Potholes at the end of the world

A cooling beer in Almate

Firstly, can I thank all of you who have donated money to our chosen charities via our Justgiving page. Initially I tried to thank each person individually, but time has got the better of me these last couple of weeks as we have grappled with long days at the wheel and long waits at the borders such that sleep comes very quickly at night and then we are off again. But please rest assured that I look at every donation and read every accompanying comment and know too that I shed a tear (not too sad a one – more a happy remembering one),  most times when I log onto the site and see Sarah’s wee face looking back at me.  And so I thank you all for the support you have given to ALL the charities we are raising funds for because they are all great causes.

So now we are sitting in a hotel room in Semey in Northern Kazakhstan. It is 5.30 pm local time and we have just had a litre of draught Kazak beer each (because we thought we deserved it and it was only 90p a pint!). We are now going to clean up a bit and then head down for something to eat and another couple of litres of aforesaid beer. At that price it would be a shame not to!

Yesterday was probably our longest drive to date, some 470 miles in 13 hours over the worst potholed roads we’ve encountered so far. The previous day we had spent in Almaty in the south east of Kazakhstan. It does not have the charm of Samarkand but it is a pleasant place to spend a day of rest and we tramped the streets to get a feel for the place and see the ‘sights’.  Almaty sits at the foot of some impressive mountains and we took the cable car to a place from where we could look down on the city in one direction and up at snow covered mountains in the other.

But the highlight of Almaty for me was our visit to the Green Bazaar, a public market, and in particular the meat section. As soon as you entered the great market hall you could smell the meat. Not an unpleasant smell of putrefaction but a smell of fresh meat that needs to go in a refrigerator. Unfortunately there was no cooling of the hall where the meat was on display and I can only guess at what the place must be like if the stock is not shifted fairly rapidly. There was a lot of bustle going on and dozens of stalls arranged by the type of meat they were selling. So there was a lamb/mutton section, a beef section, a horse section, and pork and chicken sections too. It is interesting that there were no stalls that sold more than one type of meat. The stallholders, the majority of them women, were almost universally friendly and they were happy to have their photos taken at their work.

Veg on display in the Green Bazaar

A fine selection of meat in the Green Bazaar

Beautiful offal seller

Children here see ‘life’ at the sharp end

Making sausages

Yesterday we left Almaty at 6 am because we had a long drive through mainly uninhabited countryside in order to find a lone hotel to stay the night. We had planned to do more wild camping but I guess it must be our age because when offered a bed and a shower for usually the price of a decent bottle of wine (two bottles at the most), we are not inclined to say no. Can you blame us?  Dust from the road gets into cracks and crevices I never knew existed and the chance to wash it away is always too good to turn down.

It was a long old slog yesterday. The road started off as a two lane super highway but after about 150 miles it deteriorated. I then had the injustice (I always drive slower than Andy P), of coming round a bend to see a cop pointing a speed gun at me and being clocked at 61 kilometres an hour on a 50 kph bend. Sitting in the passenger seat of the police car and not being able to converse with and sweet talk the man poring over my passport was a somewhat weird experience and when he unfolded by creased and torn, old style UK driver’s licence the look on his face said that all was not going to turn out well. He showed me a picture of Bluebell in his speed gun with the speed recorded and explained with sign language that he needed to fill out a form and charge me a 10180 Tengue (about $25 US) fine. But I noticed that he seemed strangely reluctant to actually start writing out the ticket. I soon realised why, and with a little bit of negotiation I was able to slip him a 5000 Tengue note which he slid into his pocket and we parted as good friends with a very loving handshake.

A wee while later the road turned into a pothole with little islands of smooth tarmac dispersed in it and continued like that for about 70 Kilometres.  Following a a somewhat large clang which sent  everything on the dashboard into the air to hit the roof (physics is a wonderful thing isn’t it), there was a rather loud hissing sound through the open window. Andy P pulled to a halt and the two wheels on the driver’s side had rather fine dents in the rims with the front tyre leaking air and rapidly deflating. So we took out most of the luggage in the back, found the special wheel socket wrench we’d bought and fought for ten minutes to get through the plastic shrink wrap that secured it. We were chuffed that we’d had the foresight to buy this, a feeling that was short lived when we realised that the socket it contained was too small to fit our nuts — believe you me I tried and Andy P has the swellings to prove it!

