Kazahzstan (Part 2) and Russia
Kazahzstan (Part 2) and RussiaAugust 2008
Day 21 – Friday August 1st (Continued) The Kazahzstan border lay a few hundred metres beyond the Uzbekistan border. We approached a young border guard who told us to park our vehicle and walk up to the new main building which had spotlights now that it was dark. His English was pretty good and he kept asking us for a ‘present’. He suggested to us that we should part with UK Currency or an English Soccer Shirt. We played the ignorant card as is ‘what the hell are you talking about?’ Tough shit. We didn’t have either.
We walked in the sweltering humidity into the building and went through a very organised set of people to see about our various documents. Or it would have been if truck drivers hadn’t kept jumping in front to yell about this or that and get their paperwork stamped. We were so relieved to be out of Uzbekistan, we almost didn’t mind. It was our 9th border since Hungary and we were used to waiting. We went where they told us and got the vehicle imported and our passports stamped. It was pretty efficient for a border, although we envied the officials who would disappear to their air conditioned offices to watch the TV. We didn’t know it now, but they never gave us an important document. But we had also not been given it at Aqtau either.
Told to go, the customs officers gave the vehicle a cursory glance and we were gone.
It was dark and we were night driving again. We didn’t have any choice. With Trev behind the wheel, we headed north and managed to avoid the donkeys on the road. When we reached the first major town of Saryaghash. A small place like this was definitely not in any guidebook, but after Beyneu, we were confident of finding somewhere to stay.
I asked a local for a hotel. He waved me down the road with basic instructions and a name. We followed his instructions for a couple of miles and ended up on a side- street. It was dark, but there were streetlights. As we crawled along the road looking for a hotel, a police car appeared behind us. I jumped out and asked for the hotel, the policemen indicated to follow them. We drove for half a kilometre and they pulled in front of the place that could have been someone’s house for all I knew.
But a lady had a small double room with a sink and a TV. We were covered in sweat from the furiously hot day and humid evening. ‘Do you have a shower?’ I asked with body language. No. OK, no problem and we were resigned to using the sink. By the time we had carted in what we needed (the vat of wine was a starter) and got settled, and I’d had a sponge bath, there was a knock at the door.
The lady had got a spacious double en suite room with bathroom/shower ready for us. It cost more but it was luxury to us. It felt nice to be back in Kazahzstan again and legal again. I seem to remember that a few glasses of wine were drunk in celebration.
Well you would when you calculated that the room cost you £6 each.
No matter what anyone says about Kazahzstan, I will always remember how friendly the locals were. They went out of their way to help you out. There was never much communication in English, but you always felt as if they were trying their best to make you feel welcome. This was in comparison with Uzbekistan, where (apart from our accommodation in Sumarkand), the locals treated it as a business – spend your money and get lost.
Today, Trev drove 87 miles (3845 total) and I did 0 (2286 total) = 87 for the daily total = 6131 miles after 21 days. This was just the trip to the Kazahzstan border and to the nearest town after border.
Day 22 – Saturday August 2nd
When we did the vehicle check the following morning, we realised that the main toilet was outside – a hole in the floor. Which made the luxury room even more appreciated. The hotel seemed to be decorated outside with a striking pink colour.
Our flight from Ulan Bataar, Mongolia was leaving in a week’s time. We had an enormous distance to cross through three countries. At this point, we seriously didn’t know if we would make it. All we could do was try. I looked at a map of Kazakhstan and estimated that Balkhash (by the side of Lake Balkhash) was about half way north to Russia and should be our target.
It soon became apparent that it would be a slow slog. We had to pass through endless towns and they all had Saturday markets so the traffic was heavy. Secondly, there seemed to be a police car hidden on the edge of every village, so we had to slow down every time we thought a car ahead was the rozzers. This became even harder when they used unmarked police cars and we didn’t actually know what the speed limit was. We were stopped at two police checks where they looked at our passports. At one police check, we saw a policeman letting an 8 year old kid hold the radar gun at the oncoming traffic. Finally, traffic signs were few and far between and were in Cyrillic language. We often had to follow our nose and guess which road to take.
