As Borat mania sweeps the UK, Carole Cadwalladr heads to Kazakhstan. They may not drink horse urine or punch goats, but she finds the reality more strange and perplexing than any comedy spoof

Oh, Borat has got it all wrong. Everyone I meet is in agreement on this. Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is not a totalitarian dictator; he is only moderately repressive: banning and intimidating opposition parties, jailing the odd journalist, etc. The country's national drink is not horse piss; it is fermented horse milk that merely tastes of piss. And Jew-baiting is not, actually, a national sport. It's more of a hobby, as in the phrase 'You're as tight as a Jew' or the practice of making 'a Jewish phone call' (when you get the other party to call you back on your landline).

Dilyara, a fresh-faced student of economics in the city of Karaganda, who's showing us around the place and has lived in the States, is quite clear on this. 'There's an image of Jewish people being mean and crafty and good with money but I don't think many people have actually met them. We have Jews but they tend not to announce themselves.'

And then she takes us - Steve, my travelling companion, and me - into a cafe where we have a bit of cake.

'What's it called?' I ask.

'The cake? It is known as "nigger in the foam".'

So, you see, wrong, wrong, wrong. Or, perhaps, just a little bit right. And although the sequences in Sacha Baron Cohen's new film, Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan, that purport to be in Kazakhstan were filmed in Romania, he didn't pick Romania, or Belarus, or Uzbekistan. He picked Kazakhstan.

Poor Kazakhstan. First Stalin, now Borat. It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for the government and its blundering attempts to first sue Cohen and then hire a Western PR firm and launch a debunking marketing offensive - although the fact that Nazarbayev is alleged to have stashed $80m in an offshore account goes some way to mitigating my feelings in this.

Before I left, Erlan Idrissov, the Kazakh ambassador in London, invited me over to the embassy for a little light indoctrination: the economy, fuelled by massive reserves of oil, is booming, he said, they do not rape women, and many illustrious personages have visited the country, including Dick Cheney, the Duke of York, and Chris Tarrant. 'Sacha Baron Cohen is a clever chap. He is Oxford type! He is exploiting people's ignorance of Kazakhstan!'

Which is true, of course. I know almost nothing about Kazakhstan despite having been, that rarest of rare things, a tourist there. I went in 1994 to write a chapter of a guidebook and have nothing but fond memories of my time in Almaty, even then the most cosmopolitan city in central Asia.

I've learnt a thing or two, though, having been endlessly outmanoeuvred by poor but wily peasantfolk whose sense of hospitality was so acute that after a casual encounter of say, an hour, we'd be showered with food, alcohol, gifts, the choice of their sons, horsemeat, and invitations to stay and live with them forever.

This time round, I have come prepared. We are carrying booty, lots of it, and since our first destination involves a 12-hour train trip, I explain the drill to Steve. 'We have to buy a picnic before we get on the train,' I tell him. 'Then, five minutes after you set off, everybody in the compartment whips out their food and you all share.'

But horror! We're caught in a traffic jam, and we board the train late and picnicless. We're sharing with two older woman, Maira and Tanya. 'Yest bufet?' ('Is there a buffet car?') I ask before realising the full magnitude of my error. It releases a cascade of Russian: 'Sit down! Sit down! You are our guests!' And they start excavating roasted chicken and sausage and cheese and tomato and bread and cucumber.

'But we haven't got anything to share!' says Steve. 'We can't take their food!'

'We have to!' I hiss. 'It's rude to refuse.' And I whip out a box of Celebrations from my bag. 'English chocolates!' I say and present them with a flourish. 'We've got the calendars too,' says Steve, panicked. 'Shall I get the calendars?'

'Yes!' I say although even as I say it I realise this could lead to a Cold War-style escalation of hospitality. We give calendars, showing British scenes, which they appear to like and admire, and I breathe a small sigh of relief.

A moment later, there's an ominous rustle as Maira starts rummaging in her bags. 'Kazakhstansky chocolat!' she says and into our laps thrusts a bag the size of a bin liner.

'Get the shortbread!' I bark at Steve. And there's a lull until Maira takes the nuclear option and pulls out a gold-embroidered pashmina. I protest, uselessly, and acknowledge defeat. I have nothing to trump that. And we can all, finally, settle down for the night secure in the knowledge that Kazakh national pride has been satisfactorily upheld.

