holiday harashor

Normalna means fine in Russian; this week's harashor means good. Nothing's changed, except two things. My head and my time. The one had a little click, a mental shift from endurance to enjoyment, while the other is newly limited. I booked a flight from Ulan Bator to be home before the end of Summer (assuming the UK has one). I don't regret missing China, actually. I've ridden along the border here and there and it looks menacing (did I even see it inching forwards?). Days that can be counted are suddenly precious. Routine routines gain a soon-to-be-missed quality, spitting toothpaste out the tent and always knowing what the moon is doing. The space and quiet have taken a delightful new aspect, like they had in that morning of my tour through Europe and the Balkans; like a holiday again. The dusty truck stops, where men lunch and bluetooth eachother dogfighting clips, are charming and exotic again. Instead of bemoaning what the occasional villages haven't got I've been loading up on who and what there is, making brief friends and happy camping. Correcting the I idle on the steppe to I relax on the steppe; I'm steady on the steppe; sunbathe on the steppe. I snooze... Excuse me, where's the barber shop? (my Russian leaps and bounds), and can I buy the ingredients for a stew, perhaps... is there any cold beer? Of course not, no problem, normalna. As an enormous campsite Kazakhstan excels. I do small days, forty, fifty miles with plenty of flowerfield stops and then feast for hours by rivers in meadows. Yesterday morning I made French toast.

At the moment I'm staying with the kind family of a small-town dentist, Oleg. He interrupted my listmaking outside the shop for the usual chat (which this week I enjoy) and then invited me. I wasn't planning to be invited. There's an insight into how for-granted Asian hospitality becomes. With the right kind of loitering - the right demeanor and questions in the right places - you can fairly accurately plan your home invitations. Terrible! Anyway I wasn't planning it but they're welcoming people and I'm staying a couple of nights now. Being fed and laundered, the usual sauna - banya. The family are Russian-Kazakhs. Oleg's friends last night were a Chinese Kazakh and that rare beast a Kazakh-Kazakh. In Central Asian Republics everybody's nationality has an ethnicity prefix; something to do with Genghis Khan and Stalin I gather. Anyway they're all here, in lovely multikulti. On the road I met a Mongolian-Kazakh who'd returned from Dubai to give birth to her son in order that the Arab-Armenian father wouldn't be able to take him away. I was impressed at the pragmatism, the international family planning.

So you read my last's little-bit-lonely subtext well; thanks for all the emails! Moods lift. I'm looking forward to some lake detours next week (the Mongol Hordes used to R&R in the area) and then, not so much, the built-up glut before the border. I wonder how long I can keep my holiday spirit during the Russian visa race. I'm dawdling to the start line but if, as hoped, I'm meeting Kris in Irkutsk (remember it from the Risk board?) I'll have to do eighty-mile days for almost three weeks straight. They'll at least be homeward miles, kind of.

Glorious Republic of Kazakhstan

Oleg