sofasurfers

“I think I’m going to kidnap you,” I said to Lindsay, on our first night in Almaty. I’d realised that while guest-host relations couldn’t have been worse, being able to be able to laugh/discuss/dissect with my ally – and not to have to rely wholly on the social interaction or otherwise of my host – was infinitely better than being on my own. I recalled my couple crisis in Beijing, where, compared to the catastrophe in Kazakhstan, nothing actually happened; it was just a series of nuances that – because I was alone – I was hypersensitive to. Here, we were sharing the pain, so it just wasn’t half as bad. That said, we were never quite sure whether the root cause of the problem was in fact because we were two. But actually, so what? If I were to recruit a new travelling companion out here, I don’t think I could have found a better candidate. She even draws caricatures while I write – I don’t have to sully their true identity if I want to post a picture of them.

So, instead of Lindsay waiting in Almaty for her friend to arrive from China with her new passport, visas, money, etc, she’s taking to the road with me, maybe just until the next stop, Shymkent..

“But why you want go Shymkent?” Support Act had asked. “It’s just a road.” Well… firstly, a devout couchsurfer doesn’t really have the pick of Kazakhstan. Actually, I’d wanted to go to Turkestan, some 180km (don’t check, probably wrong on that one) from Shymkent – it “contains Kazakhstan’s most impressive monument,” according to the guide book: the Timurid Mausoleum of Khodja Ahmed Yassaui (oh yes! Juicy cliffhanger there: coming soon! Juicy photos!) - but there’s not a single couch there, so I’ll just have to take a day trip from Shymkent. Secondly, (as I see it) couchsurfing tourism isn’t like conventional tourism – it is much more experimental, more open-minded. So if Shymkent is just a road, then I would like to see what that means: how do the locals cope? Maybe that’s why they’re couchsurfing hosts – to ensure a steady flow of fresh blood. Actually, our Shymkent host is a young American Peace Corps volunteer – it seems that half of Kazakhstan’s couchsurfers are thus, and probably for the same reason as those whose town is just a road. But we’ll see about that one.
Anyway, so Lindsay said she’d come voluntarily – a case of the Stockholm Syndrome perhaps.