It's so huge, Kazakhstan - huge and very, very empty. There are 15 million people in a country the size of western Europe. It takes an age to get anywhere and when you do, it's hard to remember why you came. There's terrible human tragedy whichever way you turn: the Aral Sea, scene of the world's worst man-made ecological disaster; Semey, formerly known as Semipalatinsk, the centre of Stalin's nuclear test programme, where according to the guidebook the highlight is a trip to the museum of anatomical deformities. Then there's Baikonur, the space centre, a genuinely exciting prospect except it's almost impossible to get a permit to visit; and Astana, the soulless new capital, devoid of interest other than new, expensive buildings and the bonus that in winter the temperature drops to -40C.

But we've plumped for Karaganda, a city that didn't exist until Stalin sent his political prisoners there and ordered them to build. The entire town was a gulag, known in Russia as a synonym for 'nowhere'. It's 5.30am when we get off the train, and there in the dark is Nathan, whom I've never actually met, but whom I found on the marvel that is couchsurfing.com, the website where travellers with a spare room or floor offer hospitality to other travellers.

On his profile, under 'current mission', it says: 'I'm trying to survive another year in this abandoned Soviet coal town with at least a shadow of my sanity left.' And when I email him, he makes strenuous efforts to point out the city's lack of appeal. 'If I were to "recommend" Karaganda it would only be in self-interest as it would be nice to meet with a visitor.'

When I Google 'Karaganda' I discover it's where you go if you want to buy either a wife or a baby. There are hundreds upon hundreds of women seeking husbands elsewhere, and when I see the city in daylight, I see their point. There's an impressive statue of Lenin, a shopping centre, a park, a main street, and that's more or less it. And in October, the temperatures are already sub-zero.

Nathan used to be a lobbyist in Washington but signed up for two years with the US Peace Corps to teach English and business. He likes Karaganda on the grounds that 'it's not Shakhtinsk'.

Shakhtinsk, half an hour away, was where he spent last winter in a flat with malfunctioning heating and no hot water. It used to be a model Soviet city with seven mines and 100,000 people. 'But in 1996, there was no heating and everybody left. Now there's only 14,000 people and just tower block after derelict tower block. Did you read about the explosion there two weeks ago? It killed 41 miners.'

Nathan has to 'go teach', but Dilyara, who is a student of his, takes us to Temirtau, a vast steel town filled with toxic chimneys belching toxic smoke. Nazarbayev spent his early years there and it is famous in Kazakhstan for having 80 per cent of the country's Aids cases.

'There is a lot of crime here at night,' says Dilyara.

'Oh,' I say.

'But also sometimes in the day too.'

Nowhere does grim so well as the former USSR, and yet it isn't entirely, because Dilyara is delightful. She speaks near-perfect English and is one of the new, un-Sovietised, generation. She was seven when the union collapsed and the only thing she remembers is her mother buying her a red pioneer's scarf.

'My granny tells me stories, though. She lived through the 1932 famine and she always tells us how they had to eat dead people. There was nothing else, not even rats.'

'So she must think life is better now?'

'No! She's always saying, "Well, at least you didn't have to look for a job, you just got one".'

Later, we meet up with Nathan and we head off to Dolinka, a small village in the middle of the steppe that was once the administrative centre of a gulag system the size of France.

It's a bus ride and then we take a taxi, a clapped-out Lada. Where the front passenger seat should be, there's a wooden footstool. Which Nathan sits on. Backwards. It's not being pulled by a horse, as seen in Borat's new film, although we would perhaps be going faster if it was.

The gulag buildings are now the homes of villagers, with shreds of the original fences and barbed wire still in place. It's properly bleak, a few feral barking dogs the only sign of life. More than two million people were incarcerated here for the flimsiest of crimes, but the day after Stalin died in 1953 they were set free, and the locals simply moved into the houses. It's like Dachau would be, or Bergen-Belsen, perhaps, if the world had forgotten them too.

It's a 21-hour train ride from Karaganda to Shimkent. 'Ah, inastrancia!' says the provodnitsa, or train lady, when she sees us. 'Strangers.' It's true we are strangers in a strange land, although Steve is stranger than most, being of Indian origin - a cause of high excitement in Karaganda, where he was mobbed by a group of schoolchildren who all wanted to have their photo taken with him. They'd never seen a brown person before.

