International Railroad Discussion > Kazakhstan, part 11. Aktau City

I spent a few days in the city of Aktau, a port on the Caspian Sea.

As I noted in part 8, I arrived fresh and perky after spending 42 hours on the train. The station is in an outlying city called Mangyshlak, which has a few small, tired looking Soviet era housing blocks, but not much else. It was a 10 mile bicycle ride into Aqtau proper, where I went to the Aqtau BnB Hotel, recommended on the Caravanistan website as having a staffperson that could help travelers get on the next ferry to Azerbaijan. US $20/night. Mattresses dated from the time of Brezhnev.

Aqtau, if wikipedia can be trusted, was founded as a uranium mining city in the 1960s. There's no natural fresh water, so originally they had a nuclear powered desalinization plant.

Now it's a big port city, with fancy 15 to 20 story tall residential buildings going up, presumably as vacation apartments for wealthy Kazakhs or Russians. Also unusual in that none of the streets are named. Addresses are just the neighborhood number, the building number, and floor and apartment. 1960s utopian dreams manifest in modern dystopia. And the city is at sea level (and the sea is 82' below sea level), it's probably the warmest place in KZ.

1) After detraining, posing my bicycle with Train 377.

2) Mangyshlak station, outside. Smaller, and more Middle-Eastern looking than eastern KZ architecture.

3) Trainboard



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/03/18 21:21 by gobbl3gook.

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4) Switching movement at the port. This was about 6 miles SE of the city proper.

5) Another switching movement at the port.

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Bonus photos:

6) Aktau was the first city where the bicycling was easy and good. There was a promenade along much of the waterfront, and otherwise the city was fairly flat, roads reasonably wide, etc. (Almaty was all on a hill, and traffic was heavy. Turkistan was okay, but the scenery was monotonous and there weren't really very many places to go). So in the 5 or so days I waited for a ferry I it was easy to get out and enjoy the city.

The Caspian Sea is at 82' below mean sea level. And, by coincidence, the city of Aktau is on a plateau about 80' above water level. So the city is at sea level, but the sea isn't.

This photo is at the north end of the city, looking down at the beginning of the ~3 mile promenade.

7) Soviet housing blocks, seen from the Botanical Garden.

I grew up during the cold war, and was fascinated by the stories I learned about life in Russia -- everyone lives in apartment buildings, everyone gets assigned a job, nobody can move or switch jobs without permission, the people in Russia are good folks, they don't want to bomb us any more than we want to bomb them, it's just the leaders that disagree.

So, it was fascinating, 25 years after the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the USSR, to see how all these things played out. And, people in KZ still live in Soviet era housing blocks. But they shop in modern shopping malls, drive Audis and Fords, and seem to have smoothly adapted to living fairly conventional, capitalist lifestyles.

Locations:
Mangyshlak Station
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6970471,51.3096197,772m/data=!3m1!1e3

Port
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6061652,51.2237322,2003m/data=!3m1!1e3

Seafront
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6652021,51.1351679,1629m/data=!3m1!1e3

Botanical Garden
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6524667,51.159383,647m/data=!3m1!1e3

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Your comments are so good - especially about the standard of living. We did a recent visit to Kaliningrad and were equally impressed especially by the very successful mall near our hotel.
We have done two bike trips to Cuba. You've inspired me to post pictures from those trips. Sadly the Cuban economy has not done as well for the locals, but they were always kind to us, helping us out when things went wrong with our bikes. we in Canada had hoped that the easing of American sanctions would turn things around for Cubans, but sadly I guess that is not to be.