We woke up that next morning in Novosibirsk, and headed downstairs to see what the breakfast was like at the hotel Novosibirsk.

And we are pleased to announce, dear reader, that it was a breakfast buffet unprecedented since the Hotel Puri in Malacca Malaysia. There were many kinds of meat, hot and cold, eggs to order, porridge of all kinds, fruit, many selections of breads and pastry, a large station just dedicated to a kind of mashed up cottage cheese called Tvorok, a made to order Blin station, and last but not least plenty of good strong coffee.

On top of that, there was some more of that blazingly fast wifi right there in the breakfast nook, in case we wanted to download copies of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan at 500 k/s. As you can imagine, we spent quite some time lounging around computing before heading out to do a little more serious Novosibirsk wheeling. And so we ran back up to the room to grab our Dawn Patrols, checked in once with the front desk to confirm that our registration had gone through without a hitch, and to ask the best place to buy leather jackets in town before then hit the road. Our first stop was the train station. We had purchased our train tickets online (way to go PЖД!) and so we had only to head over to the local e-ticket window to pick them up .Unfortunately, the e-ticket pickup window had a most complex schedule imaginable, and we had managed to come during one of the many 45 minute long hour e-ticket window closures which are randomly dispersed throughout the day. Rather than wait around, we decided to do a little wheeling and stop back later.

So we wheeled on, away from the train station, past a “Fennimore Cooper” branded wild west themed restaurant, and on towards the main drag, known as Krasny Prospekt, or red street.

The women at the front desk at the hotel Novosibirsk had directed us to a rather giant mal. Not long after wandering into the place, we began to become pretty sure it would not be the place to buy the AsiaWeeling leather jackets. It was very posh, in a way that only stores in Russia can be. There were, of course, your international name brands here and there, but what made it so startling was that all around us there were totally unheard of and completely wild domestic Russian brands selling for truly absurd amounts of money.

Just for fun we wandered into a leather jacket shop and tried on some truly intimidating specimens, double breasted, and covered in zippers and studs. The prices were in the thousands of dollars, through, despite stange and un-known brands emblazoned all over them. Eventually, we lost interest and headed back out for some more wheeling.

From there we headed down the road further in search of a more manageable market for leather goods. The sun came out as we rode, and soon we were bathed in that most uncommon and glorious thing, I beautiful warm day in Siberia. When we rode by this amazing umbrella concept doorway, we had no choice but to stop and appreciate it for a moment.

But a moment only, for there was much more wheeling to do, and the streets of this city were too inviting and  sparsely trafficked to resist. We rode on, then, by a giant central park, where old men played chess on concrete outdoor tables, and onwards past crumbling imperial style housing blocks.

We took a right onto a forested street the skirted the back edge of the park, and followed it until it brought us to a large church. It had been quite some time since we’d seen one of these… in Lebanon, perhaps? This one was of course a little different than any Lebanese church, with huge metallic onion domes and double perpendicular bars on the crosses.

We continued to wheel on past the church and into a more industrial neighborhood. We took a right turn once again onto a muddier and more crumbling drive, which took us through a neighborhood of sagging wooden houses and untamed prairie-like yards. We stopped at a kiosk in this neighborhood to purchase some water, but finding that it was well over a dollar for a medium sized bottled, we decided to wheel on.

I apologized to the woman, saying it was a bit too expensive for us, and just as we were about to go, she asked me to stop. “What do you want to do with the water?” she asked.

“Well, drink it.” I replied. She then told me to wait a second and went into the back of her Kiosk to dip a plastic container full of water from a large vessel she had in the back.

“Here have some of this. It’s free.” We thanked her and drank deeply.

The water tasted good. We have no idea if it was tap water or not, but it certainly did not make us sick. I thought then back to the Russian cyclist, Elya, which we’d met in Cambodia. She had said the water was safe to drink all around Russia… I hadn’t believed her, but maybe she was right all along.

