Getting to know ‘space country’

Published Apr 30, 2015

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Johannesburg - You can figure out anything if you Google it, including what’s on the menu in Kazakhstan.

Photographer Phill Magakoe and I are in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, for a week, and we’re trying to decide what to have for lunch. With a little help from Google, we order andizhan pilau (rice cooked in broth, with veg and meat) and kuyrdak (meat stew), both national dishes; we chickened out of the besbarmak option (horsemeat).

Outside the city of Astana straddles a river, under overcast skies that are still light late into the evening. You are four hours behind us and although it’s chillier here than Joburg (overcast all day, about 16ºC now, dropping to about 2ºC overnight), we will have more daylight than you: the sun sets at 8.22pm today.

Our official reason for being here was to see the presidential election on Sunday, but we’re aiming to be tourists too.

Our first impressions are good: It’s surprising how odd it feels to be in a city where rush-hour traffic is like Joburg, but walls and fences are unusual, every one of the small trees planted for kilometres along the highway between the airport and the city is neatly pruned to exactly the same height, ready for summer, and we couldn’t spot a single plastic packet blowing in the wind.

This city is relatively new - it was set up as the capital and largely built from scratch over the past two decades - but it doesn’t look like a one-time build. Instead there is an array of architecture, with wonderful, often playful accents: four skyscrapers of varying heights all with the same whimsical wiggle running up their glass sides, a tent-shaped spire, a graceful arched bridge over the river, a building with dozens of small spires, hundreds of tower blocks and skyscrapers all facing the setting sun, a soccer stadium reminiscent of Jozi’s calabash across the road from a glass palace for ice skating, smoke stacks hidden in the distance and many, many cranes building even more.

South Africans may remember Kazakhstan from about a decade ago, when Mark Shuttleworth headed off to space from the Baikonur cosmodrome, west of Astana. That cosmodrome is still leased by Russia but it sets the tone for Kazakhstan. “Kazakhstan is space country,” says Marat Nurguzhin, acting president of the national company Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary.

He should know: His company builds spacecraft.

At the new National Space Center outside Astana, they’re building phase 2 of a massive complex which will produce spacecraft. The first satellite, KazEOSat-1, was launched last April and is flying overhead photographing the globe, crossing Kazakhstan six times a day and popping over Mozambique yesterday along the way.

South Africa makes the news here via international TV channels for all the wrong reasons this week, while other channels remind viewers that soap operas are an international habit. The oddest viewing is the American home rebuild programme Extreme Makeover: Home Edition which is dubbed into Russian or Kazakh, with Kazakh or Russian subtitles, while the most universally understood is probably the music channel.

We have a week of exploring ahead, trying to understand local politics, what Kazakhstan and South Africa want to learn from each other, and how to shop if you can’t speak or read Kazakh or Russian.

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