One point to note. Our two compasses did not work in Kazakhstan. We thought it had recovered from the ferry ride, but they would turn in circles clueless of where north was. I assume this was due to the radio-active fall out over the country due to the many Russian nuclear explosions/experiments.
The roads were bumpy and tree-lined. They were sealed but gradually the potholes appeared. We would pass large ugly industrial complexes, some deserted after the fall of the USSR. At one point a wedding party passed us coming the other way. The bus shelters in Kazakhstan had an interesting shape (see photo). Every major town had an ‘entrance’ sign. At the side of the road, locals sold watermelons and jars of honey.
We would not have time to sight see. It was just a case of driving as quickly as possible to cover the ground.
We passed though the largest southern city of Shymkent with over half a million population. It was known in Kazakhstan as a wild and lawless place. I must point out that after finding an ATM, I did attempt to buy us some bread in a shop. A local was slowly getting the shopgirl to go through all the cold beer bottles in the fridge before making his mind up. I gave up waiting. It was 9.30am on a Saturday morning.!
The Brandt Guidebook said “ The pavements are uneven and the driving is manic”. We could cope with the driving but not the lack of traffic signs. These did not exist in this town. We tried to guess which was the major road until we ended up on a side road and concluded this was not the correct route. A local who already looked pissed directed us back into town. We ended up stopping a police car who led us to the right turn off. We would never have guessed this was the road to take. Shymkent is twinned uninterestingly with the British town of Stevenage – both cities have a distinct lack of character – though I’d hardly describe Stevenage as a wild and lawless place – well unless they closed the shopping centre, though I suspect there are people checking what cold beers are available at 9.30am.
Somewhere outside Shymkent, Trev was flagged down by a solo policeman. He tried to imply that Trev had been drinking alcohol (at 10am?) and was looking for money. We played the usual role of ‘dumb tourists’. We didn’t speak Russian, and he didn’t speak English. We just stonewalled until he gave up. This was the third police incident we had escaped from in three different countries. But unlike the other two, this time we had not broken the law. Trev had only had one glass of wine the previous evening. The trouble is that once you get pulled over by a policeman, you tend to slow down because you assume you will get pulled over again. We were pulled over for a fourth time later in the day, but the policemen seemed to just be nosy- asking questions, peering into the Disco to see what we had.
Taraz was a huge city of 300,000 lying on the Talas River but unlike Shymkent, we bypassed it. We were actually following signs to Bishtek in Kyrgyzstan but nearing the border, at Kulan, we took a shortcut north to join the main northern route through Kazahzstan. We could see the mountains of Kyrgyzstan in the distance. So near and so yet so far…The junction was full of stalls, mostly selling honey.
Once we headed north from that road on the A358, the traffic really thinned out as did the police checks. But we had lost so much time from the traffic/police/lack of signs. I think it was mid afternoon before we turned north and I was pretty certain we wouldn’t reach Balkhash. We had to skip Almaty which had been a major destination on our original schedule.
I took over the driving for the long haul north. I don’t remember much apart from the flat steppes landscape with horses. goats and cows grazing by the side of the road. Large isolated cemeteries appeared like those we had seen in Uzbekistan along with some of the worst rutted/warped roads we had driven along on this trip.
As dusk approached around 8pm, we reached Lake Balkhash. It covers 17,400 sq km, but is only 26m at its deepest point and it may be shrinking with its source river being interfered with. Shyganak was the first place on the lake and a sleepy town where the train stopped. The town was off the main highway and a bit of a detour, but we had been driving for getting on 12 hours and didn’t want to do any night driving.
The town seemed deserted, but I asked a local for a hotel and he pointed up the road. A bunch of young men sat outside. It didn’t look like a hotel and more like a community centre. There were three women sat in a room. Do you have a bed? They didn’t speak any English and attempted to tell me something. I didn’t understand. A man with basic English tried to explain that they were leaving soon and that I had to ask the woman who was arriving in 30 minutes.