In Shimkent we meet Michael, another couchsurfing.com US Peace Corper, who takes us home to his host family. They're not Kazakhs, confusingly, but Uzbeks, from Kazakhstan's next-door neighbour (or, as Borat calls them, 'evil nitwits'). But then, Kazakhstan is made up of a whole lot of people who aren't strictly Kazakh; Russians mostly, but also Germans from the Volga, Koreans from the east, Chechens, Poles, Tartars, Assyrians - 130 nationalities in total, most of whom Stalin forcibly resettled to here, the USSR's dustbin.

Rana, Michael's host, prepares a traditional Uzbek feast - plov, a rice pilaf- and we sit and drink tea, eat Celebrations, and we discuss the need to find Michael an Uzbek girlfriend in Russian, which is nobody's first language, or even second.

They're overwhelmingly hospitable. Rana begs us to stay until the end of Ramadan when there will be a feast with 'more than 80 plates'. Stay, at least, until the weekend, she says, and I would have, for I love their courtyard house, with its inner garden and outside kitchen complete with clay tandoor and electric samovar.

But we can't, because Lammert, a Dutchman, and Elmira, his Kazakh wife, are coming to collect us. They run a small tourism venture in the Aksu-Zhabagly national park, 50 miles away and we travel there in a Lada that has a cartoon cow and some writing on the side.

'What does that say?' I ask Lammert when we get out, thinking it must be an advertisement for his parent-in-law's guesthouse. '"Artificial Insemination",' says Lammert. 'I have another business importing bulls' semen.'

I have travelled 50 miles in a Lada which says 'Artificial Insemination' on the side. Any minute now, a tall man with a moustache could very well appear - although, according to Lammert, Borat is already doing wonders for business. 'I have already had three, maybe four calls this month, a lot more than usual.'

Which gladdens my heart because when we arrive at the village, it is breathtaking: 5,000-metre mountains soar straight up from the plain, topped with a fresh sprinkling of snow. It has two guesthouses and an NGO that promotes ecotourism - which makes it, outside Almaty, the most highly developed tourist infrastructure in the country.

We go for a walk up into the mountains, with Olmas, a park ranger, and I try to muster all the Russian words I have into a conversation, although mostly it revolves around him asking me the prices of things in England, how much I earn, how much my car cost, what a house costs, and me telling him.

Afterwards, he invites us back to his house, where we meet his wife, and I find out he studied at Almaty University for six years and worked as a biology teacher, but moved here because park ranging paid more. The home consists of two rooms: a kitchen and a bedroom/living room in which the only items of furniture are a bed, a cradle, and a small table. They have only one possession: a baby's buggy. And they lay out bread and jam and butter for us on rugs on the floor: it is, of course, the children's tea. We smile and refuse and, somehow, thank God, we manage to leave without being forced to eat it.

Back in Almaty the streets are filled with Landcruisers with blacked-out windows. Twelve years ago, the streets at night were deserted; now there's a non-stop traffic jam and a hundred different clubs. We head to Soho, alleged to be the city's most casual, Western-style bar, but by 11pm Jay, an American oilman, informs me 'there's only two women here who aren't prostitutes and you're one of them'. Opposite me sits a Russian girl, no more than 18, who has the saddest eyes I've ever seen. She finally admits she speaks English; shortly afterwards, she leaves. Steve and I drink vodka and dance and watch old, fat men cavorting with young, thin girls. Jay tells him, confidentially, that the prostitutes at the Petroleum Club are prettier.

Oh, it's so sleazy and corrupt and beautiful and tragic and, as an outsider, compelling to witness. Like Kazakhstan itself. I'd come again in a heartbeat though I'm not sure my visa application would be looked on so favourably next time around. And Borat? I meet a total of four Kazakhs who've heard of him. And they all hate him. And while I hope that Kazakhstan reaps a tourist dividend as a result of the film, there is now, I have to confess, a small part of me that thinks it's not quite as funny as I once did.

Essentials

Carole Cadwalladr flew with Air Astana (01293 596622; www.airastana.com) which has direct return flights to Almaty, from £386. The best hotel in Almaty is the Intercontinental (0870 400 9650; www.intercontinental.com). To organise trekking and stays in yurts and a guesthouse in the Aksu-Zhagbaly park, contact Lammert Bies: lammert@wild-natures.com. Carole arranged her homestay in Karaganda and Shimkent via www.couchsurfing.com.