Gone fishing in big cat country

He told the story very simply: 'It was perhaps a bit taller than a man but crouching, very powerfully built and obviously quite shy.

'Its body appeared to be matted with hair. I saw it very clearly in the fading light against the snow and it moved away very quickly when it saw me.

'I suppose it was unmistakably what you would call a yeti or abominable snowman.'

Kazbek Valiev, director of Kan Tengri Expeditions in Kazakhstan, has climbed some of the most dangerous peaks in the world in the Himalayas and on the Chinese border over the past quarter of a century.

To be a great mountaineer you have to be more than a bit crazy, but he is articulate, extremely intelligent and not at all given to fantasy. So when Kazbek told me, almost matter-of-factly, that he'd twice seen abominable snowmen on his travels, I just accepted that he had.

He said he wasn't scared at the time, simply fascinated and disappointed that the great creatures moved away so quickly in the bleak, white landscape, disappearing all too soon.

Kazbek is president of the Kazakh Federation of Mountaineering and Rock Climbing and the only Kazakh to have climbed Everest. They are very proud of him in Kazakhstan. They call him Snow Leopard.

He and his brother, Dauren, run sporting trips to the interior of this fascinating country. I was out there fishing but I could just as easily have been trekking, photographing wildlife, bird-spotting, helicopter skiing or even hunting. There are bears, lynx and leopards in the mountains. There are some 695 species of mammals, birds and reptiles in Kazakhstan, and in addition more than 150 species of fish.

The country itself is enormous yet has a population of only 16 million because much of it is barely habitable. It lies to the east of the Caspian Sea and stretches right across to the border of China. It was part of old Russia but has been independent since 1991. It has no sea coastline and the land ranges from baking hot, sandy desert to thickly wooded forest and snowcovered mountains.

Many Kazakhs still live a semi-nomadic existence, moving with their herds into summer pastures every year. They eat and sleep in yurts, the ancient lean-to dwellings of the nomads, built of thick felt and wooden laths. They are also incredibly hospitable. We drank tea and vodka sitting in alpine meadows with mountain lakes full of trout around us and the smell of wild flowers and blossoms everywhere in the spring air.

The vodka wasn't exactly smooth. It took the lining off your mouth and would have brought down a buffalo - but it would have been churlish to say no!

The temperature was well over 35C every day - and this was in May. In midsummer it goes well into the 40s, and in winter there is snow on the ground in many places from November until at least April.

Despite the heat, there is a lot of water in Kazakhstan - 85,000 rivers and more than 48,000 lakes. Predictably the fishing potential is awesome.

Martin Founds of Anglers World, Bill Chisholm and I were joining up with a few intrepid Englishmen who were camped somewhere seven hours from the capital, Almaty, in the middle of nowhere along the Ili river, probably about 200 miles from the Chinese border.

Joe Taylor, a mad-keen angler from Bicester in Oxfordshire, had pioneered the setting-up of a surprisingly luxurious camp on an island in a backwater off the main river several years ago - although how he ever even found the island is a mystery.

The whole area is a reed jungle. The reeds grow to more than 30ft and are virtually impenetrable.

Quite often as we drifted too close in our boat we would hear a stampeding of hooves from just inside the dense vegetation. The noise came from herds of what they call the killer pig - wild boar - and, on the advice of our guides, we resisted the temptation to go ashore for a closer look.

The high reeds and thick marshlands are an absolute mecca for the most incredible birdlife. Eagles soared round our heads all day. Marsh harriers and bitterns flew regularly around our surprisingly sturdy old boats.

And if cuckoos are something of a rarity in England, they are a positive pest in that part of Kazakhstan. They are as numerous as wasps back home. Their relentless call provides a jabbering backcloth of sound all day and night, when they are joined by the croaking of a thousand giant frogs.

If the noise is fantastic, the night skies above are even more so. I have never seen such starry skies anywhere in the world. Even on a moonless night, we could read by starlight alone.

And if it was busy in the skies above, it was also all going on in the waters beneath our boats. The lakes and rivers of Kazakhstan are teeming with fish.

We had come to assess the potential for landing carp - today's in fish - in the area. This would be of great interest to visiting British anglers, especially as regular direct flights to Almaty take only about seven hours. However, after a couple of days' hard fishing, it seemed that in that one particular part of that huge country, although there are plenty of carp, they are simply not very big.

I suspect there will be places in Kazakhstan where they are absolutely enormous, but on the Ili river we saw carp up to no more than about 15 or 20lb. The British record nudges 60lb.

There used to be enormous carp in the river - the Russians once farmed them commercially - but they have clearly been decimated by catfish which are everywhere.

