The hotel’s driver and a delightful manageress who spoke perfect English having lived in Sweden for 17 years took us round a number of banks who could do nothing to extract roubles from our credit cards. So we agreed that we should drive to Atyrau in Kazakhstan and, having checked that Jennifer’s payment for the first night’s stay had not been honoured by the Halifax, we would get a Kazakh bank to transfer the necessary number of roubles to the hotel. Which was very trusting of them because we could simply disappear, although the police would stop us when we come back through Russia later this year.
The road from Groznyi to Astrakhan was excruciatingly boring. Flat as a pancake and ranging from pastureland to semi-desert with xerophyllous scrub (thorny plants with very deep roots to capture moisture) and the occsional oasis-type clumps of trees, including healthy looking olive trees. We also saw some genuine sand dunes. The most exciting event of the day was getting lost in Kizlyar. Although a man in Groznyi with a large orange forked beard had put the route on my phone, I didn’t bother to look at it and drove straight through Kizlyar to the other side rather than go round it.
Nothing much else happened until we found a patch of waste ground at the side of the road and bedded down for the night. We still had 3,600 roubles left after filling the tank for 4,400 (about £40: diesel is 40 pence a litre here) but we decided to spend it on some more diesel before entering Kazakhstan tomorrow. So we had a delicious evening meal from the food which the lovely lady in Vladikavkaz bought for us.
One notable difference from 2018 is that all the border posts on the “borders” between the autonomous republics of Alania, Chechnya, Ingushetiya, Dagestan and Kalmikiya had disappeared and we simply drove across the borders. There were a few police around but they didn’t stop us.
Breakfast at the hotel
The toilet