Kazakhstan is vast and everything is very far away from everything else, so we needed to find a guide with a car. Andrei was a graphic designer when he wasn’t a guide and he often seemed to speak in Photohop English, speaking about the landscape using terms like layers, background, foreground, contrast, shadow, dimension, shape, focus.

We drove east to Charyn Canyon (‘like the Grand Canyon, only prettier’ is how it’s advertised) and descended into the Valley of Castles. We were alone, apart from the occasional little eagle and steppe mouse. The rocks towered above, balancing impossibly. Andrei asked us what we saw in the rocks, and we all saw a squirrel crossed with a turkey.

At the end of the Valley of Castles we came to a fast-flowing river lined with sogdian ash trees, ancient and rare trees which were just coming into leaf. Andrei pulled out a picnic: a stove and coffee pot, and a Russian Easter kulich. No Kazakh walk is complete without cups of steaming tea or coffee, even if only drunk out of a plastic water bottle cut in half.

Andrei asked if we wanted to go extreme. It wasn’t really that extreme, but it was a proper little adventure across sandy slopes and steep rock faces. We climbed up around the back to reach the top of the canyon, where the view was spectacular. The canyon stretched out for 200km and behind it were snowy mountains in the background. We saw other people beginning to arrive as specks on the dusty road below.

Afterwards, driving towards our guesthouse, an approaching storm turned the sky black. Hailstones the size of chickpeas beat down on the car, and the landscape turned white. A man galloped past, huddled in a duvet-like coat, while the poor animals stood looking miserable, covered in hail and snow. The villages we passed through were deserted and covered in a thin white blanket of snow, while smoke rose out of the grim and damp-looking wooden houses.

The storm had missed the village of Saty. We arrived at a smart wooden guesthouse and sat down with our host on a sofa next to the stove. ‘Why are you vegetarian?’ he asked Sophie. ‘Meat is power.’ There was no arguing with him. After warming up and sweating everything out in the tiny wooden banya, we returned inside and were presented with a noble Kazakh attempt at vegetarian food: a mountain of roast potatoes and a few carrots. But there also were glass bowls with the most delicious blackberry jam and plates of freshly made baursak, Kazakh fried bread. And more rahat chocolate of course.

The following day we drove towards the Kyrgyz border, an area patrolled by guards on horseback with rifles slung across their chests, looking just like cowboys in westerns apart from their great padded coats. We showed our passports to enter into the mountains and arrived at Kolsai Lake. It glittered and sparkled in rainbow colours between fir-covered mountainsides. We walked to a part of the lake still frozen and sat on a jetty drinking tea, watching ducks fly overhead and listening to the deep, alarming, thuddering sounds of the ice sheet cracking.

I think the most beautiful place we visited though was Kaindy Lake. Formed after a landslide in 1911 which blocked the river and flooded a forest, it is a haunting place. Skeletal, bleached tree trunks still stand in the water, utterly dead but together creating a strangely alive and alert atmosphere.

On the long drive home we listened to Andrei’s music: Armenian rappers boasting about being macho and women demanding big beards, a satirical Russian song about Barbie, Ukrainian bikers dreaming of freedom, a rapper’s remix of Borodin’s Prince Igor, and – best of all – a song I’ve been looking for since my trip to Georgia (in 2014!) about there being no train from Moscow to London.

We drove across the vast, flat, open landscape, past distant snowy mountains over which the sun was beginning to set, watching an eagle briefly fly along with us, almost like a dolphin. As it grew dark, we passed along a deep black canyon in which raged a white foaming river, and once more returned to that flat, never-ending grassland, as we listened to a beautiful Ukrainian voice sing his love song to the sky.

Kazakhstan was a strange place. Between the Russian dominance and Uzbek, Korean, Georgian, Ukrainian or American influence, it was full of contradictions: rough concrete houses and super-expensive shops, beautiful mosques and aisles full of vodka, developed cities and a yearning to live in a yurt and kidnap a wife.  Answers to questions conflicted: the stress in Kazakh is always on the first syllable said one man, but another told us it was always on the last syllable. Yes, it is still possible to visit the wild apple forests, but no, they were all cut down years ago. But come back in autumn – it’s really beautiful then, they promised.

Shymkent has long been called the Texas of Kazakhstan, a wild place full of crime and gangsters where everyone and everything is out of control. It’s 11 hours from Almaty, but only an hour and a half from Tashkent in Uzbekistan. ‘Be careful,’ we were warned in Almaty, ‘they’re not friendly like we are here.’

From the train we were met by our guesthouse owner, who offered to take us on a tour of the city. We were driven around night-time Shymkent, past the screams of a funfair, the mayor’s palatial official residence, and streets full of neon tulips (tulips, like apples, apparently originate from Kazakhstan).

‘What do they say about Shymkent in Almaty?’ he asked. An awkward silence. ‘You don’t need to worry about crime here. Everyone is much friendlier in Shymkent.’

