Hanno's blog

I'm lagging a bit behind with blogging, so I'm trying to quickly recap the recent days of my journey in China. I already mentioned that I arrived in Yining, which is a town near the border to Kazakhstan. I was a bit surprised, because I more or less expected a small town, but I found out that Yining isn't that small. It has 430.000 inhabitants (at least Wikipedia says so, maybe it's outdated) and the distances sometimes were quite huge and I did a lot of walking there. The train station was a bit outside and walking there I passed a number of construction sites for new residential area. I first thought I found one of the "ghost towns" many western media lately reported about, a clean and new looking residential area. But a closer look revealed that it was probably just not finished - inside the buildings construction work was still going.

I took the train from Yining to Urumqi. My original plan was to move along quite fast and directly take the next train to Xi'an. But that didn't really work. I had to find out that all train tickets for the upcoming days to every location east of Urumqi were sold out. This was kind of a déjà vu. Last time I was in China I had the plan to travel this way in the other direction - and no tickets were available. Reading local news, this situation might improve 2014, when a new highspeed train line opens between Urumqi and Lanzhou. I didn't want to wait that long though.

However, this time I knew that there are alternatives - by taking the bus. I took a bus to the town Dunhuang, which is about 1,000 kilometers east of Urumqi.

Finding out the bus times in Urumqi was a bit tricky. At the bus station, there was a screen with scrolling departure times - but only in Chinese. While I am in theory able to recognize Chinese characters, this was much too fast for me (and there were a lot of buses). No paper or otherwise static timetable was available. My solution was to do many photographs of the timetable. That worked and afterwards I bought the ticket. I usually do this by writing down the time, date, the start and destination - usually that works quite well when language communication is limited due to language barriers. I took a bus the next day starting at 4 p. m., which arrived in Dunhuang at around 8 a. m., so it took roughly 16 hours.

The bus trip through the Xinjiang desert passed a lot of wind turbines. While China is often portrayed as the environmental bad guy, one shouldn't fail to recognize that it's also the world leader in building renewable energies. However, the many Xinjiang wind turbine fields also told the other not so green side of the Chinese renewable boom: Many of the turbines were just standing still. The most likely reason: China is building up wind power faster than it's caring for grid integration. I'm used to that look in Germany - wind power there is also often downregulated, because grid integration is not keeping up with the installation of new wind energy. But it was quite obvious that this problem is far bigger here in China's desert.

In Dunhuang I spend three nights. Dunhuang is not on the Urumqi-Lanzhou train line, so the scarce ticket situation there doesn't affect me here. But still, I didn't get a ticket for the train I wanted and had to stay one day longer. After having traveled through several huge cities, staying here for some time was okay and I did things a bit slower. Dunhuang is famous for the Mogao caves, which are a famous tourist attraction with buddhist statues and wall paintings. I'm usually not the person who has to see every tourist attraction on the way, but as I had more time than expected, I went there.

Tomorrow I'll take the train to Lanzhou.

Pictures from Yining
Pictures from Dunhuang
Pictures from wind power turbines in the Xinjiang province
Pictures from Lanzhou

When travelling from Kazakhstan to China overland, the common way is taking the train directly from either Astana or Almaty to Urumqi in northwestern China. The train takes about 30 hours and a significant part of that time is spend on the border, because the trains need to change their wheels for the different train track size.

I read at some places about a different possibility: A bus service from Almaty to Yining (伊宁 which, to make things complicated, has also a kazakh/uighur name - Kulja / Құлжа / قۇلجا - which, to make things even more complicated, can be written in many different ways using latin characters, cyrillic characters or arabic characters). The information was quite scarce. I basically only had a few forum entries mentioning it, so all the information I had seemed quite unreliable. And even the guy from the hostel where I stayed didn't know more.

I could find out that there's an international bus station in Almaty called Sayran (сайран). It is located somewhat outside the city and can be reached with bus number 100 from the Almaty 2 train station. I went there on Thursday and - although without language communication possible - could tell them what I wanted. They wrote me down a date and time for the next bus: Saturday at seven in the morning. Sadly, I didn't find out how often this bus goes. Saturday was fine for me so I bought my ticket for the bus.

Two days later I got up at 5 in the morning and took a taxi to the Sayran bus station. Although no overnight trip, the bus was a sleeper bus with beds. However, the bed I got was so small there was just no way I'd fit in there laying down. I spent, like most others, most of the time sitting on the floor which was covered with matresses. As expected, I was the only western traveller on the bus. Everyone got a plastic bag at the entrance for the shoes. The bus ride was quite okay, although really bumpy. The bus wasn't that full and there were larger, unused beds in the back, so I also layed down for some time. However, sleeping was impossible, it was just too bumpy.

