Friday 13 July 2007
After two nights at a luxury hotel we arrived downstairs to find our guide from yesterday, Arman, dressed in a splendid doorman’s uniform. He is a gold medal holder at university and this is his holiday job, no doubt because of his excellent English.
We got going at 8.18am at 86 degrees F on another beautiful day and headed east on the M36. We had no difficulties in getting out of the city and at one stage we thought a policeman had waved us over but when we stopped he just gave us a friendly wave to keep going. We were on a really good road which meant we could go at a good speed.
Beside was something new, our first snow fences since Montana in the USA.
We could sit at 95kph as we passed huge paddocks with large silos.
A freight train passed us by and we had been informed that most of Kazakhstan’s freight is moved by rail.
As we approached Karaganda we could see huge chimneys belching smoke in front of us.
This is part of the Indian owned Mittal Steel company and it appears that steel from this area was used to construct the Statue of Liberty.
Talk about modern technology, there were not one but two cell phone towers every sixty kilometres along the highway. Pip did a check with our Aussie Next G phone and found that two networks were available but both very expensive on our phone.
The road took us through the city of Karaganda with lots of monuments from the old Soviet days and big apartment blocks.
The population is 410,000 and as well as steel making, Karaganda is infamous for Stalin-era slave labour camps – very sad. The population has declined dramatically since the collapse of the Soviet Union because many ethnic German descendants of deportees have returned to Germany.
At the small town of Kominskoi we could smell its products – pigs in huge sheds. Just before noon we saw lightning flashes in scattered thunderstorms and even drove through a small one with heavy rain and hail.
The green fields were now changing to brown plains not too dissimilar to Australia.
We stopped for petrol – what a drama.
We calculated that we needed 250 litres. First we had to pay the man behind a tiny dark window with a flap to take the money. Dick gave him a piece of paper with the amount of fuel we required written on it and the amount of money tendered – 13,750T ($137 AUS approx). Dick then went to the dirtiest fuel pump – that is always the diesel bowser – there was no visual read out on the bowser so Dick pushed the nozzle into the front tank and then waved like mad towards the black window. Suddenly a huge amount of fuel started to pour into the tank and eventually all over the side of the vehicle when the front tank was full. The man behind the black window must have eventually seen this and turned off the pump. Dick then filled the rear tank with the same problems. Even before the tank was full the pump stopped so Dick went over to the black window and was handed a receipt and a small amount of change. That is how you get fuel in Kazakhstan!
We had now climbed to 2,700ft and the beautiful road allowed the cruise control to be used for the first time since Scotland…we sat on 93kph. Every now and then we would see riders on horseback mustering cattle.
We had now climbed to 2,700ft and the beautiful road allowed the cruise control to be used for the first time since Scotland…we sat on 93kph. Every now and then we would see riders on horseback mustering cattle.
Small villages with mud brick houses and a beautiful arid brown land.
Beside the road we saw a young man dressed in traditional Kazakh costume leading a two humped camel. We offered him some money to take his photograph but he refused the money and allowed Pip to take a photograph.
All the way since Astana the road was followed by huge high voltage power lines obviously connecting every village. We were listening to Slim Dusty on our iPod and we could have been driving between Broken Hill and Port Augusta.
At about 5pm we reached the outskirts of Balkhash, a copper mining town on the northern side of Lake Balkhash. There were huge chimneys belching smoke into the sky, most likely from a smelter.
As we drove around the outskirts we saw a young man and a young girl hitch hiking. It had started to rain and we could see them getting wet so we stopped and gave them a lift. Shamil was a 27 year old Russian from the Russian Caucus, hitchhiking through Kazakhstan and the other Stans with his 7 year old daughter Angila. Shamil was a fascinating person who had recently converted to Islam from Christianity. He took his religion so seriously that he wouldn’t allow Pip to take a photograph of him or his daughter. He gave us a good explanation of the typical Russians “psyche”. He spoke reasonable English which he had learnt on his travels. He was a potter by profession and his ambition was to go and live in Tajikistan.
As we were driving we were looking for a place to stay the night and just as the railway line joined back onto the highway at Saryshagan, we found a motel which after a great deal of discussion with the manageress, she agreed to let us park and plug in our 220 volt lead for 500T ($5).
This was also a trucker’s stop and a garage and we became the centre of attention as many of the truckies came over and tried to talk to us, all extremely friendly. Amazingly one driver was moving new Lexus motor cars from Almaty to Astana. He said the cars had arrived in Almaty from China by rail – very mysterious Dick thinks!
One family who stopped at the truck stop insisted on giving Pip this dried fish as a gift after she had given their children some tiny toy koalas.
Today 747kms 22,129 km since Anchorage, Alaska
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