Week 3 no pics though , the computer won't let me
Submitted by jeremymarksuk on Fri, 01/08/2008 - 6:33am.
Monday Got around 12 and drove wayne to the airport to catch a flight to almaty. Saw team first gears car in the car park so ileft them a note. Would be good to find out how another team are getting on. Back the hotel we had lunch in the little café at the back, good food and an english menu, which means that we didn't have to guess to much. The waitress also had good English. We recommend the café wholeheartedly. It is behind the Hotel Altn Adam. We then spent 2 hours walking around trying to find a decent hotel room for 2 nights. In the end we went to the Grand Park Esil and checked in around 5-ish, the dash for the showers was site to behold. We went out at 9 to find something to eat and ended up at a place called Ali Babas, well worth a visit. The food was good and the service was excellent. One word of caution though, DO NOT try the camels milk no matter how adventurous you feel. It tastes sour and sharp but most of all it was fizzy! A nice walk along the riverside which has fountains and lights aswell as a great view of the new buildings under construction in the central section and finally to bed. There have been some amazingly heavy rains today and a cloud burst while we were in the restaurant had left a lot of standing water. Tuesday Wake up and have a shower, sounds like a small thing but it is very welcome. Have a sumptuos breakfast and head out to find the Presidential memorial hall/museum. After a couple of hours we give up and just go site seeing and there is a lot of sites in Astana. Mostly large buildings declaring how good the country and the president is. Some are nice others not so nice, we went up the tree of life tower and looked around it is obviously a huge project and apparently takes up 8% of the GDP of Kazakhstan. Astana is well worth a visit and I would like to come back here. Trying to get a taxi to take us back over the river to the hotel proved to be a dead loss, so Fred went into the Diplomat Hotel and using his best British voice asked them to order us one if possible. Thery order Wednesday Up early go to the immigration office, we speak to an officer there who gives us a right going over but does allow us to register, Fred and Hugh’s visa invitaion swing it, they applied directly to the embassy in london themselves and the visa states they are invited by the Kazakhstan Embassy London back to the hotel and repack the cars, this seems to to take longer each time, I need Waynes organising skills for this I tend to jus throw everything in the back and shut the door. We also clean out the cars again, the amount of dust is simply staggering and it is causing unforseen problems with the electrics and dashboard gauges. We finally set off at about 4pm ish and as is tradition we get lost on the way out, I ma following the skoda and at one point Fred decides to use all the on and off ramps at a junction in the end he finds the right road and rather dizzily we head off up the new motorway. After about 30kms we stop not at the side of the road but in the middle, another police checkpoint, details taken, laughter received with good grace and away we go. Finally set up camp off the road late and go to sleep, the camp routine is getting good and fast, unfortunately I am not as fast at getting a brew on as Wayne and the skoda boys are catching me up. Thursday Another undisturbed night, up nice and early and on the road, we stop for lunch in the heat beside som Pylons of the road, as we get out of the cars I think the grass is very sharp, when Hugh gets an electrical shock from the Skoda w2e take to the cars and drive off at high-ish speed. Apparently the electrical cable were building up static to a very high level. We finally reach the kazakhstan border in the late afternoon and after a brief border check of the cars we decide to head through. While we are being processed in the kazakh side, which is as good and helpful as always in kazakhstan, another team show up. The Lost Vikings are the Swedish team and have been on theroad for almost 8 weeks now and are a little crazy, most Swedes are though. We thank the kazakh guards and move onto the unsmiling russian side. This is always the hard and expensive one. We are processed quite quickly and then suddenly everything stops and we have to wait around again. This is standard and we know that it is because they are trying to work out what to charge us for. After a couple of hours it is my turn, I already have insurance and a guard has changed my money for me, pretty good rate to, so I have nothing to pay. When I get into the office though I am asked to pay 200 roubles for the car import document. I know this is a free document and they are only trying it on because I already have insurance. I just keep saying no over and over until the sullen woman doing it goes to get a border control officer, he says 200 roubles and I say no, I point at my passport and show him the entry stamp from my earlier visit and finally he lets me have the paperwork and they wave us through. It is 10.30pm by now so drive to the nearest town for fuel. The first garage we try is lit up but has no one there except a largeswarn of insects about 10mm in length that attacks us assoon as we get close. The camera flash makes them angry! So abandon garage and head for the next one. We finally stop to sleep in a truck park at 1.30am, sleep in car as no tent pitching here. Friday Up and away early to drive to Omsk. Finaly arrive about 11-ish and promptly get lost. We spend about an hour driving round asking peple for diections until we give up and head for the main road again, this promptly leads us to the centre of the city. We stop and change some dollars and get lunch in fast food place, vip chicken. We all eat 2 meals!!.one of the swedish team goes of to the bank to arange for us to exchange our kazakhstan money, after a lot of argy bargy he gets the bank to open the till for us. Finally we leave the city or at least try to, it is soviet nightmare of one way roads and no street signs. With lots of help from other cars and pedestrians we finally get onto the right road. Drive hard towards Barnaul, we pull over and camp and Fred has a shower the Swedish team goes on from here as they have to be in UB by the 1st of August. We camp overnight with thousands of mosquitos, hopefully not a sign of things to come? Saturday Get up early, everyone bitten and tired. Drive to Barnaul, we stop for lunch a We head into Barnaul and try to find somewhere open to get the car parts that are needed for the Skoda, no luck but we find a supermarket and go nuts buying nice stuff. We get directions froma car shop to another car shop but we cannot find it so we stop at a mobile phone shop and the manager hops in his car and takes us across town which takes 20 minutes and just drops us off and drives away. Unfortuantely the car shop is now a food wholesalers so no parts there. The man who owns the wholesaler tells us that everywhere is closed and asks us where we are going, when we say mongolia he gets a map out to show us the best way out of town, then he decides quite rightly that we will probably get lost. Barnaul is a very spread out city and the road we need is along way south. He jumps into his car and drives off with us following and just keeps driving and driving for about 30 minutes, we then stop at a toll booth which he pays for us and he keeps driving for another 10 miutes before he pulls over to give us directions, he has written a list of towns and roads both in english and cyrillic for us to follow. We like him very much, he does not except payment or gifts and just hops into his car and heads back to work. We drive on for a couple of hours and look for a place to stop, at one point we pull off the road and see a man pushing a car up a very long hill, he looks so beat that I go and offer to tow him up the petrol station. The fact that we do not speak russian confuses the issue so we just attach a tow rope and tow him up. We find a camp site in some deep woods about an hour later. All of us are very nervy and jumpy due to the traffic and driving also there are a lot of right hand drive cars here, we think that they most be Japenese imports. Sunday Firsst time we have been disturbed while camping, I woke up at 4.30 to see a work truck go by at the end of the track within 10 metres of the tents, the truck went up and dropped someone off and then came back. I wake up Fred and Hugh who are oblivious to this and we pack up the tents and then have breakfast. No one comes back but we move on early. We are all tired and starting to make mistakes so we stop at 10 and take a break and then drive on until about 4 pm when we make camp early and call it a rest day.
