To the Chinese border: the passport fun and the friendly face of Kazakhstan

The summer heat is also creeping to the green Kyrgyz hills. Our Czech families are leaving back home, and it’s time to head further east. We decided to go through Kazakhstan. The Kazakh border crossing to China seems to be a bit more hitchhikers-friendly than the one from Kyrgyzstan. At least the internet wisdom seems to say so. It still will be our hardest border and I am still on pins and needles about it. We also need to switch our passports because our visa are in our second ones.

As for Kazakhstan, last time, just a month ago, I found most of the locals grumpy and reserved. This time, we came to some other Kazakhstan. Everybody is just super friendly.

Yerlan the wrestling coach and his mum

Ala Archa: a mountain paradise

The Swiss girls came to Kyrgyzstan and spent the last weak with my family and usd (Vojta’s mom and Jana left one week before them). My mom and my boyfriend are leaving now, and I see them to the airport – we camp in the nearby wood again. When I say goodbye to them, I travel to the mountains near Bishkek to join Vojta, Kasha and Mira.

It’s the first time on this trip I’m actually on my own. Bishkek is very near, so I’m wondering whether I should take a city bus. I don’t want to chicken out of hitchhiking just because I’m solo, though. No need – a car stops before I find a thumbing spot, and the driver offers me a ride. Even though it’s early morning, the weather is crazy hot. Downtown, I manage to get the local price for a city bus to the suburbs, which seems to be quite an achievement. I continue by hitchhiking and soon I join the others in the Ala Archa valley.

When the weather gets mad in the Issyk-kul region of Kyrgyzstan.

Here, the air is mild, the river is freezing and crisp clean, and the trees are fresh and green. We hike up to the glacier and then we spend a day just camping on the river bank, learning a Kyrgyz song and watching squirrels eating our food we forgot to pack (it also peed on Vojta's mat). It feels like a paradise again, and I’m trying to enjoy every single second before we go back to the summer oven.

The journey of the Swiss girls is over. They fly back to Europe, and Vojta and I are on our own again. We camp two more nights in a sweltering Bishkek park, spending our days in the city cafés with wifi (and air-conditioning), printing vocabularies and messages in Mandarin, and trying to figure out how to get through China. There seems to be no legal way, so we will just have to try.

In Ala Archa valley

The more passports, the more fun

We meet once more with Amanat, the young Kazakh poet from the association that hosted us when we first came to Bishkek. He is going home, across the border to his Kazakh village, and he invites us to see his family. So we go with him.

Crossing the border is not so easy, though.

My boyfriend brought us our spare passports from Czechia, with the Chinese visa from the Czech agency in it. However, we came to Kyrgyzstan on a different passport – so each of us has a passport with the Chinese visa, and another passport with all the other stamps. We decided to switch the passports on the Kyrgyzstan-Kazakhstan border, so that we don’t have to do it when we will be crossing to China. The poor Kazakh border control doesn’t seem to be ready for this, though.

„Where is your entry stamp?“ the guard asks me when I show him my passport with nothing than the Chinese visa in it.
„In my second passport.“

He is staring at my two Czech passports, and it seems his brain is about to blow up.
„Whose is the other passport?“
„It’s mine.“
„Where did you get it?“
„From the same authority as the first one.“
„So the second one is a copy of the first one?“
„No“.
„So what’s the difference?“
„The passport number.“

The guard calls another guard, we have the very same conversation, then they call a third guard. They confiscate our passports and lead us to an office. We wait outside. It’s over 40°C and the stifling customs feel like a giant greenhouse. They also smell – not like a greenhouse, though. I ask the guards for water, but they can’t give us any. Poor Amanat is still with us, and his family calls him every few minutes. We are let in an air-conditioned office, then we are kicked off again and we keep waiting in the corridor. There also is a Georgian lady waiting, so we at least can chat about Georgian food with her. We go hold the entire passport conversation with one more officer and then go back waiting. After almost 4 hours, a plain-clothed guy with black glasses and a notebook arrives, takes us to the air conditioned office again and we go through the „why do you have 2 passports“ conversation once more. He ends up playing with our passports in his fingers, looking at us, then at the passports, then at us again.

