Kazakhstan

So after this huge waste of time, but great story to tell afterwards (I start thinking that some of you are actually thinking I am making this up – I am not!) at the Russian border, we crossed no-man’s land and arrived at the Kazakh border. What a huge difference, it’s like they just put down a shed and a small brick building in the middle of the steppe and that’s it. Even a toll booth in Europe is bigger than this.

Anyway, waiting and waiting as usual, but they were friendly, found some officer who spoke a bit English to help us out filling yet other (pointless) papers and after an hour or so we were free to go. But they all insisted on trying to tell us that we need to register within 5 days or we’ll have big problems, as most people try to cross this huge land in only a few days to skip this part. Well we wanted to see something of this country since I got all the trouble to get a double entry visa and won’t be returning here soon (I think). So we finally made it to Uralsk (or Oral in Kazakh) and I first wanted to get us registered so we were done with this and could cross the country hassle-free. Well we found the police station after asking around and they even found someone who spoke a bit English! He’s a muderinvestigator and we explained that we need to register our foreign visa. So they made some calls for us and in the end after almost two hours a whole delegation of the migration police came from somewhere else to see us. We were the local attraction, as not a lot of tourists come here, let alone two bikers that are policemen! Problem is they said (well they phoned with an interpreter to explain this to us) is that they can’t register us, because it’s saturday. And no registration in the weekends… So we are back to square one, having ‘lost’ almost 3 hours in this process, but having a good and nice feeling that they did come all the way just to tell us that they can’t help us and that we need to get registered in Aqtöbe or anywhere on Monday morning. Despite the weatherforecast, it started raining again…