After an emotional farewell to our dear friend Gapur, who saved us 450 dollars by looking after the van for us, we set off for the border with Kazakhstan. However the road was blocked for some reason, so we tried to find a detour and got hopelessly lost along little single-track gravel roads. But just when I got fed up and resolved to turn round and go back, we miraculously found ourselves on the right road.
Crossing the border was fast, and would have been faster if 4 cars hadn’t come racing up and pushed their way into the queue. None of the Kyrgyz drivers seemed bothered; they are a very laid-back people. Driving through southern Kazakhstan, Jennifer wanted to stop at the next big town and find a restaurant with wifi so she could ring her nephew on his 3rd birthday. We drove through Taraz, which turned out to be much bigger than I expected, found a hotel and asked if they served meals. No but we could go to Erk Oil, which was as much as I could understand of the Kyrgyz language. Erk Oil, as I expected, was a filling station and we thought for a moment that the hotel guy was taking the piss, until I noticed some coloured lights behind the filling station, and I could read that dread word “karaoke”. But it turned out to be a restaurant and we had some excellent kebabs before managing to get out before the karaoke started. We then struggled to get out of Taraz, but there were no road signs for Shymkent and we finished up going in the wrong direction on the road to Talas. We found a truck-stop and bedded down for the night.
The pic shows a concert at a girls school in a village near Bishkek. The kiddies are daisies!
