All Kaz-20 volunteers were required to make the trek to Almaty during July for a standard checkup with the doctor and a trip to a local dentist. For some volunteers, this entails a one-hour taxi ride. In my case, it was a 70 hour round-trip odyssey on three different trains, all for 16 hours in the city. At least I ran into a few other volunteers who were in town for an English teachers' conference.
As ridiculous as that may sound, though, you simply become accustomed to long train rides. They aren't nearly as unbearable as they may seem. For one thing, trains are timed to maximize sleeping time; the Zhezkazgan-Almaty train leaves at 11:30pm and arrives at 5:50am two days later for a total journey of around 30 hours, the majority of which I slept through. To cope with the ponderously slow speed of Kazakhstan's trains, locals have developed a great train culture and more often than not I find myself in interesting conversations with kind people. In this country, people aren't always overly friendly in the public sphere, but on the train this is very rarely the case. Life on the train is worthy of much more than a paragraph, however. When I finally get around to taking pictures on the train, there is a tour de force of a post waiting to be ridden about The Train.
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2 comments:
Wow, it's hard to grasp what a 70-hour trip must be like. Sounds like a good 50% of your time in Kazakhstan has been spent on a train :o
15 hours? sounds like poor business travel planning. 18 hour round trip, 96 hours in almaty.
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