Beineu, Kazakhstan - waiting for another train
In October 2019, we took a very long train journey from Tbilisi to Shanghai. The route itself is certainly more popular than we first thought, populated by independent travelers across the age range who we met again and again as we traveled further East. While in Geneva last summer, we decided that taking a train to get to Shanghai was also a great way to showcase our most recent music project about portable instruments, besides being an excuse to train our stamina on the road. We were not disappointed!
The four bags that accompanied us through our Journey
Our portable instrumentation at Kurmangazy Conservatory of Music in Almaty.
Talk about avoiding flights and living a more ecologically sustainable life has become an enormous part of the Zeitgeist in Europe today, so we also wanted to decide and see for ourselves what we could do to travel differently. As musicians constantly on the move, it’s not always possible for us to do what’s best, but we wanted to know: what does it really take to avoid what would be a 13 hour flight?
But even more important is the definition of sustainable travel itself: for us it means refusing the act of travel as a commodity, and assuming it as an act of creation. Travel has never been holidays for us, or a series of attractions to buy a ticket for. This trip was our way to discover the arts and music in countries that agencies not necessarily put in their destination packages, and once more a challenge for our music to survive and exist among more diverse audiences.
We had just one month in between the end of a residency and the start of another, giving us just enough time to get from Tbilisi to Shanghai. What we can say after these 30 days of sleepless nights, bumpy rides, shady kazakh hotels, a soviet-era cargo ship with no schedule, platzkart entrepreneurs, and every kind of border security imaginable, is that avoiding a long flight means so much more than just riding the train.
We packed our bags with the handmade instruments that we had built in Switzerland during the summer, a complete set up that could allow us to play anywhere. In the spirit of doing everything ourselves, building our own instruments was another box we had now checked. This over land journey put those instruments to the test, to see if we could get them through customs all the way to China, and play concerts in unconventional spaces along the way.
Now we can say that these instruments made the journey safely to Shanghai, just as we did. We met new people, tasted new foods, discovered new landscapes, and took plenty of photos!
Our Route
We always have more stories than there’s time to tell them. Below is a selection of photos from our journey. We hope that you can experience the slow transition from West to East just like we did.