„Propustit,“ he says finally. He closes his notebook and leaves again. We get a stamp and are free to go.

Amanat's home

40°C and counting

 

We arrive to Amanat’s home way later than expected. It is a cosy village house with a garden. It reminds me of my grandma’s garden long ago back in Czechia. His mother is reserved but doesn’t seem to be mad at us much. They give us a plenty of home-made food and a drink made of fermented grains. (It is slightly sour and when I first had it in Kyrgyzstan, it tasted like vomit. I started liking it now, though.) They also have a bucket shower and a small paddling pool in the garden for Amanat’s little sisters. They let us use both. In the sultry weather, the pool seems to be the best place to be in the whole village. At evening, some of Amanat’s sisters and his father come from their trip to the Issyk-kul lake, and show us their pictures. We also talk about Amanat’s school. He made an innovative theater project focused on dispute-solving in families, was in Kyrgyz news and was even invited to run the project in Kazakhstan. He would like to get into politics after school. He admires the Kazakh president and dreams of meeting him in person. He is happy about all the opportunities there are in his country now – way more than his parents’ generation had in the Soviet times.  

Our pictures from Europe seem to be interesting.

In the morning, we get a lot of food again and we say goodbye to everybody. Amanat walks us through the blazing hot village to the main road, and we part for good.

We want to avoid Almaty and try to go around because we have very little Kazakh money and don’t want to change more. We find out, though, that we actually don’t need more if we eat what we have left from Kyrgyzstan and just buy bread. (Our budget suddenly shrinks when Vojta stops buying Coke and ice-creams.)

Our driver has an air-conditioned car but if I try to touch the window, the glass is burning hot. So I just enjoy every minute we spend in a bearable temperature. Even the driver says that a weather like this is not usual here. When we get out of the car, the heat almost knocks me down. We walk along the road to find the right way around Almaty. Every time we see a water tap, I pour water all over myself to enjoy 10 minutes before all my clothes get dry again.

A Kakazkh kitten (the picture is pretty much unrelated but I put it in here because it's cute)

Our next drivers are friendly and talkative, offer us pastries and give us a bottle of ice even though we tell them we are fine. We end up at the Kapchagay lake, which is the best place to be even though there are so many fancy hotels on the shore that it’s almost impossible to reach water. A guard lets us use a paid beach for free just before it closes.

Next day, the weather is even hotter. Fortunately, the road goes through a mountain pass and we end up waiting on the very top. Here, the temperature is under 40°C, which feels almost mild, and the last car crew gave us cookies with hippos on it. I’m perfectly happy we got a bit stuck.

In a Kazakh village: barbecue, vodka and Shoqan Walikhanov

 

In the afternoon, we get picked up by Yerlan. He is a wrestling coach and finds the idea of hitchhiking through Kazakhstan quite fun, even though he tells us it will be hard in China because Chinese food is bad.

  

When we tell him our Chinese visa only starts tomorrow, he decides to show us a museum. He turns from the road to the mountains. I am wondering how there can be a museum, but the slopes are nice and fresh and we drive along a clean stream, so I don’t care. Once, we even stop at a water spring.

Yerlan first takes us to his family’s house. His parents look like characters from a fairy tale. They only speak Kazakh – no Russian. Our new friend tells us they originally came from China. His mum gives us lagman and tea and it seems like the best unexpected goodbye to Central Asia.

Yerlan's dad

In the village, there really is a museum: the museum of Shoqan Walikhanov, a 19th century Kazakh traveler and scholar. It is closed now, but that can’t stop Yerlan. He drives around the town until he finds the custodian and convinces her to open the place for us. It’s an impressive building with red carpets, and the expositions show the whole history of Walikhanov’s travels. In the epoch of European colonists who used to bother village people in other countries to „study“ them, Kazakhstan had its own Kazakh ethnographer. He died in this village when he was 29.

