Cracking Malaysia

We left Siberia on our 32^nd wedding anniversary and arrived at Kuala Lumpur the next day both tired, fractious and ill tempered. We fell out. I considered getting a divorce, but I have really been looking forward to coming to Malaysia and without Liz I would have no reason to be here, so we made up.

I have been here before, but never for more than a few days passing through, so this is an opportunity to properly get to know the country. First impressions have a dreamlike quality because KL, where we are this week before moving to a much smaller town, is such a contrast to where we have been living. Whenever possible I like to travel overland and get an understanding of how far I’m going but there is something magical about flying and, after a fitful night on the plane, we’ve stepped out into a different world as cleanly as Alice through her looking glass.

From a low density town built in the middle of nowhere to a skyscraper city constantly expanding; from our Soviet style apartment block to a 5 star hotel; from a land which is extremely cold and very dry to one which is never cold, always humid and where it rains at some point almost every day; from bread, potatoes and horse meat to rice, noodles and seafood and from copious beer and vodka to what has so far been a very disappointing attempt to find something to drink.

Next week we will be further north, in Kuala Kangsar where we will be making our home and which is also the residence of the Sultan of Perak. I have always found that the truest experience of a country is to be found in the small places and not the big cities, so once there I will try in earnest to crack the code to understanding life in Malaysia. But for the next few days we have to put up with the hotel.

From cold and dry to hot and wet

This is the final update for this blog not just because it is the end of spring but because it is the end of our time in Kazakhstan. Next week we will be starting a new life in Malaysia from where I will write a new blog.

The melting ice, I imagine all the way back to the Altay Mountains in China, caused the River Irtysh to swell and flood the land on the left bank as far as the eye could see. I hadn't understood why a path I often walk on is raised on an embankment, but that became a mile long jetty around a watery landscape with Sunday picnickers dotted along its route. The locals in Pavlodar aren't pork pie and a bit of tomato people; their picnics involved advanced pyrotechnics to barbecue skewered meat over twig fuelled fires. Now they've gone and the water has rapidly receded, but they've left all their rubbish behind.

Attitudes towards litter seem to be a clear marker between developed and developing countries. A couple of months ago I was travelling through Myanmar and remember on a rail journey carefully kicking the remains of my meal under the seat in the hope that it would eventually be found by a cleaner. I realised that if I left it in view a helpful Burmese would dispose of all the paper and plastic in the local manner by throwing it out of the train window.

When the ice outside our apartment building melted it revealed a layer of rubbish that had been held in its grip all winter and was quickly dealt with by a cleaner with a brush and cardboard box. But in contrast to this attitude I also saw community groups tidying and prettifying their surroundings. This I learned is subbotnik and we were involved in cleaning up Liz’s school one Saturday.

Subbotnik was keenly promoted by Lenin as voluntary Saturday work on community projects. It seems like a metaphor for the tragedy of 20^th century communism that it became debased from an opportunity for communities to work together, in order to take ownership of and pride in where they lived, to an enforced duty which effectively made it unpaid labour. It is good to see the tradition of subbotnik return to its original meaning nearly 100 years after it was first introduced, and it is a reflection on the hard working Kazakhs that they embrace it as a way to take their young country forward.

It may be easier to just not make the mess in the first place but, in a world where we interact with our electronic devices more than with our neighbours, there is a need for some form of shared social activity, and picking up litter can be as good as any.

Siberian central heating and spring cleaning

Spring here isn’t the gradual change of season found in temperate climates but a transformation into a completely different world. For more than half the year the people are in a state of semi-hibernation; only leaving their homes out of necessity, heads down and eyes fixed, swaddled in layers of protective padding, to get to their place of work or forage for food from the local shops dotted at the bottoms of concrete apartment blocks.

But then the world moves on its axis and children emerge to kick footballs and play on the swings, old woman who haven’t been seen for months occupy the wooden benches and blink in the warm sunlight, and from our apartment can be heard a rhythmic thwack. This is spring cleaning. Young men are sent out with the rugs from their homes which they drape over the children’s’ playground equipment and ritually beat. No doubt this was an important task after a winter in a yurt with a wood fire that had been kept burning for months but, with a custom of always removing outdoor shoes and central heating, it seems less of a necessity in apartment living. And the central heating is ‘central’.

