Somewhere on the vast, empty Ustyurt plateau, between the Caspian and the dried-out Aral Sea, the map reads Saigachy-Zhideyli, and then it goes quiet. The Ustyurt is a high, flat desert of clay and limestone, cut at its edges by sheer white cliffs called chinks, and it lies partly in Kazakhstan and partly in Uzbekistan. It is one of the emptiest places in Eurasia.
The name gives the clue to the animal. The saiga is a small, odd-looking antelope with a swollen nose that filters dust and warms the air in winter, and herds of them once crossed these plateaux in huge numbers. Poaching and disease cut them to a tiny remnant by the early 2000s, and in 2015 a mass die-off killed more than half the world's saiga in Kazakhstan, but protection has helped, and the population has recovered a good deal in recent years. A rider might see a herd moving on the horizon, nervous and fast, or a lone wolf or a kulan, the wild ass.
The desert has a stark beauty. The sky is huge, the colours are subtle shades of ochre and grey, with sparse wormwood and saxaul scrub, and the silence is complete. In spring, tulips and other flowers carpet the clay for a few weeks, and in autumn the air is clear and the nights are cold. Summer is searingly hot, and winter brings blizzards and temperatures below minus twenty.
For travel, I must be blunt: this is expedition country. Roads, where they exist, are rough tracks of sand, gravel and broken asphalt, with no services for hundreds of kilometres, and navigation is by GPS. Fuel, water and food must be carried, and you should have recovery equipment, spares and a satellite communicator, and ideally travel with a second vehicle and local guides. Permits may be needed for border zones and reserves. In an emergency you may be a day or more from help.