In the museum of Shoqan Walikhanov

We drive even more up the hill to find Yerlan’s friends. On the way, we meet a broken car stuck in a small saddle – its crew could easily star in a comedy. One of them is short and plump, the other one thin and tall. Both are drunk. They first cut out a seat belt to use it as a towline. Then they find out it won’t work, and think of pushing the car up instead. My task – as I am the smallest person around – is to drive it. They push me with the car up to the edge of the mountain slope, and I’m wondering whether its brakes work. (They do.)

The place we are going to is a little mountain pond where we can swim. Yerlan’s neighbors are finishing somebody’s birthday celebration with barbecue and some bottles. An elderly man makes Vojta drink with him and every time Vojta refuses, he gets mad. They also lend us their horses to ride them around. When the party is over, a stern-looking 12 years old boy puts his tired father and uncle into their car, and drives them home. Vojta – who normally doesn’t drink at all – is drunk too.

Party at the pond

„I’m sorry,“ Yerlan shrugs his shoulders. „I couldn’t tell them anything – they are elders, it would be impolite.“

We spend the last night in Central Asia in Yerlan’s fairy tale house. In the morning, he drops us on the main road. Only 200 km left to China.

Shoqan Walikhanov once again

Yerlan's crew

Cookies with hippos for the win

Kazakhstan: 2500 Kilometers of nothing and a bit of hospitality

When you hitchhike in Kazakhstan, most of the time you are in the middle of nowhere. That's because there is a lot of nowhere in Kazakhstan, so it is quite easy to be in the middle of it. Sometimes, you at least drive on a road, though. 

How to hitchhike on a field

When our Dutch friends with the old Land Rover leave, we stay alone in the steppe on the outskirts of Beyneu. We need to cover several hundred kilometers of pretty much nothing, reach a crossroads with the road going to Aktobe, and then go through more nothing. 

We are waiting for any cars to show up on the road. It's hot and windy, and only endless steppe is ahead of us. Again, I'm a bit nervous. What if hitchhiking is actually difficult here and we will get stuck without water... Or what if we meet more zombie gorillas who will want to punch us like the ones a couple of days ago? Pepper spray wouldn't help at all in this wind. 

I don't have time to imagine more things to be afraid of because a guy stops. Time to practice our fake Russian.

"Hello, we are hitchhiking. That means we travel without money. Can we still go with you?"
"Yes but I'm only going to the next village."
"How far is that?"
"100 km."

The Atyrau-Aktobe highway

Our next car is a truck with two drivers - the one who is not driving wants to play Durak with Vojta. They ask us about our journey and want to know how much our government pays us for traveling. They are reluctant to believe that we are doing it voluntarily, for free, and our government has nothing to do with it. 

Soon, we get to the crossroads. Our friends are headed north. Locals told them the highway straight to Aktobe was bad, so they are taking a detour. 
The road looks normal, and in the map, it is drawn in red. And roads drawn in red are nice - they are big highways. So it can't be that bad, can it?

After a couple of kilometers we cover with an old Soviet minibus, the nice road becomes so full of potholes that there actually are more potholes than road. The driver doesn't bother with it and steers into the steppe. The ancient Soviet car shows to be a solid offroad. It doesn't seem to need any asphalt to go 60 km/h. 
The wide field is full of intertwining car tracks but the driver never doubts which way to take. I'm trying to keep an idea where the asphalt road is, but I sometimes can't see it as we are jumping up an down on moulds. There at least is a railroad nearby going the same way, so I hope we won't get lost and be eaten by camels. 


The driver leaves us near a Soviet monument in the middle of the field and continues to a village behind the train tracks. It seems that here, most drivers have mercy on the road and use it, so it might be a good hitchhiking spot. (Except that there are no cars.)

When there is a car, you can see it from afar. Or actually you can see a dust cloud. You watch it approaching for several minutes until you also hear the noise and eventually discover a car under the cloud - and then it goes past you as if the driver weren't surprised at all to see hitchhikers in here. It happens every ten minutes or so and it is the most interesting thing you can see around.