Southern Kazakhstan borders Uzbekistan and is in some ways closer to the settled culture of the Uzbeks than the nomadic life of Kazakhs. Unlike cities such as Almaty and Astana, which were largely built by Russian invaders, some of the towns in southern Kazakhstan still seem as though they belong to an ancient past. The most famous of these is Turkestan, which has been inhabited since the 4^th century BC, but which became famous in the 14^th century when Tamerlane ordered the building of a magnificent mausoleum to the sufi saint Khoja Ahmed Yassawi.

We reached the mausoleum through a stone archway and along a path lined with trees thick with blossom. From a distance, its colours looked dull, the air clouded by the dust that blows off the steppe. Close up, however, the tiled walls are bright and lively, exquisite in pattern and colour. Women walked slowly around the perimeter, both hands on the walls, head bowed, feeling their way as they prayed. Birds swooped in and out of their nests in the building, squeezing through the intricate geometric lattices. On the south-eastern side, the Mausoleum revealed its unfinished state: only bare brown brick remains, undecorated and with wooden beams still sticking out. It had a very different kind of beauty: austere, meditative, calm. This mausoleum is considered by some to be one of the three greatest pilgrimage sites of Islam, second only to the Haji (some even consider three pilgrimages here to be worth one pilgrimage to Mecca).

We found our way to the ticket kiosk and bought tickets at the rate for ‘citizens from the far abroad’. Inside the mausoleum was a large white hall with bare walls and scalloped ceiling, and a magnificent great cauldron in the centre, two metres in diameter and made of seven kinds of metal. Along a tomb-like corridor we found a wooden grille, through which we could see the green tomb of Yassawi. Pilgrims sat here on benches, praying and talking to family and friends.

Surrounding the main mausoleum were mosques, smaller mausoleums for other holy people, and a bath house. As we were looking at an old wooden column carved with calligraphy, on top of which perched a pigeon’s nest with tiny chicks, a group of teenage boys came up to us. Without a word, they stood behind us and one held up his phone to take a selfie with us. They went off looking happy, taking more selfies in front of the old Qurans.

A camel sat on a carpet, waiting for tourists, but soon wandered off into the field of blossom. In the distance we could see the bright white mosque newly built by President Nazarbayev, glinting on the hazy horizon. In a canteen we found shubat (fermented camel’s milk) to drink, and then we hunted unsuccessfully through a hall of souvenir stalls, which was empty apart from a few stall owners hiding among their felt hats, miniature dombras and bracelets made of wolf claws.

On the bus back to our guesthouse, the conductor wanted to know what we were doing and where we were going. In between collecting bus fares, he would come back to us and resume a conversation through Google translate. It was a conversation often repeated, in restaurants, in the banya, on the train, with policemen, with printers, with shopkeepers: what are you doing in Kazakhstan? Tourists! Why do you want to come to Kazakhstan on holiday?! How much does it cost to come here? Where are you going? What are you doing? Are people friendly here?

The ethnic diversity of Kazakhstan is fascinating. Between all central Asian countries there has always been movement – Shymkent, for example, is the heart of Uzbek Kazakhstan – but Kazakhstan’s history makes it especially diverse. After the absorption of Kazakhstan into the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union, it came to be known as a place of exile and forced labour. As well as the famous exiles such as Dostoevsky (who was interested in the ‘indigenous’ question in Kazakhstan) and Trotsky, thousands of people from North Korea to Ukraine were imprisoned in Kazakh gulags. Today, among populations of Russians, Koreans, Germans, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Uyghur, Chechens, Tartars and others, memories of this past are fading, or being deliberately ignored, and only the odd comment serves as a startling reminder.

In Shymkent we saw no trace of the wild west. The long Uzbek houses make parts of the town look like a village, with narrow streets through which men wander with trolleys, crying their wares. Drivers are astonishingly well behaved. We needed to print our train tickets, so we found a large copy centre where a group of young women and an old man sat. Walking into the room brought stares and the now familiar sensation of extreme self-consciousness, as though our mere presence would sustain conversation for the rest of the day. With much giggling they asked the usual questions (what are you doing in Kazakhstan! you came here on holiday?!), then refused to take payment, preferring payment in the form of English practice.

Another exchange took place in a canteen where we were having breakfast. We were approached by a kindly and distinguished looking gentleman who wanted to practise his English. Marat (like the Frenchman, he said, drawing a finger across his neck) was a wind power engineer who told us about his dream for Kazakhstan to be the largest producer of wind power. The more vodka he drank, the more enthusiastic he got about wind energy, and boasted that Kazakh wind turbines could be two and a half, later three, times more efficient than other countries. He’d won an innovation award in California and would be at Expo 2017 in Astana in the summer. I looked him up afterwards and he really had invented a wind turbine that was one and a half times more efficient than other types.

Marat told us that all Kazakhs must know their family members up to seven generations back, but that he could go twenty generations back. He insisted on getting more cake and tea, and taught us how to politely pour it out: the less full the cup, the more honoured the person is, and by the end we were pouring out thimblefulls to sip at every few minutes. He punched himself on his heart with pride every time he mentioned the word Kazakh. His greatest dream was not to build wind turbines or win prizes, but to retire and return to the heart of Kazakhstan, to live on the steppe with his horses, dogs and cows. For now, though, he could only wait for his lift to the windy plains of Otrar.