We spend about an hour at a restaurant in the middle of the desert and also some time at the border. I was a bit worried about the border crossing, because recently there have been some conflicts in the Xinjiang province, which is the chinese province you enter when coming from Kazakhstan. But at the border everything was fine, except that my border crossing took a bit longer than the others.

Right behind the border a lot of people were trying to offer money exchange. I didn't do that, because at such points you usually don't get the best exchange rates, which later turned out to be a mistake. It seems not exactly easy to change Tenge into Renminbi in Yining and as I'm writing this, I still have some Kazakh money with me after having tried to exchange it in three different banks in Yining.

I first feared that I had lost my bus after the border crossing, because I didn't see it anywhere, nor did I see people I remembered from the bus. I wasn't too worried, because the border town Khorgas itself seemed large enough to provide a place to sleep and further travelling options, but after a while, I saw some people I remembered from the bus and finally, it came back and picked us all up. We arrived in Yining at around 9 in the evening, so the bus trip took about 12 hours. That was longer than I expected, as I read 7 or 10 hours at other online sources. If you wonder why it's 12 hours from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., you have to consider the timezone change (but timezones deserve another blog entry anyway).

Hopefully this information will provide other travellers some help when they try to take this bus. To recap the important information:

• Bus from Almaty to Yining starts at Sayran bus station (reachable via local bus 100 from Almaty 2 train station).
• Runs at 07:00 a.m. on unknown weekdays, but due to my experiences probably on fridays and not on thursdays (If you have any info on that, e. g. a link to the bus company, please add it in the comments).
• Costs 4600 Tenge (thats about 21 € or 30 US$).
• Takes about 12 hours.
• Crosses border to China at Khorgas (霍尔果斯 in mandarin chinese, قورعاس in uighur, Хоргос in russian and Қорғас in kazakh language).

Pictures from bus trip

After Astana I went on to Almaty, which is the former capital of Kazakhstan. As I already wrote my previous two stops (Petropavl and Astana) were sharp contrasts, Almaty again was a completely different place. While also relatively expensive, it doesn't have the kind of "artificial" feeling that is present in Astana.

I spend two days here. Almaty has some mountains surrounding it. There are two hilltops that one can reach via cable car. One is Koktobe, which has something like a small amusement park on the top. But due to lots of snow, most things there were closed. For the free software fans upon my readers: I saw an arcade machine with Tuxracer there. Never seen Tuxracer in an arcade machien before (however, I have seen an arcade machine with the free software game Stepmania on my last trip).

The other cable car starts near the ice skating stadium Medeo (which can be reached via public bus line 6) and goes to the ski ressort Shymbulak. The ski resort was closed and sadly, this meant that also the second cable car, which could bring one even more up the hills, was also closed. Still I had some stunning views on the mountains. In the gondola, I talked to a local who spoke a bit of English. He said they call it the "little Alps". I found that quite described it well. It really looked like you were in Austria or Switzerland. To make this impression complete, the cable car was even built in Switzerland.

Pictures from Almaty

After staying in Petropavl I made it into Kazakhstan's capital Astana and stayed there for a few days.

I am glad that I've been both in an I assume average Kazakh city like Petropavl and the capital Astana. The contrast was pretty extreme. It wasn't like going to another city in the same country, it felt more like going to another world. Petropavl looked more or less like many post-soviet cities I've been before. Often a bit shabby, with waste laying around, broken or non-existent sidewalks and alike.

Astana is quite the opposite. Nothing here is old, large parts of Astana were build within the last two decades. Dirt or waste in the streets was almost zero and the traffic seems pretty civilized. Until 1997, Almaty was the capital of Kazakhstan, due to some complicated political compromises, it was moved to Astana and there began the growth of this boom town.

The city center is dominated by unusual and stunning architecture. It is build in almost perfect symmetry. For example, if you stand right in front of the Khan Shatyry shopping center in the middle (there's a wastebin so you can see where the exact middle is) and look to the Baiterek tower (Astana's landmark), it is perfectly centered in the archway of the KazMunayGaz company headquarter (a large state-owned oil and gas company). Same on the other side: If you stand in front of the presidential palace in the middle and look to the Baiterek tower, it's framed by two golden other towers.