There is only one car which doesn't have a cloud of dust behind it. It is a white truck which is going very slowly - at first we think it is not moving at all. We watch it approaching for ages, and then it stops for us.

The driver is Iranian, doesn't speak any Kazakh or Russian and looks very much lost. We dig out of our heads some Farsi words we have almost forgotten, and he seems actually happy he met us. We spend in the truck next three hours - and cover 30 kilometers. 

The best hitchhiking spot

It is the first time the driver is going this way, and he too believed that the big red line in the map actually was a road. His car is made for nice flat asphalt. He is going 10 kilometers per hour, he sometimes tries to leave the pothole road and very often has to go back again when he comes across a bigger mould that his truck cannot climb up or down. And he is running out of his visa. 

At evening, we stop in a village (yep, there is a village. And it has internet network coverage). The driver fails to find a shop in there. He looks like he is going through a culture shock.

Camping in the steppe is quite scary this time since anywhere we go, we are technically camping on the road. So we set the camp behind an iron pole and hope that a car doesn't bump into us. It is a bit colder here than in the hot south, so the night is actually comfortable for sleeping.

A zombie camel

In the morning, we take a position at a communist monument behind the village and use it as a watch tower for finding cars. Hitchhiking is quite hard here because the road is several kilometers wide. You need to identify a dust cloud in the steppe and then run to be able to meet the car and wave at it. And you mustn't fall asleep while waiting. We miss a couple of cars because they are too fast and too far, and then we are lucky and make some 40 kilometers with a local truck at a normal speed.

There we meet our Iranian again, and we know that our fate is to suffer up to Aktobe together. I mentally prepare for three more days in the wasteland, but surprise surprise, a real road starts in the middle of the way. When we are saying goodbye to each other on the outskirts of the city, we realize that the driver also ran out of money for food, so we give him some.

It's for free, we are Turkish

1950s crane in Aral

For several days, we are making our way through the steppe. For the first time in months, we spend such a long time just going ahead, without stopping much, without meeting people to stay with and talk to. Drivers and strangers on the street are way more reserved than in Azerbaijan, Turkey or Iran. The fact that we are bad at Russian and know nothing in Kazakh doesn't help either. A lady tells me how to say "hello" in Kazakh, except that there are four versions of it according to the sex of people who are greeting each other, so I never really know which version to use. I end up saying always "salam" and hope I won't offend anybody too much.

It's hot, the steppe is endless, the constant wind is throwing dust into our faces. I'm actually happy for the wind, though, because without it, the heat would be much more annoying. And if the wind stops at evening, mosquitoes attack us. We are covered in dust and sand. In almost a week, we find running water twice: once, it is a river, once a gardening hose in a park. Finding drinking water is also hard. 

Meeting Johannes

I'm getting tired of the monotonous days, the dust and the heat. We are starting to get to each other's nerves. I'm getting annoyed by Vojta being all the time bitchy and rude and in a hurry, and he is annoyed by me not wanting to be in a hurry and telling him to stop being bitchy and rude. 

We meet Johannes, the Austrian biker, on the road on several occasions. The long way is tiring him too.

Harbour in Aral

We reach Aral, a totally uninteresting small town that used to be a thriving harbor before the Aral sea dried out. We are thinking about hitchhiking more into the desert to find a cemetery of old ships stranded on the former sea bottom, but we google that they have already been sold to China. So we at least go to the ancient port. We navigate through sandy streets, family houses and a couple of zombie-looking camels. Several locals we ask don't know where the harbour used to be, but eventually we find it. There still are a couple of puddles in the ancient marina, some desolate factories around, and especially two huge, magnificent cranes from the fifties. We climb them up a bit - from the platform, I can see the port and the sea of sand.