So we explored the town which had no sealed roads, just dusty lanes. The low level houses were protected from the wind by tall fences. There were a few basic shops to get beer and lemonade, but not much else. Back at the hotel, the woman had arrived.
I asked and she just shook her head. I think the place was full of those young men on some kind of course. Whatever. It was almost dark and we had just lost an hour with no result.
As we had turned off the main road, I had a feeling that the restaurant on the corner may also be a hotel, so we drove back and asked. Yes, they had rooms. These had just been built. They were so new that there was no running water in the sink. The double room was small but clean and we were able to shut out the mosquitoes that were appearing outside.
Originally, I had asked the lady if there was a shower, trying to point out that we had just driven from Tashkent and were very dusty from all the dusty roads. She said no, but mentioned it to her husband who later introduced himself and said we could use his shower. It turned out that there was no running water anywhere and that barrels of water were brought up from the lake. The bathroom, consisted of a large barrel of water in a tiled and wooden back room. I called it a Himalayan shower, because I had done this in Nepal. What you do is stand in a large basin, and use a jug to douse yourself with water. Then you soap your self down and use the water you are standing in to rinse yourself off. It had been another scorching day, so the cold wash was very refreshing.
Back in our complex, we had a large new tiled communal area next door with a TV, so we set up our stove and cooked another meal inside. Our digs tonight cost £9.50. It was better than looking for somewhere in the dark.
Today, Trev drove 310 miles(4149 total) and I did 171 (2463 total) = 481 for the daily total = 6612 miles after 22 days.
Day 23 – Sunday August 3rd
We got up at 5am. There was nothing to do but drive. Once Trev had checked the Disco and I had packed, we left as the sun was rising at 6am. We were able to make good time, guessing that there would be no police cars on the road this early on a Sunday. All we saw were the steppes scenery with camels near the road. There were good road surfaces. We just ground the miles away.
At Balkhash, we filled up on diesel and moved on up the M33 highway. Still no sign of police and we drove as fast as we could get away with considering we had a Land Rover. At the major town at Karaganda (pop 410,000), we found a supermarket and restocked for the final leg of the journey through Russia and Mongolia. We experimented with the fresh delicacies which were excellent and bought a couple of bottles of Kazahzstan red wine.
My original plan before the trip had been to take a diversion from Karaganda and go and see the new capital of Astana, but as with Almaty, we had to drop all sightseeing in Kazahzstan and just keep heading towards Russia as quickly as possible.
The few towns we passed through all had entrances over the roads and large billboards of their President trying to look Presidential. On the edges of town were endless watermelon stalls. This country seemed to have enough watermelons to feed the rest of the world.
We had made good time and were confident that we could reach Pavlodar. Then around Ekibastuz, the road turned to red mud. Recent rainstorms had saturated the new road building program and we slid our way through the mud for mile after mile trying to overtake slower trucks and cars. Suffice to say, the Disco was caked in mud and had turned a different colour.
We had read that it was illegal to drive in Russia with a dirty car, so at a fast flowing river, we pulled up and washed down the Disco. It was freezing outside with a strong wind and lack clouds overhead.
Ironically, just as we started off with a relatively clean machine, the rainstorms returned with a vengeance and rinsed off anything we had missed. The road was soon full of puddles to plough through.
We pulled into Pavlodar (pop 330,000) as dusk was falling and saw a new motel on the outskirts. They had a great room for £25, a restaurant and a security guard looking after the car park. Perfect. The receptionist did not speak English, but we got the gist. Later on, she showed us her ‘English book’ and tried to read some phrases about breakfast time etc.
We had crossed Kazahzstan in two days and were ready to enter Russia tomorrow morning. It would give us five days to reach Ulan Bataar. To celebrate, we decided to spend the rest of our Tenge currency in the motel restaurant. We noticed that they had Stella on draft. We also noticed that another table had four Englishmen. They were doing the other Mongol Rally. We exchanged stories, downed beer and picked our meal from a menu of pictures. It was a bit of shock to get the bill and discover that the beer was £4 a pint. We ended up paying a shit-load of US dollars to make up for our lack of Tenge. I think the restaurant cost more than the room. Doh!
