Kazakhstan

You can see it already at the border of Kazakhstan: how people from different parts of the world have moved and met here. You see the Turkic peoples, you see Persia, you see Arabia, you see Genghis Khan, you see the Golden Horde, you see the Soviet Union, you see the Silk Road, you see Asia for the first time in a real way.

The greeting is in Cyrillic script, in words that sound Turkish. The religion has been Islam since the 8th century. Everywhere you see the nomadic past, even though the nomadic lifestyle was banned in the Soviet Union, leading to half the country starving. But the yurts are still there, the semi-wild horses everywhere on the steppe, horse meat, fermented mare's milk. And an incredible kindness and hospitality.

2500 kilometers of steppe that we cross redefine the expression of endless emptiness. At first glance, it seems so, but on closer inspection, the steppe offers plenty of variety: camels, horses, shepherds on motorcycles, Saiga antelopes, the little fox that became very affectionate, steppe grasses and flowers in all shades, endless power lines, and the road, straight as a string.

The Caspian Sea has disappeared, the Aral Sea is slowly returning (we only saw the dried-up port). And then another piece of Russia, which we can only see from a distance because we no longer have a Russian visa: the cosmodrome in Baikonur, the place from which Yuri Gagarin flew into space as the first human. The cosmodrome with the launch pads can only be seen on the horizon. But we could play on rocket parts.

In Turkestan, we meet a man and his architecture who was very important for Central Asia and created an empire from here through Afghanistan and Persia to Syria: Timur the Lame or Tamerlane.