Our ‘Home Bargains’ purchase turned out to be not quite so much of a bargain as we’d thought; quite the opposite in fact. Fortunately the wheel nuts where relatively loose and we were able to undo them with the wrench provided by Nissan and we had the car jacked up and the wheel changed in the sort of time that would give Lewis Hamilton sleepless nights.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, suffice to say that Kazakhstan is a country of wide spaces and big open skies; and empty, relentlessly long roads that do not seem to want to end.  We finally reached our destination in the shape of a small town that appeared to be situated in the back of beyond and which could have served (with no modifications) as the film set for any number of post apocalyptic offerings. ‘Laura’s’ Hotel (who the hell is/was Laura?), was set back a little from the road and it was clean and cheap and they provided us with some soup and ravioli type stuff, followed by a main course of beef and potato stew.  This turned out to be uncannily tasty though it may just have been a combination of acute hunger and the bottle of Romanian red wine which we had consumed on arrival and which I had bought for just such an occasion all those weeks ago (is it only weeks?), back in Romania.

Bluebell 2 takes a rest

Big skies

Open road

Our hotel for the night

Then it was on to Semey and the same relentless road for the first hundred miles during which we passed a pair of huge (golden?) eagles on the ground feeding on road kill just next to the roadside. They were very impressive birds and we came across four more smaller eagles some miles further on picking at a dead cat on the edge of one of the villages.

It was whilst passing one small village that three young boys waved to us and we decided to give them the football we had brought with us in a sort of post colonialist peace offering (how arrogant is that?). We stopped, expecting them to run towards us to see what we wanted but instead they skidaddled for all they were worth as soon as we got out of the car (I guess it would have helped if I’d taken my Uzbek hat off). I was not to be perturbed by this however as that bloody football has been the bane of my life for the last month because it falls out every time I open the back door and bounces off down the road and has nearly got me run over on several occasions. So I waited until they looked back and then kicked the football as hard as I could in their general direction. Their reaction was immediate, like a switch being thrown, and they now proceeded to race towards me with big smiles on their faces to collect the ball. The first lad picked it up and there then ensued a scuffle, the result of which we didn’t wait around to witness for fear of being prosecuted for incitement to riot. Hopefully it was all sorted out relatively amicably but it shows the power of the unequal distribution of material possessions to upset a previously stable dynamic and turn friends into foes.

On reaching Semey we found a back street tyre place where the little man there used a big hammer to bash the dent out of the leaking wheel, before reinflating the tyre and then balancing it on his machine. He then bashed the dent out of the wheel still on the car in situ, and in less than ten minutes the whole job was done. He raised his eyebrows when we said we’d driven there from England and he refused to take any payment for his handiwork, demonstrating once again the very real pleasure that people get from giving a helping hand for no financial reward.  So we presented him with a Mongol Rally T-shirt with which he was well chuffed.

knocking a wheel straight

Receiving his T shirt

We then found a great little hotel for £7 each for the night and it had a rather fine restaurant attached which served beer at 90p a pint. Now that is what I call a result. So tomorrow (Tuesday) we head to Russia and then we have a decision to make. Ten days ago the Mongolian Authorities started charging an import tax deposit (supposedly refundable) of around $5000 US to all Mongol Rally cars on entry at the border, effectively putting a stop to cars going into Mongolia as few people have (or want to risk) that amount of cash. So we have to decide whether to just head straight to the finish line in Ulan Ude, Russia or to risk trying to get into Mongolia at one of the smaller border crossings. The problem to contemplate is potentially screwing up our visas or getting stuck in no man’s land and so there is some serious thinking to be done. We will let you know what happens in a later blog. In the meantime it is on to Russia and the chance to drink some cheap vodka and perhaps catch up with Vladimir himself.

Cheers for now, Andy Coe