One thing that's notably missing in Astana: It has only a very limited public transport system. There's no metro, no tram and no trolleybusses. Normal busses are the only way to get around. In the evening, they are so crowded that it can be a pain to use them. Also, it's a bit tricky to find out which busses you want to take. Bus stations have sometimes maps with bus lines, but they don't show all bus lines, only the ones starting at exactly that bus stop. I didn't see any complete bus map anywhere offilne or online. I've pictured a bus map (and another one) which features some of the more important lines linking the city center with the train station, maybe this is of some help for other travellers.

Astana is relatively expensive and features a bunch of large shopping centers (the biggest one being the Khan Shatyry, which they call the largest tent in the world). I think you get the idea what kind of place that is. Many describe it as "like a western city", but that really doesn't catch it. Others describe it as the Dubai of Kazakhstan. While I've never been to Dubai and can't judge, it feels to me that this describes it much better.

I originally planned to stay until saturday and take the train to China from Astana, but I found that the options of exploring the city were quite limited. You pretty quickly get around having seen all of its sights and there doesn't seem much around worth visiting. So I went on to Almaty.

A quick overview of things one can do and i did in Astana:

• Go on Baiterek tower: Not too expensive and nice view on the city with signs of distances to other relevant cities (e. g. Beijing 3656 km, Moscow 2280 km, Helsinki 3020 km).
• Ocenarium in the Duman entertainment center: Not that cheap, but nice and quite relaxing atmosphere. Biggest attraction are two large tunnels under a big aquarium, so you can watch the fishes from below.
• Pyramid (Palace of Peace and Reconciliation): Pyramid formed building containing an opera, conference centers and more. Not really worth visiting, it was mostly boring. I was the only english speaking person at that time, which didn't stop them from giving me a guided tour through the building.
• Khan Shatyry: Mostly a shopping center (so not thatwah interesting, except for the fact that it's a tent-like architecture). The upper floor contains a mix of an amusement park and an arcade hall. I saw a lot of those entertainment complexes, most other shopping centers in Astana have something alike. Also, there's a "Beach Club", which is a very expensive swimming bath.
• Watch unusual architecture: All over the city center.

Pictures from Astana

When I crossed the border to Kazakhstan I was told that I had to register my visa within 5 days. I read about that before, but I thought I had read somewhere that this wasn't necessary for EU citizens, so I was a bit surprised. But it turned out registration wasn't that difficult.

I did the registration on Monday in Astana. Registration needs to be done at the Migration Police office, which is located in the улица Сакена Сейфулина 29. I was there at 11:00 and the place was quite crowded and busy, so I already feared this might take some time. But it only took a couple of minutes, I gave them my passport, my migration card and a business card of my hotel (they wanted to know the adress). Then I was told to come back at 15:00. I was also told that they could only do a registration for a maximum of ten days. This wasn't a problem for me, because I don't intend to stay longer in Kazakhstan and my Visa validity ends there anyway. But for travellers wanting to stay longer in Kazakhstan this might be a cause of trouble.

After all, it wasn't that troublesome, but you should be aware of the registration when travelling to Kazakhstan. I don't know what to do if you're not passing a big city and thus have no way to visit the office of the migration police.

After a two-night train trip I arrived in Kazakhstan in the town Petropavl / Петропавл, also known under the name Petropavlovsk (which should not be confused with Petropavlovsk in Russia, where a town with the same name exists). There was no particular reason why I went there except that there's a relatively fast train from Moscow. Going directly from Moscow to Kazakhstan's capital Astana or the ex-capital Almaty would've meant a trip with at least three nights in a train, which I thought would be too much.

There's surprisingly little information you find online about Petropavl in English, although it's not that small (about 200.000 inhabitants). I can't add that much, as I only stayed for one night.

I had a booking for a hotel, which teached me a little lesson: Sometimes preparing to much may cause more hassle than it helps. I didn't find the hotel I've booked at the address where it was supposed to be. You may wonder how I fail to find a hotel, but you need to know that "hotel" here not necessarily means the same as you are used to be (big building with big sign "Hotel XY"). They're often hidden in flats inside normal buildings.

After checking the booking again I found out that it listed two addresses. One for the apartment and one as the contact address - and they were not nearby. No hint where I was supposed to go. While searching for my hotel, I found three other hotels which, by the way, were all much cheaper than everything that was bookable online. So finally I decided to forget my booking and just took one that seemed okay. Luckily, I could cancel my other booking without costs (I would've complained if I hadn't been able to do so) and ended up in a fine apartment, cheaper than planned and with a kitchen.