It had been pouring with rain all evening. Retiring to bed, I could hear a drip and saw that water was slowly leaking though the ceiling. I curled around the wet patch and crashed out.
Today, Trev drove 370 miles(4519 total) and I did 293 (2756 total) = an outstanding 663 miles for the daily total = 7275 miles after 23 days.
Roadkill: Dog x 4, bird x 3, rabbit, UFO
Costs in Kazahzstan for 2 days (in British Pounds Sterling)
Travel - £57.62
Grand Total so far £1661.30
Day 24 – Monday August 4th / Day 25 – Tuesday August 5th
We had it all planned. Get up early, drive the 100km to the Russian border, be prepared to spend hours there but get through and on our way. The alarm got us up at 6am and I discovered I was now sleeping in a puddle. We packed and headed outside, paid the security guard, asked him for directions to the border and set off in the pouring rain.
To keep a long story short, we then spent a fruitless two hours driving around attempting to find the road to the border. There were no traffic signs anywhere. We drove around industrial estates and past a huge factory where all the workers were arriving by tram or bus to start their shift. We followed traffic down a sandy track only to end up at another industrial complex when the road ran out. We asked various people (including a policeman) and we went round in circles. Suffice to say, we were not in the best of moods when we drove past our hotel 90 minutes later. I had followed my instincts but there was nothing visible to get your bearings on. Our compasses were still not working either.
In the end, I flagged down a police car, told them we wanted Russia and they told us to follow them. Ten minutes later, they stopped and waved us down a non-descript road. We had driven past this road, but a complete lack of traffic signs had not helped. We would never have found this road without local help.
So, we were on our way. This road must take us to the border. Wrong. The road forked with no directions and we were lost again. We took a guess, ploughed on and were surprised to finally reach the Kazahzstan border.
It was around 10am (so much for the early start). We got mixed messages at the border. Someone said it wasn’t open until 2.30pm. Someone else told us to wait.
We now expected to experience the ‘one car an hour’ procedure that the Mongol team on the Kazahzstan/Uzbekistan border had told us about. However, after 30 minutes (long enough for us to make coffee on a stove by the Disco because it was so cold), we were waved through to the immigration building.
We produced our passports and vehicle documentation and stood by a counter. The officers could not speak English but asked us for a document we had never seen before. They got someone to show us the document. We were clueless. We had passed through Kazahzstan immigration twice and on both occasions, we had not been given this document. Everyone else seemed to have it.
There was much discussion between the officers and they kept asking for this document. They couldn’t speak English, so I did a body language guide of ‘ we arrived in Aqtau – no document. Then we left Tashkent – no document’. Shrugging my shoulders, I indicated ‘Well, what now?’
They kept barking and pointing about this missing document and I kept barking and pointing that we didn’t have it. We stood around. They were trying to find someone to speak English. Trev and me were looking at each other thinking ‘We are fucked. They are going to ask us to drive to Astana to get a document. There goes the trip”.
Thirty minutes after arriving at the counter, Trev as the vehicle owner was led on to a room with the Top Man. Five minutes later, I was waved through. We repeated our story using our maps and body language. The official flicked though our passports. He came across our new Kazakhstan visas where a $20 number was written. His eyes lit up. He came up with a ‘solution’. For $20 each, he would turn a blind eye. Whatever. I peeled off a couple of $20 bills and hoped he didn’t realise that I have about $1500 in my money belt. This was a genuine problem. We had never been given that document by two different immigration sections.
So we got our passports stamped. Then customs had a go. We were asked to empty the vehicle of everything. We took our time. We had a lot of gear to unload. The customs people got impatient. Hurry it up. No, we thought, you want us to unpack, you can wait. They had a look at what we had unloaded and gave up. Pack it up. We packed it up and off we went. At the final check, we were told to stop. What another problem? The guard made a call and waved us on. We could almost imagine the conversation: “What about the foreigners?” “No problem. They paid us $40. You’ll get your split”.