"Short history of the Aral sea"

The Islamic month of Ramadan has begun: Muslims are not supposed to eat or drink when Sun is up, which in this heat requires a true devotion. My new hobby is to watch our drivers and see if they celebrate Ramadan, or not. Most of them don't; they can't stop drinking water because of their physically demanding jobs, and some say that they usually respect Ramadan if it is in winter, but not in summer. Some do celebrate it, though - one of them is visibly thirsty and exhausted, and the very minute the Sun goes down, he pulls out and takes out his snack (and insists on sharing it with us even though he was starving the whole day). 

Our Uzbek hosts

As we are heading south, it is hotter and hotter. On the outskirts of Shymkent, I decide that I'm just not going anywhere without at least a bucket of water. I find a car workshop with a cafe, and the staff show me an outdoor water tap. A real water tap! With water! Real water! I squeeze underneath and pour water all over myself. The workers are staring at me: I must look like a water ghost, but I'm totally happy because it's my first shower since the gardening hose in Aral. Vojta wanted to know prices in the cafe, so I ask one of the technicians.

"For you it's for free. Where are you from?"
"Err... thanks. From Czechia. We are hitchhiking."
"Oh I see. Come have a meal." A small group gathered around me.
"Thanks a lot but my friend is waiting..."
"Where?"
"Over there. He is building a tent."
"Go and get him here, tonight you sleep here. Be our guests."

I bring Vojta and to be sure, I ask again how much a meal is in the cafe. 
"I said it's for free!" the technician, probably owner, gets almost mad. "We are Turkish!"

He gives us a hotel room and a meal and lets us use shower, a washing machine and power plugs. We wash almost all our stuff and for a while, we get rid of wind, dirt, mosquitoes and the burning sun. I realize that taking a shower is one of my dearest hobbies. I am absolutely happy.

Almaty: the fanciest city in Central Asia

Lunch with a Turkish truck driver

The little restart helped us a lot. It is even windier and hotter but we have regained some energy. Slowly, we are approaching Almaty. We meet Johannes once more and have beer with him. Jimmy and Roger are already in the city: somehow, they overtook us.

We hitch a ride with an Uzbek couple. The lady - her name is Gulnura - tells me about Uzbekistan, about winters in Kazakhstan, about Kazakh language... They also invite us for a delicious meal. Kazakhstan seems to be suddenly spoiling us.

We meet another Turk, a truck driver, and he adopts us for a while as well. We cook pasta together in his truck kitchen. Meeting Turks is nice. The world would be sadder without Turks.

Almaty

Almaty feels like a different world, and not only because there suddenly are mountains and the weather is mild and fresh. Almaty is cool, rich, fancy, fast, showy, international, modern, and mostly Russian-speaking. Everybody on the street look classy. There are big shopping malls, glass buildings, fancy attractions and expensive cars. (One of the favorite pass-times of the richest local kids is to show off with their cars at a particular parking lot. We are curious, so we go look at them: leaning against the cars and drinking doesn't look much like fun but watching them is as much fun as going to ZOO.)

We get in touch with a Couchsurfer who lets us stay with her. Let's call her Aygerim even though her real name is way less Kazakh. She also is cool, fancy and international, and speaks more Russian than Kazakh. She has no idea about all the versions of saying hi according to people's sex. She has never really been to any other Kazakhstan cities except Almaty and Astana because there is no point. Other city people hardly ever go to the west of the country either. 

We are enjoying life in civilization again - Aygerim shows us some of the fancy parks, a cable car, and we go to a swimming pool. I smoke weed with her and her friends and I get high and I'm surprised because normally it doesn't work on me. Aygerim tells us that once, her mom found the weed but Aygerim told her she only was selling it, not smoking it, and her mom was ok with that. 
 She also drives us to the Mongolian embassy and we get so far the quickest visa in our lives - a sleepy guy in the shabby building seems to look a bit surprised we actually came to the embassy for a visa. 

Aygerim studies abroad and tells us that she just wants to get out of Kazakhstan - pretty much everybody who can afford paying a school abroad do their studies elsewhere because local universities are bad. She is rather critical about the government, too.

We get in touch with the Dutch guys, their friend Denis and his wife Adisa again. Denis tells us a story about an unknown drunk dude in a traditional costume with an ax that was threatening to kill his wife for marrying a foreigner. Seems that Almaty also has some not very modern people.