We then ordered a couple of cups of coffee from the lady, which where were priced at a much more reasonable 12 cents per cup, and along with the coffees came two complimentary sausage rolls. “Please take these. For your health, she said.” We tried to refuse, Arab style, for a bit and then accepted them, for they smelled amazing. They were something like a cross between a croissant and a corn dog.

We munched down on those, and I did my best to make small talk with the lady in between customers. She was a new entrepreneur here. Recently having parted ways with her husband, she had bought this kiosk and erected it here. She explained that she did not have to pay for the land, here, since it was on the roadside, but that she did need to pay quite a lot to get a certificate of health approval from the powers that be. She pointed up proudly to here certificate.

“How often do you need to get a new one?” I asked.

“Only if a cop comes by and makes trouble with you.” She said smiling and winking. Quite a place, this one.

We hopped back on the bikes then, and headed back towards the heart of the city. Notice here, how differently Beeline advertizes in Russia as compared to the Uze and the Kaz, or even Vietnam and Cambodia.

We continued wheeling, past more giant cookie cutter housing blocks, and eventually noticed we were thirsty, so we wandered into a giant grocery store, bought waters there and investigated the giant selection of frozen Russian dumplings, called Pelmini. We drank deeply and talked about how every culture seems to have its dumpling. The Turkic cultures have their Manty, the Chinese their Jaotse and their Baozi, the Russians their Pelmini, England and America, their dumplings to name a few.

We headed back out to the street, unlocked the bikes, and spent a while staring at an amazing copper colored classic soviet car before climbing back on the cycles.

From there, we wheeled on to a more central market district where we continued the search for leather jackets. The jackets still proved difficult, but we were confident we’d find the right ones eventually. We did find this fantastic mathematically based advertisement for… we’re not sure… reading in the city?

Anyone that can unpack this in the comments is more than welcome to. Here’s their website… still confusing…

We dodged in and out of malls and shops, finding some fantastic huge Russian women’s boots, but still no Jackets.

We headed from there back towards the train station, timing our wheel to shoot the window when the e-ticket kiosk would open back up. In doing so, we found ourselves on the wrong side of the station, which gave us the opportunity to take a giant overpass above the tracks of this cities huge Trans-Siberian station.

We spent quite some time lingering above the tracks, taking in the operations.

The ticket office was indeed open when we arrived, and the woman who worked there was very patient and methodical as she prepared our tickets for us, showing us exactly how the schedule would work, and underlining that all the train times would be in Moscow time, and not to let that confuse us. Fair enough ma’am.

Tickets for the trains all the way to Ulan Ude in hand, we wheeled from there to a large park, where it seemed it had become city wide cocktail hour. Cocktail is also not quite the right word… It was more like city-wide I’m-off-work-it’s-time-to-Gulyat-with-a-beer-in-hand-hour.

We passed by this very loud and interesting statue.

Your guess is as good as ours as to what components of this are intended by the artist and what are graffiti. From there we headed out of the park, past an interesting geodesic dome and a large wavelike seashell opera house.

For dinner that night, we decided to sample the fare at one of Novosibirsk’s many Traktirs.

The Traktir is a kind of Russian Institution. It’s a theme restaurant that is privately duplicated thousands of times in nearly every Russian city. The algorithm goes like this: Decorate the interior of the place with tons of wood, or fake wood if you can afford it. Make it look as much like the inside of a log cabin as you can. Then fill the walls and ceiling with as much rural schlock as they can hold up; I’m talking hoes, buckets, ropes, saddles, chains, quilts, whatever you can get your hands on. Windows should be minimized, and the staff should be hired only if very attractive, blonde, and female, and placed in a truly ridiculous costume, bright red britches will do, excessive bits of lace and shiny clasps are preferred. Then after all of that is done, you can start thinking about the food.

This is the Russian way, in restaurants at least: concept first, then everything else.

The food should be homey, though, nothing too spicy, nothing too loud. Plenty of meat, plenty of potatoes, a few soups would be good. Black bread is a must, and above all else plenty of booze, for that Russian stereotype is not so far from the truth.

