Shymkent, November 22

And then it rained for forty days. Acually, it only rained all day for two days but it feels like forty. I did not really count on anything like this, it's quite rare in this area too. We've visited Shymkent's museums today. There is a museum about Soviet repression, which is more a documented memorial to the victims than a real museum. The most impressive thing about it is probably that it exists at all: I never found something like this elsewhere in the former Soviet Union (with the exception of the Baltic states).

On the other side of the city centre, the regional museum's vitrines have an amazing aray of artifacts: from stuffed animals and fossils to contracts from local industry and personalia of local war veterans and sport heroes.

Shymkent is a big, lively city, more lively than anything I've seen since Kyiv. It even has shops and restaurants selling western food, which is very welcome since my stomach has problems digesting Kazach samsas. We stay in hotel "Turist", an old Soviet era structure, where most of the paint on the walls has died a natural death since. The hot shower in my room is a real treat though.

I should explain the "we". When I wrote my last entree, I had crossed thousands of kilometers of steppe without meeting other western foreigners. Then one evening in Turkistan, somebody knocked on the door of my hotel room. Since that moment, I have been travelling together with Stuart and Alexandra, an Australian couple who follow the Silk Road in the opposite direction - but like me, during the wrong season. Besides being interesting company, I'm glad they decided to knock on that door because travelling together brings practical advantages too. The heating in our Turkistan hotel suddenly began to work (first night it was freezing inside - it must be too expensive to put the thing on for one guest!), hiring a taxi to visit a site off the main roads is cheaper with three people, and most importantly, you can have conversations that go farther than "Hello, what is your name."

Of course, being in a group means you have less interaction with local people. Not that travelling together prevented us from getting into contact with locals. Physical contact too, like when twenty-five people are stuffed into the minivan you took, built for fifteen. When we arrived in Shymkent, we ran into Aika, a local student who was so excited to meet foreigners that she just had to drag us into the back couch of her father's Lada. Her parents were happy to drive us to our current hide-out (the commy place that so urgently needs new paint - and, to be honest, a good cleaning). Just a couple of minutes ago, another student came up to me to talk, to practice her English. In public busses and marshrutkas, kids look curiously at you, sometimes trying a shy "hello, where you're from?". It's sometimes flattering when everybody finds you so special...

Our small company of three visited places like Sayram, a small town with a peculiar Medieval minaret and a lot of mausoleums; Sauran, a ruined city in the middle of the steppe; Otrar, another ruined city in the middle of the steppe, destroyed by Genghis Khan, and the mausoleum of another sufi saint, Arslanbab. Those were nice and rewarding little excursions. However, tomorrow I'll pack my back and take a bus further east, once again all by myself, while my companions will head off into Uzbekistan. To A+S: thanks for your company and good luck!