68. Day 60 – To the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana

Wednesday 11 July 2007

Last night we actually stayed in the hotel at Lake Burabay where we had parked our vehicle. We walked down to the lake for a very pleasant and cool view of this extraordinary area.  We found it hard to believe that the latitude was equivalent to being south of Hobart, Tasmania yet the temperature was warm and we could have been in the tropics of Queensland. We watched the sunset over the Lake.

This morning we departed at 9.15 and headed back through the town of Shchuchinsk and onto the highway A343 to Astana – the new capital of Kazakhstan.  We were delighted with the road – this has become our obsession.  We could sit on 80kph in relative smoothness while watching the planted wheat fields passing by.  For the whole 240 klms to Astana we drove beside a huge job of new road construction.  The Government is obviously spending a huge fortune and they will end up with a four lane freeway across the country.

We stopped for lunch in the Earthroamer in a small village called Kogam and parked beside an old Soviet style bus shelter complete with hammer and sickle sign writing.

We have hardly seen any hammer and sickle motifs since leaving Moscow.  A couple of young men stopped their cars and came over to talk to us about our trip.  The Kazakh people appear to be a lot more demonstrative than the Russians. Often as we have been driving in the last two days, drivers will toot and wave at us after they read our “Australians Driving Around The World” sticker – in Russian.  We asked one of the young men to take a photograph of us just to show what we look like after 2,000+ klms since Moscow.

Very soon after a group of local children came over towards the vehicle, however when Pip walked towards them at first they ran away!  Their confidence gradually grew and they came back, which enabled us to take some lovely photographs of them.

We were back on the road at noon with the temperature at 89 degrees F, once again a sunny day with a few clouds and the altitude was 1,200ft.

We noticed the road construction equipment was brand new, American Caterpillar graders and bulldozers.

We were following the railway which joins Moscow with Astana and it appears to be electrified for the whole way.

This is very efficient for greenhouse gases.  Contrasting with the multi million dollar equipment used for the road construction were local villagers with their horse and carts and cattle being mustered by horse.

About 30kms before Astana we picked up a hitch hiker, a 39 year old Kazakh man called Tolgate.

He only had a few words of English but we communicated as best we could.  We think he told us that the roads were being built by the Germans and at one stage we came across a huge machine designed to build concrete roads.

We drove through heavy traffic into the city of Astana and Tolgate directed us to the main entrance of the Okan Intercontinental Hotel where we checked in for two nights and parked our Earthroamer below our window in the hotel’s secure outdoor car park.  At least the solar panels will keep the batteries charged to run our refrigerator.

Today 262kms      21,382 km since Anchorage, Alaska

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