Yesterday Rustem from the Australian Consulate mentioned to Dick that in Kazakhstan it was necessary if we had someone else drive your vehicle, such as Alexey we must get a legal document giving permission from a solicitor. Can you imagine if anytime you wanted someone to drive your car you would have to get a legal document allowing them to do so! So this morning Alexey picked us up in his car and we drove to a solicitor’s office. We didn’t need an appointment but just arrived at the office of one of many legal offices around the city. The lady solicitor told us that we needed to get a Russian translation of Dick’s passport and she directed us to a translator’s office. After a bit of searching around the street we found a little office up a flight of old dark stairs. There were two beautiful young ladies dressed in stunning low cut dresses and very fashionable high heeled shoes, sitting behind their desks. One of the girls quickly typed up a translation and photo copied Dick’s passport and only charged us the equivalent of $15AUS. We took this back to the solicitor’s office and she appeared to fill in the areas on a document already on her computer and also took details from Alexey’s driver’s licence. This only cost us $17AUS and we were on our way.
We returned to our Earthroamer and found Zhenya lying underneath the engine checking everything and getting more data to send to John.
As there was little we could do to help we drove up into the mountains for the afternoon. Alexey took us to the Chimbulak Ski Resort. On the way we passed the famous Medeu Ice Rink which sadly had no ice but did have some people on roller skates roaring around.
Above the ice rink is a huge ‘dam’ wall, in fact it has no water behind the wall as it is designed to stop avalanches and flooding getting to the city of Almaty only 10 kilometres below.
At the ski resort we jumped onto the chair lift and went in three stages up to 3,163 metres – that is over 10,000ft. It was a bracing 3 degrees C at the top.
We decided to walk down but after skidding and sliding on the rocks we climbed back up to the chair lift and came down sitting on the chair.
Huge bulldozers were grooming the hillside no doubt in preparation for the 2011 Asian Winter Games which Astana and Almaty have won.
We returned to the city to await news of our vehicle. We just hope it won’t be too long before the capable people at Ford have our Earthroamer going again because we are concerned about the snow falling in Mongolia and Siberia as winter nears.
Click here for the next day – an update on the Earthroamer repair.
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