10/8/2016

About 50 kilometers north of Turkistan, from the main street, you can see the walls of the ancient city of Sauran, which is undoubtedly worth a short detour.
The site is open, and left to itself, the main visitors are herds of horses













Kilometers and kilometers of steppe and nothing, of horses and camels, sand and heat, we cross Qyzylorda and pull straight up to Baikonur.
In the middle of nowhere of the immense Kazakhstan, Baikonur is a place that everyone sooner or later heard of, perhaps forgetting soon after.
It is the seat of the huge cosmodrome built in Soviet times: it is from here that left Sputnik, the first satellite, the dog Laika, Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.
After the closing of the US Space Shuttle program it remained the only place in the world where human beings still depart for space.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has leased from Kazakhstan the area of the cosmodrome and the town of Baikonur, which are now formally Russian territory and are accessible and can be visited only with special and expensive visas and permits.
We can only observe on one hand the antennas from a distance and on the other the checkpoints into the city, around which prowl the usual camels























We sleep in a hotel for truckers on the road, with the innkeeper in google translate mode.
Now, I understand that my Russian is very basic, but with four gestures usually I'm able to make people understand me. No, with her no, she must at all costs stick to the automatic translator of the phone and this means that every ****ing communication requires grueling minutes in which she types and then show you the display with some incoherent phrase in English. And you wanted only to pay the that you took from the fridge...