Overall, despite the border difficulties (and lack of road signs), I thought that Kazahzstan was a country that deserved more time. It is the 9th largest country in the world and we gave it four days without seeing much apart from road scenery. I would like to visit it properly and explore Almaty and Astana. Having been deported from Uzbekistan, I think I’ll have to come back here to pop into the other countries I missed in the region. We found the local people friendly and eager to please. It was just a case of dealing with officialdom.
We drove onto the Russian immigration post, expecting a long wait. However, much to our surprise, it was very organised. We entered a building (not air conditioned and full of flies), but there were four offices in a line behind glass. We were told to start at one booth which dealt with our passports/visas and were then told to go to the next booth where we were issued vehicle insurance which is mandatory in Russia. This took quite a long time as we translated our vehicle documentation. We were pleasantly surprised when we were charged $80. I had read that other teams had been charged $150 upwards. At a third booth, other paperwork was produced. Admittedly we had to wait for someone to appear after 10 minutes. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant change from Kazahzstan border procedures where we had no idea where we were supposed to go to do something.
Back at the vehicle, customs officers had a search of the vehicle. I had a plastic box of ‘bribes’ – some pretty crap stuff such a strapless watch, a load of camera films (no use to us with digital cameras) and some mini ‘Gucci’ after shave bottles from previous flights. I opened the box and indicated ‘Help yourself’. He took one small bottle of ‘Gucci’ with great delight and waved us on. At last, my box of crap had worked.
Due to the fact that we would spend less than 24 hours in Russia, I will not bother to go into Russian background and leave it until I do a proper visit across the country.
Our biggest problem was that we did not have a roadmap of Russia. All we knew was that we had entered Siberia and that we had to find the large city of Barnaul where we would turn south to pass through Biysk and Gorno-Altaysk and hopefully find Tashanta near the Mongolian border. That was as much info on a map that we had. We had no idea of distances (it was over 800 miles in the end), and we didn’t have a full tank of diesel. We also had no Russian money.
To start with, Barnaul appeared on signposts. It was very flat countryside and the road surfaces were reasonably good. The harvest had already been taken in but there were huge fields of sunflowers still in bloom. Then the signs stopped and all the roads got smaller and looked the same. It was very overcast so there was no sun. We ended up getting lost (our compass was still not working so we couldn’t even point the Disco east) around a bunch of isolated hamlets full of flocks of white geese and connected by muddy trails which had been decimated by recent heavy rainfalls.
We slid around the mud and ploughed through huge puddles, absolutely clueless where we were until we reached another hamlet where we would attempt to ask a local for Barnaul. We were obviously off the beaten track and it was too complicated to explain which small roads to take at which junctions so they would either have no idea or point us on. Barnaul was still a couple of hundred miles away, so it was like being lost in a village in my county of Norfolk and asking how to get to London 150 miles away.
So we followed our nose and eventually came to a junction where a larger road appeared. We waited for another vehicle and asked which way to Barnaul. Turn right.
The road was good apart from a herd of cows blocking it at one point and when it turned into a rutted nightmare (see photo). Somehow we had missed the rain which was ahead of us.
Conscious of our depleted fuel tank, we looked for a garage that took credit cards. This was a doubtful proposition considering the size of towns we were passing through. We did find one that looked promising but the machine rejected the card and were told that Barnaul had ATMs.
We finally rolled into Barnaul around 8pm. It was dusk. We had originally thought we would be here around midday but with the Pavlodar debacle, the hold ups at the Kazahzstan border and the going round in circles around Russian hamlets, we were well behind schedule. If we were going to make Ulan Bator by Friday, we had no choice but to drive overnight through Russia and try and make up some time.
Barnaul has a population of 575,000 and is a prosperous industrial city. We saw a western shopping mall and inside I found an ATM to get some Russian Roubles which had increased in value immensely since I had last visited Russia in 1992. We had a map of Barnaul and eventually found Prospekt Lenin in the dark which runs 8km through the city. This took us to the Ob River where a bridge took us over to the southern section of the city. Passing through, Barnaul looked like a decent city to stay in. Downtown was very westernised.
