We've been driving through Kazakhstan for the past four days now. This countires huge. As soon as we got over the russian border the road ran out, so we spent the first four hours tearing along rally style dirt tracks. We soon got to Oral and drove preety much straight out again. Everything was going very easily... too easily. There was a sign over the road on the way out of Oral saying good luck in English and Russian. At the time I thought it was jst a nice thing to say. Now I realise they were being sincere. Our plan was to drive on the M32 down to Aktobe, and then straight down to Uzbekistan. The 400 mile trip to Aktobe took us two days. Average speeds were about 20km/h. The roads are awful on this stretch, there are Panda sized potholes round every corner. Our progress was made worse by the fact that the roads emptied by about 6:00pm and anyone you did see after then kept on trying to tell you to get off the roads before dark, and that you should come and stay with them. This got us all a bit suspicious and we ended one night trying to hide three Pandas in the middle of a tiny famring village. We obviously didn't hide them very well as all the locals came out and we had quite a job explaining to them what we were doing. On this road giant eagles sat like mile posts in the middle of the road and whenever you passed one it took off anbd flew alongside the cars until the territory of thge next eagle.
On Sunday we made it to Aktobe, but we were all quite un-nerved by the whole experience and the isolated nature of the roads. Luckily we met a couple of local guys who over a couple of beers set our minds to rest and answered all the questions we had. As a result of our chat we have changed route slightly. We decided not to continue down the M32 as it would have taken us weeks. We are therefore not going to Uzbekistan. Instead we took a non-existant road north to Kostanai. Although the motorway was on the map it was only just being built in reality. After a couple of hours we overtook the machine that was cutting the initial track. We were driving through arable land and desert, skirting the russian border and relying on compasses to keep us going in the right direction. Any vilage we did drive through was like a ghost town with only two or three people wandering about. The nigfht before there had a been a thunder storm so in patches the mud roads got very boggy. We all got stuck at some point or other including the 4x4 Panda, but it did redeem itself by towing one of the other cars out. At one point we were getting stuck every 100 yards which was pretty demoralising. The cars were taking a bit of a beating at this point. Eventually we made it to Kostania and the green car stopped in a garage for some repairs to the sump. Seems like they've made it worse but we'vce learnt a valuable lesson, if something needs fixing do it yourself. The mechanic who showed us to the welders bought us lunch and showed us all round town. We stayed last night in a place called Buraba, which is called little Switzerland. It has little mountains and a ginat lake and was really nice. We camped in the gatekeepers back yard, drank a few beers and got pestered by Russian kids with amazingly good English. This morning Chris' car wouldn't start, but after much head scratching we manageed to get it going by upgrading the entire ignition system with spare kit. This was our second potential show stopper and it felt pretty good to fix it ourslves.
It has been good roads ever since and we are now in Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan. We've got our Visa stamped at the OVIR and we are about to set off for Almaty, the old capital, and then probably dip down into Kyrgyzstan before racing back up for Mongolia. The plan is to get to Mongolia as early as possible and have a bit of camping and driving holiday around the base.