We also see Karla, a girl that Vojta met at a train station in Beyneu, and she drives us to the mountains. At the beginning, there are some of the fanciest and most expensive hotels. The rich Almaty people seem to love going to the mountains dressed up, with high-heeled shoes and satin dresses, to take selfies. The mountains are tall and wild and eventually we get to a place without buildings. On the other side, there is Kyrgyzstan and the Issyk-kul lake. A guy tells us that in the Soviet times, he used to walk there on foot. We find an old observatory; Karla climbs up the rusty construction and we follow her - it's fun to see such a classy girl to enjoy urban exploring. We then spontaneously climb a mountain of 3800 meters, the highest place I've ever been to, and I again feel almost like after smoking weed. Then we have a picnic at a lake and are kicked off by some very important chieftains because we are foreigners. They probably also want us to give them money, but Karla is just being nice at them and keeps smiling and they let us go. 

Reunion with our friends

Like the previous countries, Kazakhstan also becomes too interesting for us, so we again stay longer than expected. Only after almost a week with Aygerim, we say goodbye to everybody and thumb towards Kyrgyzstan.

International Roadtrip through the Kazakh Steppe and Car Glass Smashed with a Fist

The city of Aktau is basically in a desert. It means that between Aktau and the rest of civilization, there are several hundred kilometers of nothing. Our plan is to cross this nothing with the Land Rover crew we have met at the boat, and to separate in the next town of Beyneu. So we start discovering Kazakhstan together with the Dutch guys and the Swiss girls who also became hitchhikers for now. Also, we come across the first assholes since the beginning of our trip.

Hildi the dead camel

Jimmy and Roger need to do some car maintenance, so we stay a few days in Aktau. Vojta and I spend most of the time in a fastfood with wifi, finishing the Chinese visa paperwork. (Eventually, we send the documents to my boyfriend who will bring it to a Czech agency together with our spare passports. Then we can just pray gods of all possible religions.) Meanwhile, Kasha and Mira do acrobacy on a rooftop of the car on a wooden pallet we stole for fire but decided not to burn. At evenings, we meet up with Johannes the biker who lives in a hotel, and drink beer together on the beach. Our big old green military car with white zebra stripes attracts a lot of attention - people stare and honk at us, and some of them come to talk.

Aktau: a lot of free space

Everything looks large in this town: roads, squares, buildings... It reminds us of how big this country is. So far, Kazakhstan looks fancier than we expected. There are no 30 years old cars like anywhere in Azerbaijan except Baku - most of them are new offroads. Also people look fancy. Houses are totally Sovietic, though. 

And there is one notable thing: sand. It's everywhere. There also is constant wind, so soon the sand is on us and in all our stuff, and we can't get rid of it.

Having a car just for yourself is comfy and you get spoiled very easily (even though there are just two seats and the rest of the crew is squeezed in the sleeping part like sardines in a can). You can carry a lot of water, food and beer, and move fast through the city to find a camping spot on the outskirts. (Except that anywhere you go, there is a lot of sand and wind, and that's pretty much it.)  

At the sea coast

Our drivers take us to a meeting with their Couchsurfing friend. His name is Denis, he is originally American and he happened to come to Aktau with a TV crew - they are making a show about the countryside of Kazakhstan (countryside means pretty much everything except Almaty and Astana). So we end up on TV again, two days after what we thought was the last TV interview in our lives - except that this time, it's Roger who does the speaking. 

Denis lives in Almaty and knows Kazakh as well as Russian. He shares some of his insights about our new temporary home country: "People in Kazakhstan are very hospitable if they know you - that means they push a lot of food on you whether you want it or not - and very rude if you're a stranger. Especially if you look Russian. That's from the Soviet times." He also tells us that Aktau was built for uranium miners during the Cold War. Now, it is used mostly for oil drilling. And in most of the Mangystau region, there is no fresh water whatsoever, so Aktau has a power plant to desalinate sea water. 

