Aktau, between the desert and the sea

One of my favourite Soviet films is ‘Irony of Fate’, in which a Muscovite gets drunk and flies to Leningrad, where he goes to a building with the same number in a district with the same name, and lets himself into the apartment he believes to be his home — which instead turns out to be the home of an attractive woman. In the film, even most of the furniture and fittings in the two apartments are the same, mass produced in the same Soviet factories. 

I unintentionally reenacted this during a visit to the seaside city of Aktau,, where I rented a flat for a week in a block in one of the microdistricts — that looked exactly the same as all the other blocks in all the other microdistricts. 

I was in Aktau for a conference on investment in West Kazakhstan, but arrived a few days early to get to know Aktau and also take a side trip to the oil town of Zhanaozen. 

Plight of Kazakhstan’s mono-towns

The regional investment conference was the first of several organised by the Kazakh government, in what was clearly a response to the Zhanaozen tragedy. 

By bringing in international investors they would be able to diversify the “mono-towns”, which relied on a single industry like oil or metals, create new jobs and keep people happy. 

It was also good preparation for when the oil or chrome or coal or whatever ran out, after which the future of those towns would be bleak indeed. 

Aktau is the regional capital, built on the shore of the Caspian Sea and surrounded by desert. 

The flight from Astana to Aktau took almost three hours, it was already dark as my taxi drove along the causeway from the airport into town. 

I saw long queues of cars at the petrol stations. Kazakhstan’s three refineries are nowhere near Aktau so even though the region produces a lot of the country’s oil they still sometimes have petrol shortages. 

50 shades of chilly

I spent the first night at the Aktau Hotel on the sea front, which turned out to be a slightly modernised Soviet era hotel. (I couldn’t afford the brand new hotels catering to oil workers.)

The air had been warm and damp when I arrived (in sharp contrast to Astana where there were already frosts at night), but the wind got up during the night and I was woken by a furious lashing at the window. The next morning I saw it was a thick black cable that had come untethered from somewhere and was hanging loose down the side of the building. 

The water in the bathroom was stone cold. I sat on the floor and read 50 Shades of Grey, that year’s sensation, for five minutes while I waited for it to heat up before conceding defeat and taking a quick ice-cold shower. 

Unfortunately there was no curtain on the plastic cubicle and both my clothes and the book were soaked. 

Autumn sun

I left the book on the windowsill to dry in the sun, but even after that it still looked like I’d been up to something unsavoury with it. I’d have to hide it in the second row of books on my bookcase when I got back to Astana. 

Outside it was a warm and dazzlingly sunny day even at the beginning of September. The bushes along the sides of the wide road were still in flower and there was a salty chemical tang in the air. 

The wind had dropped but drifts of golden sand had been blown up along the  broken down curbs, in the holes in the pavements and into the flowerbeds. 

Aktau’s unique address system 

I found the apartment with great difficulty. In 2012, Aktau was a city of around 170,000 people but it had originally been built in the 1960s as a camp for oil workers and micro-districts of low concrete apartment blocks had been put up seemingly at random as more workers arrived. 

Rather than street names, each flat has three numbers – micro-district, then block, then flat. But while the micro-districts were numbered these weren’t marked anywhere and they weren’t in any order – for example micro-district six where I was staying was between two and eight, and across the road from 22. The blocks also seemed to be in random order. 

Apparently Aktau residents pride themselves on the city’s unique numbering system. 

Technical water 

When I eventually found the right flat after asking several people, I found the plump middle-aged landlady wearing a long loose flowered dress like many of the women in the street. She was wiping the floor with a very grey cloth but dropped it in a bucket of even greyer water to greet me. 

I soon discovered the reason for this; the taps in the flat ran greasy greyish “technical water” – sea water desalinated by the local nuclear power plant. 

This can only be used for washing as it isn’t drinkable, and I found it left my skin, clothes and dishes covered with a greasy sheen. They had normal water at the hotels but apparently the residents were stuck with technical water. 

Traditional Kazakhstan 

Having stocked up on some groceries, including two five-litre bottles of water, from the local shop, I sat by the wide window reading my book and watching the Kazakh families go about their business — young couples deep in teasing conversation, women hanging out washing or trudging by with shopping bags, men tinkering with their cars. Little black-haired black-eyed children darted about in the overgrown gardens around the apartment blocks.

Western Kazakhstan is supposed to be the most traditional part of the country – the “most Kazakh” people say – and I noticed many of the older women and even some of the younger ones were in long loose dresses with headscarves. The young men still had the same tight jeans, fitted t-shirts and macho swagger as the ones in Almaty though.

Reenacting ‘Irony of Fate’

One evening two friends-of-friends who worked in the oil industry in Aktau invited me out for dinner. 

At an open air restaurant, we drank beer, ate a surprisingly tasty pasta dish and watched the huge orange sun sink slowly down below the Caspian. 

Later we went on to the Shamrock Irish bar, a rowdy expat hangout. It was much too noisy to talk so I sat with my friends and some of their acquaintances, nodding amiably. 

After more beers and a few shots of whisky, the chances of me finding my way to the right block in the right micro-district were low, so luckily one of the oil workers asked her driver to drop me off. 

I tottered up the stairs in my high-heeled sandals, trying not to trip on the broken concrete. I guessed there wasn’t much burglary in Aktau because my key was basically just a prong of metal that must have been the easiest thing in the world to duplicate. 

Getting to what seemed, in the light of the single bulb illuminating the stairwell, to be the right floor, I jabbed it into the corresponding hole. 

I had been wiggling it for a while when I realised the door looked different, and that I was on the floor above my flat. 

Unlike in ‘Irony of Fate’, the key didn’t open the other flat — and I didn’t get to meet a handsome man inside. Instead, I made my way downstairs and eventually let myself in through the right door for a much-needed sleep.