We ordered Borsch and Solyanka (both came with plenty of sour cream and fresh dill), and a large plate of meats which was from the “to beer” section of the menu, which featured dishes paired with beer. We got our giant plate, which turned out to be filled with 4 kinds of meat (sausage, chicken wings, lamb Shashlik, and roast chicken skin), fresh cukes, onions and tomatoes, and plenty of deep fried potato wedges. Petty darn American if you ask me. And it came included with a couple of large glasses of Siberian Crown Lager, a sudsy local cheapo.

We landed in Novosibirsk to find it cloudy and threatening rain. We filed off the Air Astana propeller plane and walked down the stairs and onto the runway. The first thing we noticed was that this was a new climate. It was cool and fall-like, new Englandy even. We climbed onto a bus with our fellow travelers, and a ever so slightly grinning fellow wearing a bright white captain’s hat and white gloves piloted the thing across the jet way and over to the terminal.

We had made friends with a fellow on the airplane, another Mongol Rallier, who had suffered a tough accident, in which the entire drive train of their Ford Transit had completely disintegrated somewhere in Western Kazakhstan. He was headed now to Novosibirsk to meet up with some other Mongol Rally participants in hopes of Still making it to Ulaanbaatar.

He spoke no Russian and had never been to the country before, so we accompanied him over to the entry card filling out booth, to tackle the issue of filling out the forms as a team. They were, of course, only in Russian, and I was struggling to figure mine out when a starchy and immaculately uniformed woman came over, demanded to see my Russian visa, and then low and behold, filled out the entire form for me in a few minutes flat, all in beautiful cursive Cyrillic. How’s that for service!

The entry process was completely painless, and performed by a strikingly beautiful woman, who welcomed me to Siberia in Russian before stamping my papers and handing them back to me.

On the other side of passport control, our luggage was already waiting for us. A few men with adorable trained drug sniffing dachshunds were wandering around the place. As I headed over to pick up my bag, one of them came over to me with his dog and gave me a quick solute. “May I?” he asked in Russian. “Of course,” I replied. The little chocolate covered guy then proceeded to stick his nose up under the lip of my pack, tail just whipping around like mad. “Ok. Thank you.” The man said, and flagged me on towards customs, which was also a walk in the park. I put all my luggage through a old Russian-made X-ray scanner with plenty of Dr. Who-esque lights and readouts on it, and then walked directly out the large electric sliding doors, which had been jammed by a piece of triangular wood to be always open.

Outside it was brisk, and overcast. I looked out on a small parking lot, a military base, and some big stretches of pine forest. The air was clean and crisp. My goodness it felt great to be in Siberia. Cab drivers began coming up to me and asking if I needed to get into Novosibirsk. “I’ve got a bicycle, so no need.” I replied.

“And where are you hiding a bicycle?” they asked. I patted the bag slung over my shoulder.

“Just watch this.”

Scott soon exited the facility in similarly high spirits “I feel like I’m in Germany!” he exclaimed and we began to unfold and reassemble the cycles. As we did so, we began to collect a crowd around us of interested cab drivers. My Russian was getting better, and now that we’d spent that day in the Mountains outside of Tashkent with Shoney’s friends, I knew enough Russian swear words to understand what they were saying, and most of it was pretty flattering.

As I worked, I joked around with them and talked about the cycles, where we’d ridden them so far, how the gears and internal hub transmission worked, and about our plans in Siberia. They seemed to be generally not only approving, but dare I say… respectful?

I realized, as I chatted with these guys that it was the first time we had collected a crowd of interested people around us in some time. It was the first time people had showed interest in the cycles since Shymkent, or even back in Uzbekistan. And it felt great. I found myself remembering why I love AsiaWheleing, why I love traveling and why cycling new cities is such an amazing way to see them.

I had been worried for a moment that Siberia would be as grumpy as the northern Kazakh cities had been, but thanks be to Jah this was proving not the case.

