Steppe in Style: adventures in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Winters are tough when you’re living in Astana, one of the three coldest capitals in the world (the others are Ulanbataar and Ottawa). This is my experience of how to survive winter in Astana, when the temperatures can fall as low as -50C. As November moves into December, the days and nights get steadily colder.…

We drove in a motorcade from Kyzlyorda to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, forcing the few cars we passed onto the verge. Eventually amid some hilly land to the right of the road I saw the mushroom domes of Baikonur in the distance.  We were still some way from the Baikonur Cosmodrome when we were told to…

On day in early November I set off for Kyzylorda, a city hadn’t visited since my trip to Zhezkazgan for two and a half years earlier.  Kyzlyorda airport was one of the big square buildings jokingly known as “chicken sheds”. We were disgorged straight onto the tarmac outside the terminal. Inside, despite the largeness of…

There was a small foreign press corps in Almaty, but I soon realised I was the only western journalist in Astana, though there were reporters for the Russian and Chinese media.  This was confirmed at the first press conference of the government’s new Central Communications Service, launched in 2012.  At first, I was a bit…

Central Asian women are great enthusiasts for personal grooming, and dedicate a lot of their time and money to looking good. Beauty salons offering manicures, pedicures, waxing and other treatments aren’t hard to find — there’s usually a Salon Krasota on most street corners. But you need to choose among the man the right one.…

Ever since I moved to Astana, I’d found myself writing more about agriculture, as the city is in the heart of Kazakhstan’s grain belt.  In fact Astana was previously called Tselinograd after the disastrous Virgin Lands campaign in the 1950s, when large parts of north Kazakhstan and other previously uncultivated land was turned over to…

People often ask where I get my ideas for articles from, as if it’s some mysterious process known only to the initiated. Usually it’s a question of reading everything relevant — in my case all the news, reports, social media and other material I can find about Central Asia — talking to people, keeping my…

Shortly before I turned 35 I decided I wanted to enrich my life, which during the winter in Astana had mainly been spent working or hanging round the flat eating comfort food and watching box sets.  One thing I’d wanted to be able to do for a while was to learn dressmaking so I could…

The pensions story ran right through the first half of 2013. It started as a straight economic story, as the pensions system was being overhauled. But it didn’t end there. As the winter turned into spring a rare movement of mass public discontent started gathering pace as first hundreds then thousands of Kazakhstanis mobilised against the…

For a person born and brought up on a small and densely populated island, the vast amount of empty space in Kazakhstan is hard to compute.  Globally, Kazakhstan has the third lowest density after Australia and Canada with just 16 people per square mile, compared to 413 in England.  Most of these are concentrated in…