We found a garage that took credit cards, held on to our Roubles, filled up the tank and the jerry cans and did some emergency repairs to our damaged headlight. Trev came up with a brilliant idea of taking one of our large plastic container lids and securing it over the remains of the headlight. If it was going to rain overnight, the bulk would be protected and it would also deflect the bare bulb’s illumination.
It was a good job we had got some Roubles because we had to pay to use a toll road. Admittedly, it was a tiny amount and the cashier had to give me a whole lot of notes as change for my large Rouble note. Within a few hundred metres, we were flagged down by a policeman standing outside a traffic control building.
We passed our passports and vehicle papers across to the police officer. Trev was asked to come inside. We hadn’t been speeding, or crossed a white line but it was our first experience with Russian policemen and other teams had reported some bad experiences and to expect to get fined for anything so they could boost their incomes.
Trev came out to get me. He didn’t understand what they were saying. I came in with my Russian Statement that explained what we were doing. Suddenly, they were all over us, drawing maps to explain which roads to take in the various cities. They were so helpful, I thought they were about to offer a police escort to the Mongolian border.
We were waved on our way.
It was getting on for 10pm now. It was dark and we had been up since 5am and driving since 6am. 14 hours and we still had to keep going. The only way to do it was to split the driving up for 2 hour stretches allowing for either of us to power-nap in-between driving.
The road south (M52) was surprisingly good. The surface was excellent. There were only two lanes but traffic was minimal and it was easy to either follow the red lights of a vehicle ahead or overtake a slower vehicle. Our police maps got us through Biysk and Gorno-Altaysk. There were no donkeys and carts on the road. The trucks all had lights. Relatively luxury to us after Uzbekistan.
Sometime around 4am, we passed through Cherga and started to climb the Seminsky Pass. Trev was asleep while I drove along a twisty road through thick mist. There were no other vehicles on the road. As dawn appeared, I discovered that we were now following the Chuya River and that we were surrounded by spectacular mountain scenery. It was brilliant and I wondered what we had missed on our overnight run. The sunrise rose through the mists with mountains silhouetted around us. I was amazed that Russia had such spectacular scenery. This was an area I would have to return to in the future and explore properly. You heard it here first - the Altay Republic/Territory is spectacular. Later, we talked to other teams who were also overwhelmed by the scenery and they did it during the day.
We found a garage. There was no one there at 6am and just as we were pulling off, we spotted a vehicle heading for the garage. It was the owner. I pulled out all most of our Roubles and filled up the tank.
By 8am, we were both zonked. We had been driving for more than 24 hours between us, and neither of us had slept much. I guess we had an hour off at the side of the road. Trev said later that a Mongol Rally entrant had passed by heading back from Mongolia and pulled up but saw us asleep.
We headed for the Russian border. It was a new building and organised but they were only letting in one vehicle at a time. We had the correct paperwork. But we had a hold up to get our passports stamped. Two loads of Kazahzstanis were heading for Mongolia for a fishing trip and customs had them unload all their fishing gear out which they had to drag to the first floor past passport control. We were finally allowed to move ahead of them and get out.
Finally, we left Russia and headed for the Mongolia border. It had been a hard slog but in retrospect we both agreed that the overnight crossing of Russia, saved our trip.
No roadkill spotted
Today (including driving in Mongolia for rest of Tuesday), Trev drove 566 miles( 5085 total) and I did 407 (3246 total) = 973 for the daily total = 8248 miles after 25 days.
Travel - £53.64
Grand Total so far - £1755.15
Accommodation - £28.61 (2 nights)
Food - £55.19 (inc overpriced beer)
Other - £12.06
Total - £153.68
Costs in Russia for 2 days (in British Pounds Sterling)
Accommodation - £0 (driving all night)
Food - £0
Other - £40.21 (Car insurance)
Total - £93.85
Maps courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps used with permission.