Kitsch time on Aktau beach

Denis and his colleagues then take us to the steppe to see the deepest canyon in the country. We meet a German dude with another Land Rover - a new one - and a hitchhiker with a bicycle. So far, Kazakhstan seems to be a hub for travelers. The driver is planning to cross all the way to the Aral sea, something like six hundred kilometers, through the steppe with no roads whatsoever. Denis says he's mad, but the guy is pretty sure about his plan.

We also find a large animal carcass. 

How we met Hildi the camel skull

I know it might be hard to imagine, but a skeleton of a dead animal can be very much fun. ("You guys are sick," Denis says.) We especially like the huge skull, so we take it along and get a new team member: Hildi the dead camel. 

Another advantage of having a car.

A dude who thinks he is the Hulk

The German guys heading to the desert

We slowly start moving towards Beyneu. There is mostly sand. We are all pretty excited about the journey, though. We are listening to a long playlist of good roadtrip music, and the young guys make fun of Vojta's Slavic English and random use of articles. 

The couple of villages we cross are way less fancy than Aktau. And usually it's hard to get water. 

It's pretty easy to buy ice-cream, though. Vojta buys one in every shop we stop at, and the girls start calling him Ice-Cream, or "the Ice-Cream" since the only thing he consistently uses with the definite article are people's names.

The air is getting very hot despite the wind that never stops. It's not possible to open windows at the back of the car, so it feels like traveling in a greenhouse. It's not possible to sit in there much either, so I lie on a pile of backpacks and usually sleep. 

We stop at a small cave in a rock near the road. Some people are having a picnic nearby.

"It's something else than just desert, so we want to see it," the Dutch guys say. "And there are people, so it must be something important."

It actually is important because it seems to be the only place with some shade in the whole region. Some of the people are resting in the cave. They make some room for us and then invite us (in Russian) to join their picnic. It's quite admirable how much Russian the Dutch guys are able to use thanks to their audio guide. We learn that our hosts are an extended family, and most of them work in the oil industry in Aktau. 

Picnic with a Kazakh family

They give us some sashlik - roasted meat - and coke. All the family members smile, tell us their names and are curious to know where we come from and what we are up to. Some of the kids examine our offroad.

"Nice people - I finally feel more at home in this huge country," Roger says when we are leaving. He is right. Later, when we are making our way through the wasteland and see mostly grumpy faces, the memory of these people helps me to stay in a good mood.  

We go further - the military offroad is actually pretty slow - and in the afternoon we stop at yet another village to scrounge some water and get more food. Then we sit on top of the car and eat ice-cream. Here, the Land Rover is even more of an attraction than in the city. All drivers going past us honk and wave - except two.

When we are sitting back inside to move on, we notice two dudes waving their fists at us. They stop just in front of us; the bigger of them gets off the car and goes towards us with a totally blank expression, as if he weren't an intelligent creature at all. We haven't seen them before and we haven't even blocked their way, so it takes us a couple of seconds to realize that for some reason, the gorilla mistook our car for a punchbag. 

"Just go!" Kasha tells Jimmy who is now behind the wheel. He tries to drive away as quickly as possible, which is probably why the engine fails. 

Without a single word or any change in his empty face, the dude tries to open Jimmy's door, but he can't because Roger is holding it. So he starts beating at the window. 

"Go, Jimmy!" 
"Hold the door!" 
- bang -

(The confusion reminds me of the Game of Thrones scene, and I'm glad there just is one zombie boxing into our car.)

With the third blow, he breaks it and the pieces of glass scatter inside. Jimmy manages to start the engine and to drive away. 

"Are they after us?" 
"No, they went to the left, let's just get the hell out of here."

We only stop a few kilometers after the village. Jimmy's face is still green and the pieces of glass are everywhere. We wash shards out of his and Roger's arm. Kasha, who is sitting at the passenger seat, takes an ax and a plank from the back of the car and puts it under her feet, in case the dudes would appear from an unexpected direction and assault us again. (I don't know what exactly she wants to do with the ax, but since she is the biggest fighter among us, and since in zombie movies axes always work, I trust her.) 

