty comical when you consider the sky-high mountains of corpses – millions – left in the wake of history as unfolded in the non-Canadian rest of the world. Get a grip, people.
Finally, we fly back to Almaty for our flight to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia two days away. We take the cable car up to the Kök Töbe recreational area. It’s surprisingly modern.
So we spend our first days in UB (Ulaanbaatar) arranging the rental of a vehicle and camping equipment. We set out for a 16-day trip of wild camping and off-roading.
Sight or Insight of the Day
We wrap up our travels in Kazakhstan and head for Mongolia. It’s been a fun three months in the ‘stans.
Some final issues about Kazakhstan – first, do ‘Cossacks’ in Russia have anything in common with ‘Kazakhs’ in Kazakhstan? According to AI:
‘Cossacks and Kazakhs share an identical linguistic root word that originally meant a “free man,” “wanderer,” or “adventurer”. However, they are two completely distinct groups with different ethnicities, languages, and histories.’
‘Both words derive from the ancient Turkic word ‘kazak’. Historically, the Russian Empire used this term to describe wanderers or people who lived free from the control of any state or overlord. Eventually, the Russian convention split the term to differentiate the Kazakhs of the Central Asian steppes from the Slavic Cossacks serving in the Imperial Russian Army.‘
Second, what’s the deal with Borat and Kazakhstan? As someone who enjoys offbeat humour as much as the next person, I find the character of Borat hilarious. Bur really, it’s not very representative of Kazakhstan. The Borat persona is more like an exaggerated Balkan/East European satire, rather than Central Asian. Maybe Sacha Baron Cohen should have come up with an imaginary country to use as his cultural pincushion?