A people who still love nature

In Kazakhstan, the rivers flow freely and the people seem to have taken an oath to preserve the land. Nature never looked so tranquil to my eyes, spaces were never so boundless, I felt my thoughts did not echo, but flowed freely.

The country is also blessed with beautiful people. It almost seemed like heaven, and we were the outsiders; people of our ethnic origin were hard to come across. As we walked through the markets of Charyn, people would ask to take pictures of us. Rumour has it that Arabs came here during the Islamic conquests and inter-married with Kazakhs; some of the Arabs married into Chinese families. The descendants of both these people still live in Kazakhstan.

"You know them when you look at them," one of my local friends told me. "They like you Arabs," he said. I told my friend we liked the residents even more. Time and again my travels take me to interesting places, but Kazakhstan was like the last undiscovered frontier.

We went to the ranges by the Charyn river to hunt, we had with us three ex-Soviet military men, one of them was "with the environment"; he said he had been patrolling the mountains east of China since the nineties. He smoked heavily while we found our way through the mountains looking for pheasants, his studied footsteps taking care to preserve his stamina and provide for longer resistance. He would find the steepest entrances through the rivers and mountains and venture through them.

He seemed, stubborn at first, but I wouldn't dare let him get out of sight, I followed him throughout. He seemed to know the place, and he wanted me to know that.

I was startled by his scream as he called out to his dog, "Jenia, Jenia."

Jenia came along. He had in him, to some degree, the aura of the USSR. An old Arabic proverb goes "the dog is like his owner" and Jenia couldn't resemble his owner more — he was by far the most disciplined dog I have seen. Indeed he seemed like a robot. Without him, our hunt was futile. Two of my friends felt so excited with the unique energy of the place, they followed some of the pheasants uphill on foot. Jenia followed them, too. He was always, as they say, "hands on."

Perfect teamwork

We camped by the lake on the first day of our expedition; the winds picked up and it was really cold. The men who were with us had created the perfect team, one would look after the cooking and the other the guns and ammunition and the third decided on the coordinates and which direction to take.

China stood tall before us; we could see the cascade of mountains. We would pass by huts or other hunting posts every 100 miles or so while we made our way up the range. As we moved through the mountains, they spoke of a place — the "Valley of Castles" as they called it, which was formally referred to as the Charyn Canyon. It was a place of huge red sandstone structures wrought by the wind. The whole valley seemed alive. The only other place that is comparable to this is the Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA. The place was protected by the police, but then again there was no one there — it was like we were the last humans on earth!

We decided to leave the car and take a dip in the water. One of the team members who was a pharmacist got me some berries and I decided to have them with the water. Delicious, I thought. I told him to bring me some more but as he ran off happy to oblige, someone yelled out: "Wait, those are poisonous!" Looking visibly guilty, he looked at me and said that "a few of them will not cause much harm".

-  Mohammad Al Qasimi is a recent graduate of the American University of Sharjah.