Kazakhstan

I'll get it out of the way now, I didn't see Borat, or any mention of him in Kazakhstan. What I did see were the first oriental looking people on my journey, and quite a large number of them too.

Aktau feels like a wild west town, with wide boulevards arranged on a grid and cars instead of horses. It features an Irish bar with high prices, shops, hotels and little else. It seemed that every local with a car was automatically a taxi driver as well, judging by the number of offers of lifts we got. I used these taxis twice, and both times got driven miles away from where I wanted to go, and once we got pulled over by the police as well. Interesting, but not particularly useful.

The main road from Aktau to Beyneu was fine for around 120km, but it is 400km long. The rest of the road was a rutted muddy track, which took far too long to traverse. This was compounded by the truck failing several times due to a shoddy batch of diesel, each time necessitating a ten to twenty minute stop for Tim to fix it.

Two days later we limped into Beyneu, a town with a deficit of tarmac and seemingly a surplus of nothing, except psychotic guesthouse owners who terrorise their customers. It was a town with no apparent reason for its existence other than the railway junction there. By now the train was looking pretty attractive as a means of travel, with the awful state of the "main" road. And we were going to be driving on a minor track the following day! It will be terrible, with sand drifts, mud pools, monsters, bandits and foreigners!

Actually, the track turned out to be much better than the main road: virtually level, and nothing to impede our progress. We reached the Uzbekistan border quickly, and passed through in only two hours! Trust me, that is really quick for this part of the world. On the Uzbek side the road got even better, with passable tar in places. We reached Qonghirat that night.

Just one photo, I can't remember whether it is Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan because it all looks like this. Yes, really!