Stolen Moments, Astana
Undoubtedly, one of the benefits of 2006’s surprise hit film, Borat, was to forever imprint Kazakhstan on the memories of the British, indeed Western, public. However questionable the image it presented (and it was certainly controversial), the film raised curiosity about what this vast country was really like. When I was asked, at very short notice, to stand-in for a colleague and present to a meeting of Kazakh government officials, I leapt at the chance and “happily” accepted the consequent travel nightmare that ensued.
It was close to midnight when finally I emerged from that parallel dimension known as “Travelling” and into the terminal of Astana’s International Airport. My last minute booking had conspired with flight delays to cause me two days of travel in order to arrive at the Kazakh capital. A final delay on the ground had meant that I was helplessly aware, as we lifted off from Heathrow, that I would miss my connection in Turkey. The resulting overnight stay in Istanbul’s opulent Ritz-Carlton hotel (one of my favourite hotels) was some small compensation for the next day’s backwards leg to Frankfurt in order to catch the only other available flight east to Astana. I seemed to have sat still for the better part of 48 hours and I was dog-tired.
It wasn’t difficult to spot my driver in the near-deserted concourse of the shiny new airport. Every inch a Tatar horseman, the stocky man’s proud moustache vied only with his enormous fur hat for bushy blackness. He smiled and nodded and led me out into his country.
On the recently swept pavement, burnished ridges of residual ice gleamed dully in the sodium light as I skidded, slipped and plunged precariously after my escort. His car was a big old Audi saloon whose dashboard glowed in constellations of orange and red warning lights but it was warm and I was tired. I wasn’t about to protest. The hotel was in reach and all I remember of the journey was birch trees and snow.
The Okan InterContinental Hotel is the city’s first five star hotel. Both outside and in, it is large and marble but with welcoming staff. My room, also large and welcoming, smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke in the way that is often a feature of Eastern European hotels but then the bed was beckoning. I was finally here. I may have missed the briefings and pre-meetings but at least I would make the main event in the morning.
7.00 a.m. and, from my bedroom window, I get my first proper view of Astana. The main streets and pavements are swept clean of snow but side roads, yards and building sites range from pristine white to grey-brown slush. Directly across from me, a man is working on the outside of a window, eleven storeys up. He is standing on a tower of scaffold no more than six feet long and maybe three feet deep. Astana by daylight is an impressive sight. The world’s second coldest capital (after Ulaanbaatar in nearly neighbouring Mongolia), temperatures can drop as low as -40°C. All through the older part of town huge pipes, two feet across, run along the pavements and bridge up over the streets, the earth too geologically unstable to bury them.
In 1997, Kazakhstan’s capital was officially moved from Almaty to Astana (Kazakh for “capital city”). Officially, this was because of lack of room for expansion in the former capital, still the country’s largest city and commercial centre; others suggested that Almaty is uncomfortably close to the borders of China and Kyrgyzstan (which seems a not unreasonable consideration). Whatever the reason, Astana is being completely rebuilt. The main streets of the new city are laid out along the cardinal points of the compass with magnificent presidential palaces at each point. All along these streets are great marble temples to bureaucracy; the headquarters of the national oil and gas company is an enormous triumphal arch; the Ministry of Finance building curves for all the world like a dollar sign and elsewhere matching cones of gold-tinted glass are being constructed. The overall impression is something of a Las Vegas of the Steppes.
My morning was consumed with presentations and meetings held within one of these splendid ministries; this one a bastion of salmon pink. The event was a fairly large affair which had drawn speakers from neighbouring Russia and as far afield as Korea and the U.K. As a result, our ministry hosts had arranged dinner preceded by a trip to one of Astana’s most bizarrely impressive tourist attractions, the Oceanarium. Upon entering, I was presented with several tanks displaying The Fishes of Kazakhstan; trout, perch and the like. It was a slightly “Borat” moment. Astana sits in the north-east of land-locked Kazakhstan. The nearest access to the ocean is the Black Sea, some 1,600 miles away. As a consequence, the Oceanarium claims to be the world’s most inland marine aquarium and beyond the display of local fish, the facility houses a huge, walk-through shark tank that rivals anything in Florida and a large collection of other marine life. By the dim lights of star-fish tanks, I tentatively asked some of the young ministry interns about the Borat film. Far from outraged, they had enjoyed it in parts and been bemused by other parts. On the whole I think they enjoyed the infamy.
The next morning, I had a few free hours before heading out to the airport. I mastered my Berlitz Russian phrase book to get a taxi across to the Bayterek tower. Located in the centre of the new city and nicknamed “Chupa-Chups” 
by the locals because of its resemblance to the ubiquitous lolly-pop, the tower affords views of the formal streets and gardens of the city. For me though, a wee Scots boy born by the sea and never out of sight of the mountains, more amazing than the impressive scale of construction was the sight of the steppes beyond; mile upon mile of barren, snowy flatness in every direction as far as the elevated eye could see. I would like to see the old capital, Almaty, nestling as it does in its dramatic mountain setting but this, for me, crystallised the sheer size of Kazakhstan, the world ninth largest country, the largest of the ex-Soviet republics.
Somewhere in the heart of the city, I passed a sculpture of a young man standing, vexedly staring at the face of his upheld wrist-watch. He wore a long-sleeved tee-shirt with the sleeves pulled back, loose jeans and what might have been a base-ball cap. Surrounded by frozen banks of swept snow, his face was untroubled by the sub-zero temperatures of earliest spring. Some twenty feet away, as yet unnoticed, face charged with a young woman’s sense of mischief and delight, the figure’s overdue date had just arrived. It was a beautiful image with universal appeal; something to which people the world over can relate.
Kazakhstan is a country to watch. Rich in mineral wealth, it has vast oil and gas reserves and the world’s second largest reserves of uranium. The government is actively seeking to diversify beyond its natural resources and is developing its financial services industry along with its telecoms and IT infrastructure. They have recently agreed with neighbouring China to develop a free-trade area across their mutual border; perhaps with a view to creating a 21st century Silk Route.
It was an all too brief visit and I was sad to leave Kazakhstan. I wanted to explore the city further, to get out onto those vast steppes but I resigned myself to the inevitable taxi, check-in and long wait at the airport wondering how I could engineer a return visit.