I've never really catfished before but now it seemed clear that this was the best sport to be had. Anatoly, my amiable Kazakh guide, set Bill and me up with tackle that seemed, frankly, crude but was to prove to be only just strong enough.

He then took us out on to the river and began 'clonking'. I had vaguely heard of this technique before but never really understood it. The clonk consists of a small, flat, wooden object with which the guide beats the surface with a strange hollow slapping noise as the boat drifts downcurrent.

The baits are fished as close as possible to the rear of the boat, right alongside the clonk, only about a foot below the surface, and the plan is to draw the aggressive catfish up from the depths.

It felt utterly ridiculous and looked more so. However, after about an hour of this nonsense, as we were drifting round an island in the fast current, the clonk clearly worked.

My rod screamed as a big fish took right by Anatoly's hand and dived straight back down to the bottom in more than 20ft of water. There then began a fight with one of the most powerful creatures I've ever hooked in my life.

It sulked on the bottom for minutes at a time. It screamed off downstream, banging the line with its massive tail, somewhere deep underwater. It ripped 70, 80, 90 yards of line off at a time in completely unstoppable runs.

Next it swam upstream against the current and the full power of the motor on our boat - it felt absolutely enormous-And when it began to tire and we saw it for the first time roll on the surface beside the boat, that's exactly what it was. Enormous! Huge! Absolutely colossal!

It looked like an enormous serpent. Its head was as big as an armchair. Its huge, tapering body was as long as our boat, which posed an immediate problem.

Somehow Anatoly got his strong arms around the back of the head of the giant fish and heaved. Of course, at the pivotal point, once the head was in, the enormous body had to follow. The problem then was that there was no room left for Bill or me.

Perched precariously on the very front of our suddenly all-too-inadequate-looking boat, with the massive mouth of the catfish only inches from our bare feet, we raced back up river to our camp, pouring water on our giant prize all the way back.

We weighed it in the equivalent of a kiddies' paddling pool, took lots of photographs and then returned it to the depths of the river, into which it happily sank and swam strongly away. It weighed just over 130lb and was the biggest fish I've ever caught.

Over the next couple of days, Bill had two more, both over 140lb, Joe Taylor had one of 152lb and I lost a second fish that was clearly much bigger than my first one.

It had been a fantastic three days. It's probably the best catfishing in the world. They've been caught on rod and line in the Ili river now to well over 200lb, and there are even rumours of 300-pounders. The fishing potential is awesome.

We returned to Almaty for a long-overdue bath, a change of clothes and a night out. In a club called the Tropicana we drank Kazakh and Georgian wine and ate local trout and huge steaks.

Also on the menu was a dish described as 'deep-fried sea bear' - but none of us was brave enough to ask for it. God knows what it was.

We even danced to such up-tothe-minute, cutting-edge music as a Kazakh cover version of the Searcher's Sixties hit Needles And Pins.

The next day, with Dauren and Kazbek, we went up in the bestequipped helicopter I've ever flown in high into the Tien Shan mountains which border China. We had spent a week in baking heat, but once we had got over the alpine streams and meadows we found thick snow up among the high peaks. These are some of the greatest mountains in the world, some of the last great unclimbed peaks, the home of snow leopards and, of course, the yeti!

As well as being the only Kazakh to have climbed Mount Everest and probably one of the few people to have had two face-to-face meetings with an abominable snowman, Kazbek has one other claim to fame. From the very helicopter that we were in, in 1998, he rescued a lost climber at the greatest height any helicopter has ever flown to get a man down from a mountain.

The guy in question was an experienced Japanese climber who had often climbed with Kazbek. Delirious from altitude sickness, he had resisted all attempts to rescue him by the rest of his party, cut himself off from them and said he wanted to die.

But Kazbek is not a man to take no for an answer. With exactly the same crew that flew us through the Tien Shan mountains that beautiful May morning, he was determined to get his old friend down to hospital. They stripped out the helicopter's windows and doors to make it lighter and somehow got right up to the terrifying peak of the snowcovered mountain and hauled the protesting and bewildered climber in and down to safety.

The climber said later that when he saw what appeared to be a helicopter coming over the peak, he was convinced he was already dead - because helicopters didn't fly at that height. It couldn't be done. Yet, somehow, Kazbek and his crew made it, high in the daunting frozen peaks that form the impenetrable border between China and Kazakhstan.

And the height of that extraordinary rescue was just over 23,430 feet!

Getting there
British Airways (0845 7733377) flies to Almaty in Kazakhstan three times a week from Heathrow. Return fares start at £556. Anglers World Adventures (0116 2553497; www.anglersworldadventures.co.uk) offers tailormade holidays to Kazakhstan starting at £1,160 for a week.