The true story

ALMATY, Kazakhstan – At a national park an hour’s drive from the largest city in the ninth-largest country on earth, men with broad smiles and sharp knives crouch over the steaming entrails of a horse whose meat they’ll be savoring for months.

Back in town at a Wi-Fi-friendly coffeehouse, wafer-thin women clad in Dolce & Gabbana and stiletto boots nibble smoked salmon sandwiches against a backdrop of Toyota Sequoias and Lexus sedans.

And in the chilly parking lot of what’s billed as the world’s highest Olympic skating rink, members of a champagne- and vodka-fueled wedding party – one of 70 or 80 a day on weekends – kick up their heels to a traditional Caucasus folk dance called the lezginka.

Welcome to the glorious, previously obscure nation of Kazakhstan: land of horseflesh eaters, fashionistas, romantics and a foul-mouthed TV reporter named Borat.

Not.

British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, whose Kazakh alter ego Borat Sagdiyev has been dissing this Central Asian republic since 2000 in the TV series “Da Ali G Show,” catapulted into the global zeitgeist with his hit mockumentary “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”

The film’s real targets may be American bigotry and xenophobia, but what rankles Kazakhs is the depiction of Borat’s homeland – including, among other insults, the fact that he shares his village home with a cow and is so unfamiliar with indoor plumbing that he washes his face in a toilet bowl.

This former Soviet state previously pulled the plug on Cohen’s Web site, and threatened legal action after he showed up at last year’s MTV Europe Music Awards in an Air Kazakh prop plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle.

Officials have since backpedaled, inviting Cohen to visit and discover that “women not only travel inside buses but also drive their own cars, that we make wine from grapes, (and) that Jews can freely attend synagogues.”

Sayat Tour, a local travel agency accustomed to sending Kazakhs out of the country for R&R rather than welcoming foreign tourists, recently launched a nine-day “Jagzhemash!!! See the Real Kazakhstan” itinerary that promises to “greatly inspire, hearten and energize you” and “hopefully bring our peoples closer together.”

A land of startling contrasts

Thanks to its massive reserves of oil and gas, Kazakhstan boasts one of the region’s fastest-growing economies.

In the cultural and financial center of Almaty, a city of 1.2 million sprawled at the base of the snow-capped Tian Shen mountains near the southeastern border with Kyrgyzstan, crumbling Soviet apartment buildings stand next to garish casinos. City markets sell fermented camel milk and horse sausage, while European designer boutiques hawk $1,400 sterling liquor flasks and $4,000 leather jackets.

Nearly devoid of private cars a few years ago, Almaty’s tree-lined streets are now clogged with vehicles – which, in turn, have created a perennial shroud of smog.

Most Almaty residents have never heard of Cohen’s Borat and his assaults on Kazakh pride. Though English is taught in public schools, Russian language and cultural influences still hold sway, and home-based Internet access remains a rarity.

But among those who have, the reaction to their newfound notoriety is nearly universal: dismay at Cohen’s depictions of Kazakh life, and worry that gullible foreigners will accept his outrageous assertions at face value.

“We don’t live in yurts, and we don’t drive camels. This is modern country, but many people in America think Kazakhstan is in the Middle Ages,” sputters Almaty college student Dias Murzakhanov.

An hour from Almaty at the 10,000-foot Chimbulak ski resort – which lost a bid for the 2014 Olympic Winter Games, but will host the 2011 Asian Winter Games – Kazakh public relations executive and former BBC producer Daulet Zhumadil notes that new slope-side homes are fetching upward of $1 million.

He invites a visitor to “breathe the freshest air in the world” (fresher than Almaty’s, at any rate).

Pointing to a trio of babushkas (Russian for “grandmothers”) waiting for their young snowboarders to return from the slopes, Zhumadil breaks into a sly grin: “Sacha Cohen was not correct,” he says. “We don’t use these women to power our ski lifts.”

There are several theories about “Borat,” Zhumadil says.

The film could be “a plot of Hillary Clinton to discredit George Bush by making Americans look bad.” Or maybe someone in Kazakhstan’s opposition party “tries to make the black PR to show Kazakhstan in negative colors.”

Or, he says, Borat’s homeland “could be just accidental. (Cohen) sucked it from the finger and said, ‘Let it be Kazakhstan.’ “

Almaty-based Summer Coish, co-editor of a new magazine about Central Asia called Steppe, says Borat’s creators were on to something: Kazakhstan is a “blank spot on the map” to even the most educated and peripatetic travelers.

Cultural learnings abound

A stop along the ancient Silk Road trading route and once home to nomadic horsemen who traced their origins to Genghis Khan, Kazakhstan’s vast grasslands and deserts were a dumping ground for political prisoners and other undesirables during the Stalin era.

The Cold War started here when the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear weapon at Semipalatinsk, and Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome launched the world’s first manned orbital flight in 1961.

The country’s daunting distances have helped keep tourism to a trickle, despite such draws as mountain climbing, hunting with eagles and falcons and overnight stays in traditional yurts (now used seasonally by shepherds who spend their winters in heated apartments).

The Almaty-based Ecotourism Information Resource Centre, a 2-year-old tour company that’s the first of its kind in Kazakhstan, will host about 400 international travelers this year – up from 130 the year before.

And the boorish Borat may be a blessing in a cheap-suited disguise: According to the London Observer, the foreign currency firm Travelex has had to order more of the Kazakh currency, the tenge, to meet a recent surge in demand by British travelers.

Whether newly curious Americans will brave a long journey (11 time zones from the East Coast) to sip horse milk, browse for antique carpets and hike through the lair of the endangered snow leopard remains to be seen.

But Sayat Tour’s Talgat Dairov is optimistic.

“Most don’t believe people will come here for touristic purposes,” Dairov concedes. But he has received more than 50 inquiries since launching his Borat tour.

Some, he hopes, will be “willing to travel to Kazakhstan and see for themselves what the real country, not the Borat version, is really like.”