UK

Driving out of Kazan after one of the best breakfasts for many a day, we travelled west (after driving north and getting lost) to the Raifa Bogoroditskii (Virgin) Monastery. It … Read more

A lengthy drive through a countryside of deciduous forests alternating with ploughed fields and small farming villages. Only one significant town on the way, Dimitrovgrad where we stopped at a … Read more

We stayed in the van for most of 30th September, waiting for nightfall when the plan was to get through the border at midnight, the earliest we would be allowed … Read more

Day 91 was a relaxing day, staying at the Tanzharyk Hotel,because our Russian visa starts on 1st October and we needed to take our time getting to the border. There … Read more

Khromtau looked rather less awful in the light of day with some nice looking single-storey brightly-painted houses visible from the main road. It is a major chrome mining and processing … Read more

There is practically nothing worth writing about today, except that the monotony of the semi-desert/steppe was broken by lines of trees either side of the road which were presumably planted … Read more

There are no settlements of any sort on the motorway over the huge distance from Aral to Aktobe, so we stopped at a huge service station at the turnoff to … Read more

I feel so sorry for the Kazakhstan tourist authorities. One of the few places that anybody outside of Kazakhstan has heard about is the Aral Sea which has been steadily … Read more

Kazakhstan has to be the most boring country on earth. And it is HUGE. Over one million square miles, bigger than Western Europe, and the 9th biggest country in the … Read more

Continuing on the Talas road we came, after about 100 metres to the border with Uzbekistan. Turning round, we noticed a sign for Shymkent and spent the rest of the … Read more