January 7^th is Christmas Day in the Orthodox Church which uses the Julian calendar and May 8^th Victory Day to celebrate the successful conclusion to the Great Patriotic War, but in Pavlodar the dates that everyone knows are October 15^th and April 20^th; this is when the heating is turned on and off. It comes from a power station on the edge of town through many miles of large bore pipes which are mostly underground. The system constantly needs attention and there always seems to be a digger working somewhere to remove the sandy soil and fix a leak, but the radiators are fed with water that makes them too hot to touch and they kept our apartment warm and cosy. The only control on the temperature is to open and close the windows.

We went back to the centre of town for the end-of-war celebrations. There was marching and bands playing patriotic tunes and the crowd was much larger than it had been for Unity Day. The bulk of casualties from the Second World War were borne by the Soviet Union and it is commendable that their sacrifice is not forgotten, but I felt saddened that bloodshed and chauvinism had so much greater appeal than the tolerance and understanding celebrated on Unity Day. A hundred years ago Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and their contemporaries changed how war is perceived in our culture and commemorations are now sombre affairs where tribute is paid to those who died in the service of their country. Here in the old USSR the emphasis is much more on celebrating victory and triumphalism.

I preferred Unity Day.

May Day in Kazakhstan

While next week’s UK election looks to be a close call, the Kazakhstan presidential election last week was something of a non-event, with the incumbent polling 97.5% of the vote. Nursultan Nazarbayev has uniquely been in power since before the country existed, as he was previously president of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, and is now viewed as the father of the nation whom it would be unpatriotic not to vote for.

 In fairness he does seem to be an extraordinarily capable man with sound common sense and, most importantly for a nation builder, policies that seek to encourage peaceful co-existence, co-operation and inclusion. A fine example of this was the Mayday holiday; in a delightful contrast to the machismo of Soviet era tanks and rocket launchers rolling through Moscow’s Red Square, Kazakhstan now calls this Unity Day and celebrates the diversity of ethnicity in the country.

The Kazakh people love singing and dancing and without a cloud in the sky in Pavlodar, a stage was built in front of the main civic building and the road closed to traffic. But what we found most interesting were the couple of dozen stage sets that had been erected opposite and decorated by different groups to display their culture. I read that there are 120 nationalities (a looser term than countries) represented in Kazakhstan and we had fun deciphering Cyrillic writing and trying to guess what region each display represented. We had our picture taken with an Armenian girl from Liz’s school, were given fizzy drinks from Ingushetia and practised our Chinese with some men from Xinjiang Province. Many of the groups belonged to the old USSR or present day Russia, and probably had their roots in Stalin’s practice of sending people or populations he didn’t like the look of to Siberia.

While the mean spirited rise of UKIP shames Britain, I like to think that President Nazarbayev’s drive for a country that sees difference as a positive attribute, and strives to respect all its peoples, stems from a natural desire for equality and fairness. But it is also a pragmatic response to uniting a vast country whose borders are lines on a map more than showing any cultural cohesion. A quarter of the population (half in Pavlodar) are ethnic Russians and the president will be acutely aware of recent events in the Ukraine.

The variety of nationalities did not extend to the food, and we sat at one of the temporary outside cafes to eat plov, a ubiquitous Central Asian dish of rice, vegetables and horse meat cooked together in a giant pan over an open fire. While the first president, as he styles himself, is undoubtedly extremely popular, it is against a background of there being no effective opposition, which really makes the electoral process a charade. Evangelical democracy, touted as a new religion and used as an excuse for carrying out all manner of evils, may be overrated but the overwhelming support that Nazarbayev has garnered gives him the power of a benign dictator. The question then arises of who will follow him and will they be as benign.

Some measures have been taken to limit the power of future presidents (the first president is exempt), such as restricting their tenure to two terms, as is the case in the USA and China, but there does not seem to be a clear mechanism for a successor to rise up. Maybe Nazarbayev has learnt a trick from Elizabeth 1^st  and is not keen to have a potential rival, but he cannot last forever. Or maybe he can. He is revered in the country more than is generally attributed to mere mortals and from his election posters he is clearly getting younger.