And so it was with a chorus of “good lucks” from the gallery of cab drivers that we hopped onto the cycles and headed down the road. We got another small salute from the guard at the gates to the airport. I asked him the way to Novosibirsk city center as we rolled by, and he directed us onwards, calling out “Maladietz,” which means more or less “way to go, man!” or “Good show, old boys!”

And then we were wheeling. And it felt great. It was a totally new climate and a new landscape. After being in either steaming Jungles or dry deserts for the past 8 months, it felt great to be in a temperate zone, like coming home for the holidays.

The roads were decent, but there was no shoulder, and certainly no bike lane. In fact, during the entire 20 km ride into Novosibirsk, we saw perhaps one other fellow on a bike. Wheeling, it seemed, would not be popular pastime here in Russia. Luckily, traffic was not too dense, and the drivers on the road were so surprised to see two fellows in Vietnamese motor cycle helmets riding fully loaded down with packs that they gave us plenty of room.

We stated to hit the outskirts of Novosibirsk and stopped to confirm our trajectory again, this time at a bus stop in one of the more far-flung suburbs. I had an interaction with a local that was far from the Indonesian smile or the cheerful vibes of Laos, but it was not openly hostile and combative the way my interactions had been in Kazakhstan. And it felt great. There is certainly a sheen of grouchiness to the Russians, I wouldn’t dare deny that, but it’s really just superficial, almost a cultural or stylistic choice, and easily broken through with just a few words of conversation.

It began to mist on us, ever so slightly as we made our way into the more gnarly and built up city center. Little droplets of water were clinging to my mustache and wool sweater as we pedaled across a large trestle bridge over the river, Ob. We passed by a couple of young men on the bridge, who’s fantastic leather jackets and completely wild vertical mullets convinced us that we needed to adopt a little Russian style before we left Siberia. They were like the perfect cross between Jack White and David Bowie.

We had, in the depths of our time in Astana, riddled with bed bug bites, and computing in the lobby of the Radisson, decided to just go ahead and splash out a little here in Novosibirsk. We had been advised by Ms. Helen Stuhrrommereim, that our first registration here in Russia was the most important, and that in the future we would only need register in a city that we would be staying in for more than three days. More than a three day stay in a city is rare on AsiaWheeling, and we had read that there was only one Hotel in Novosibirsk that would be guaranteed to both be open to foreigner guests, and be sure to register you, and that was the Hotel Novosibirsk. It was by no means a cheap hotel, not by anyone’s standards, and certainly not by AsiaWheeling’s. But we had booked it. And over the internet no less. We could not even remember the last time we stayed at a hotel that could be booked over the internet (ok… yes we can… it was probably the intercontinental in Muscat with the Illustrious Mr. fu).

We stopped by an ATM on the way to the hotel. It was a Russky Standart ATM. I had, living in Petersburg become familiar with their world famous Russkiy Standart Vodka…

…but I had not yet learned that the vodka company had made a foray into the world of banking!

The rain stopped just as quickly as it had started, and we found ourselves at a large central intersection. We stopped there on the quickly drying streets to ask a pedestrian who was so startled to see us, that he responded to our question of “Do you know where the Hotel Novosibirsk is?” with a simple “yes,” and them some dumbfounded glassy eyed staring at us and our cycles.

“Could you tell me where?”

“Ah yes of course…”

And two blocks later we were looking at one of the ugliest, blockiest concrete hotels we had ever seen, dropped down like a giant alien tombstone, right there in front of us.

The misting rain was started back up again as we wheeled our bikes into the lobby. It was certainly a much more impressive hotel on the inside than the out. We headed up to the gleaming mahogany front desk, and were immediately assigned a few beautiful women, one of whom showed us where to park the bikes, the other of whom pulled up my registration online and took the payment.

They ran a tight ship here. They took our passports from us and registered us right there and then, scanning all the relative paperwork and sending off the completed forms via email, giving our passports back in a matter of minutes.

Feeling just great about this place, we headed up to our room, which was not Chinese business quality, but is was plenty clean. The hot water seemed to be inactive, and the wireless internet network up there didn’t seem to be giving up any data, but our view of the train station across the street was magnificent.