Notable in Petropavl was a huge outdoor market. Although it's quite cold, it was crowded and seemed to be the normal way of shopping here. Not only food was sold, but anything from clothes to tools or car parts.

After spending a night, I took the train to the capital Astana.

Pictures Train Moscow-Petropavl
Pictures from Petropavl

I had about six hours time in Moscow before entering my next train. A bit too much time for getting from one train station to another, eating and sitting around. So I looked for something to do while being in Moscow. I already visited the basic sights like the Red Square last time I was in Moscow, so I was looking for something more unusual.

I checked the Wikivoyage page of Moscow and one of the first things it mentions is the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines. That sounded like it's worth a visit. I checked the location and it is quite centrally located, only a few minutes walk from the Metro station Baumanskaya. (If you exit the metro, you're already on Baumanskaya street and the Museum is in Baumanskaya street 11.)

As the name says, the museum features arcade machines from the soviet aera. You get a couple of real soviet 15 Kopek coins when entering that you can spend on playing. So I played some rounds of Magistral (Магистраль) - seems something like the soviet answer to Pacman - and others. Honestly, for many of the games I failed to understand how they were supposed to be played. What was interesting that there were a couple of "games" that featured non-virtual content. For example, there was a game where you could control a little toy tank called Tankodrom (танкодром), but I didn't really understand how to play that game either. Obviously there were quite a number of games with cold war references. The Museum also includes some tables where you can have a coffee after playing. If you ever happen to be in Saint-Petersburg, the museum has a branch there, too.

After that I went to Kazansky railway station where my next train was leaving. Moscow has several train stations and some of them are named after the countries where their international trains are heading. So for me that meant I entered Moscow at the Belorussky railway station (because I came through Belarus) and I left at Kazansky railway station (because I was heading to Kazakhstan). (someone in the comments told me this is wrong and Kazaksny station refers to the city Kazan - so I was probably wrong on this naming)

Pictures from the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines in Moscow

When you go to Russia, you'll always have to fill this little form. The so-called migration card. It's just a tiny piece of paper, not really a "card".

The migration card is a double-form where you have to fill in some of your basic data. It's then stamped by the border guards and split in half. They keep one half, you get the other and keep it until you leave the country again. From what I've heard, one of the more troublesome things you can encounter is losing your migration card while in Russia.

There are some tricky things to know about the migration card. First: If you enter Russia through Belarus, you'll get only one migration card for both countries. That bothered me a lot on my last trip, because I only entered the data for Belarus, that means a stay of one day. Turned out this wasn't a big issue. When leaving Russia the border guards had a more closer look on the documents and obviously noticed the misinformation, but they didn't seem to care that much.

There seem to be similar issues with other countries. I even once got a migration card at the Ukrainian border, where I didn't want to enter Russia at all. It just happened that I was sitting in a train that was going to Russia after crossing the Ukraine. So if you ever happen to enter Russia through another country, although you don't necessarily get the migration card at the Russian border, you should enter the data for your stay in Russia.

Another thing I learned this time: There is a field for the Visa number. Now I obviously had two Visa - one for Belarus and one for Russia. I filed the number of the Russian one, because after all, I wanted to go to Russia and only cross Belarus on a train. Turned out I was wrong and the Belarus border guards complained. Admittedly, it can be a bit frightening if a border guard tells you something is wrong, especially if you don't understand their language. But after all, he just filled in the correct Visa number himself and everything was okay.

Kazakhstan also has a migration card, but it is not split in half and no similar pitfalls seem to occur there.

If you've been reading my blog back in 2011, you'll remember that I did a two-month-long trip on the transsiberian railway through Russia, Mongolia and China. Ever since the idea was in my head that I wanted to do something alike again.

So today I am starting a new journey to Asia, again mostly by train. Slightly modified from last time, as I don't need to see all the places again I've already been. I started today at 6 am in Berlin and I'm currently in Warsaw, Poland (where the 19th world climate conference is just starting, but that's purely a coincidence). I'll only spend a couple of hours in Warsaw and then will continue my trip to Moscow. From there, I'll head on to Kazakhstan and later to China. If everything works out as intended, I'll hopefully spend parts of the winter in warm and sunny areas.

I make no promises, but I'll try to keep my blog updated with pictures and events happening on my trip.

Technical note: All entries related to this trip will be marked with the tag asia2013. All entries related to my previous trip to asia can be found under the tag trip2011. Pictures will be collected here.