Two other guys stop next to us to say hi and take some selfies with us. They look totally unsurprised by the fact we are sweeping smashed window glass out of the car and walking around with an ax. Then they go again.

The zombie dudes don't show up anymore.

The whole thing didn't start making any sense. We just suddenly have one window less than before.

The engineer thinks that the glass won't work well

At evening, we drive a bit into the steppe, put up our tents next to the car and cook a good meal with a lot of heavy ingredients that we would never bother to carry on our backs, and we open beers. It has now become a ritual.

 Jimmy loses his car keys in the middle of nowhere and then finds them again, and we stalk a dung beetle rolling a really big ball of shit. We play flutes, guitar, and Roger even takes out his violin. 

My first dung beetle

There is a special poetry to making noise in the middle of the steppe.

When the night falls, we make a campfire with wood we scavenged in the morning from some old fireplaces, and we drink.

Once again, we have found good company to travel in. It makes me remember the Iranian hitchhikers. Even though our new friends are about the same age as Atesh and they dared going so far, they are way more organized and way less punk. I'm wondering whether it's because they are Europeans. Probably not; they actually are less punk than us, even though we are old.

A concert in the steppe (pic from the Dutch guys' camera)

The next day, we go to see a famous rock formation, which actually is the last rock we see in days. Up to Beyneu, we drive through a completely empty, flat, windy steppe where you can see that the Earth is round. It is almost frightening. If there is a storm with lightnings, you will definitely be the highest point above the ground. And if you need to pee, you just tell your friends not to look in your direction unless you want to walk several dozen miles to hide behind the horizon.

We don't meet any more Hulks. We once almost crash into a truck that  decided to take over another truck exactly at the moment our car was approaching. Roger somehow manages to squeeze between the truck and the only road sign on the whole steppe, though, so we don't die.

To be, or not to be

Our vague hope that Beyneu would be a super civilized city with a lot of  shops that sell car glass proved too ambitious. There mostly are roads with asphalt (and sand and wind), there are grocery stores and we even find an ATM for Master card, but that is pretty much it. As for the window, I go with the Dutch guys to look for it whereas the others are buying train tickets to Uzbekistan. Two guys tell us they know a place where to repair it, which pretty much is a trap. At first, Jimmy has to discuss with someone over phone and bargain the price from something like 100 Dollars down to 30. Then the dudes try to stick a toothed, obviously too small glass shard into the frame with a duct tape. We tell them that we think that the glass won't work well because it is a bad glass, and that we want a good glass (the Russian sentence we learned on the ship is suddenly super handy). They eventually find a car glass pane and even discover screws in the window frame to detach the frame from the car (they didn't try to look for them before). Then they try to cut the pane, they break it and ask for the 30 Dollars.

Inzhenyor dumayet shto stakla bude rabotat kharasho

We tell them: "no glass - no money", and to their question where we are going I tell them Uzbekistan, because I am worried they will try to follow us. 
We get a plastic foil (for free) from a photo studio, and Kasha and Jimmy make an improvised window themselves. Also for free.

We stock up on food and beer again, and go to the desert to make one last campfire before we all separate. Also Bjorn joins us - he is living in a hotel in town. Cycling from Aktau in the never-ending strong wind has been one of the hardest parts of his journey.

The idea of going on across this giant country without our new friends is making me slightly nervous. And I'm not the only one.

"You can go with us to the next city, if you like..." Roger offers us uncertainly. It actually surprises me; he usually is the one who sticks to the plan - it's usually Jimmy who makes generous offers. It sounds nice and it would postpone our separation a bit. I realize how much we are getting spoiled in the car. 

"I think we'd rather hitchhike...", Vojta says.  

Eventually we decide to part as planned. At night, Jimmy drives Mira and Kasha to the train station, and they continue to Uzbekistan. The next morning, we say goodbye to Jimmy and Roger at the end of the town, and we watch their zebra car disappear in the desert.

We are on our own again. 

Hildi chilling