Eating a horse

Yurts give an odd contrast of the temporary and the permanent. We ducked down to negotiate the solid wooden door set in the canvas and felt structure and I took off my boots to protect the thick richly patterned carpet. A group of people attired in intricately embroidered costumes invited us to squat down at a large polished table full of food, the shape of which echoed that of the yurt, with its latticework frame supporting the ribs of the structure soaring to the top where it was open to let in light and air.

More than a dozen yurts had appeared overnight on the playing field at Nazarbayev Intellectual School in Pavlodar where Liz works. A stage had been erected for performances of singing and dancing and all the teachers were in traditional dress. Nauryz is the spring celebration in Kazakhstan which dates back 3,000 years, but then our festival of rebirth is named after the ancient pagan goddess Eostre, who surprisingly was more concerned with fertility and rabbits than with chocolate.

Before the USSR Kazakhstan was part of the Russian Empire and before that home to a nomadic people who moved their stock around the vast steppe. They had no interest in international boundaries, but this is the only culture that the country has to draw upon to provide a national identity. The festival on the school playing field acted out the old traditions, but they can still be found in reality away from the cities. Last year I stayed in a yurt half way up a mountain in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan and, although my hosts told me that they only used them in the summer months, when they moved their flock up to the higher pastures, it seemed to me that little had changed over several centuries.

Inside the yurt each table was laden with food and I was given a larger helping than I really wanted of beshmarak. This is the national dish of chunks of horsemeat served on a bed of pasta. With the usual cutlery of just a spoon and fork I struggled to separate a piece of flesh from a lump of fat but the horse was quite tasty. Less so was the kumys, fermented mares’ milk. I was handed a bowl and, after gingerly taking a sip, I had to fight to control my features as they tried to screw into an expression of disgust.

The scene was splendid with the yurt decorated with tapestries and animal skins and even a live eagle adding to the atmosphere, but I was feeling awkward about the food and drink in front of me. I tried to ignore it and pretend that it wasn’t mine but I was a little relieved when the group we had found ourselves with suddenly got up and bade their goodbyes. It was at that point I was informed that we were with the judges who were assessing the standards of hospitality. We went straight to the next yurt where I was immediately presented with a large plate of beshmarak and a deep bowl of kumys.

Spring in Siberia

Spring in Siberia

Last week, when the dense coating of snow and ice had just died miserably, this path was mantled in an ooze of mud which made me abandon an attempted walk. Now the ground is mainly firm and this backwater of the River Irtysh, that has for five months been a solid expanse of ice thick enough to have cars driven on it, is reflecting clear liquid around its edges.

The ground which has been held in the iron grip of winter for so long seems to sigh with relief, as the tension eases from the boughs of the silver birches and the crows flap with an energy that suggests an expectation from life that exceeds bare survival. But I’m still wearing my duck down jacket and I would not risk stepping out of doors without a woolly hat. In the extreme cold my eyes were running with tears before I got a hundred yards from the warmth of our apartment and I would wear the ushanka I bought in Pavlodar market, the fur-lined ear-flapped headgear with the stereotypical Russian band of dark fur visible across the forehead.

This is Kazakhstan, not Russia, but the cold, the snow and the river recognise no borders. Incredibly there are still fishermen literally on the river. They bore holes through the ice and huddle in little tent-like structures. Lighting a fire to keep warm would clearly end in disaster so they rely on vodka to keep the blood in their veins flowing. It is a macho community and the size of any fish that can be landed is of course governed by the size of each fisherman’s auger.

I follow an earth embankment which takes me on a round trip inside a peninsular jutting into the might of the Irtysh and meet some coarse haired cattle. They are newly released from their winter prison and can barely contain their excitement as they explore the outside world as if newly born. And of course they are. Spring in Siberia is so sudden and so extreme that the whole world; the cows, the trees, even the soil is reborn. It almost makes me understand why some people are religious.