We changed out of our sandals, threw on our pointy Uzbek shoes and sweaters and split to go stroll a little in Russia. Strolling is of course not quite the right term, though. What we really wanted to do was Gulyat. The russians have many words for walk, just as Inuits have many words for snow, and Gulyat is the Russian term for entertaining one’s self by wandering around, chatting and pointing their heads into various shops parks, cafés and the like. Gulyat is about as close to a national sport as Russia has. I mean they like hockey, some of them, but they all love to Gulyat. You could even say that the Gulyat is not unlike wheeling without the bike.

And so Gulyat we did, stopping first at a Blin place, so that Scott could try his first Russian crepe. We chose to get them with smoked salmon and fresh dill and eat them as they walked. They were splendid.

And so we strolled on, through the gentle mist, into a large outdoor market, where they were selling everything from fruit to fish.

From there, we strolled on into one of the large soviet built housing blocks, all of which have a giant interior courtyard, usually sporting a children’s playground and a few small gardening plots.

In Soviet times, the Russians had very few options when it came to brands and types of consumer products. And, though the Soviet Union has been long gone now, there is still a reactionary increase in the selection of products. This cigarette kiosk for instance, has only a typically Russian selection of brands and sub-brands.

We were not interested in cigarettes, so we headed on, past another one of those Kvas tanks that we’d seen so much in Kazakhstan. Here in Novosibirsk they seemed to go with the more subtle blue and white patterning over the louder yellow they’d preferred in Astana.  Continuing to stroll, we inspected the offering of restaurants and pubs in which we might be able to feast.

The sun was just setting as we arrived back at the hotel Novosibirsk. It felt great to be in here. Our hotel made us feel like princes and the city had a fresh and invigorating vibe to it. So we decided to go out and celebrate by purchasing the first glass of ale that we’d been able to find since Hong Kong. It came accompanied by the classic beer Russian beer snacks, a kind of black crouton snack called Grenki.

As we walked back to the Hotel Novosibirsk, we stopped at a Ukrainian Peasant Branded baked potato stand, and got a couple of baked potatoes with cheese and mayonnaisey salads on top. They were heavy and greasy, but also quite satisfying.

Back at the hotel, we continued to strike out on the hot water and the in-room wifi, but all was forgiven when we went downstairs to the second floor lobby to connect. Not only could we easily get on the network, but we were seeing unprecedented speeds. I’m taking four or five hundred kilobytes per second downloads. We were in Russia now, and it was time for AsiaWheeling to get back to being seriously on the Internet.

The sun was still far from risen when we awoke our last morning in Kazakhstan. I wandered into the kitchen and began making coffee, calling to Scott to make sure he was rousing himself as well. It was a little before four in the morning, and I headed into Scott’s room to take down the laundry line that we had put up in there.

I chewed on a small bowl of cereal, and Scott nibbled the last of yesterdays raisin and nut bread, but neither of us were very hungry. Coffee would, of course, be key, so we focused mostly on getting some of that in our system.

We headed out into the chill of the streets. It was downright cold our here, and I took out my sweater to wear on the ride.

As we pedaled on through these familiar streets, past cops setting up traps to extract bribes from early morning drunk drivers, and workers lined up at fluorescently lit bus stops, the sun began to shed the first purple glimmers of light across the sky.

We headed over the large central bridge, past the good old Radisson Hotel (may your ping times grow ever shorter), and on pas the Khan Shatyr and into the Kazakh country side. We nearly scared a fellow to death, when we rolled up to him at a stoplight in the outskirts of Astana and he rolled down his foggy window to find two fellows wheeling. He confirmed that we were indeed on the correct road to get to the airport, breathing out the words in a huge cloud of condensation and cigarette smoke.

It was really downright cold out here. I should have put on my Uzbek shoes, for my toes were absolutely freezing as we wheeled. Soon we were just hammering through the Kazakh step. The area was flat as a pancake and we had a mild tailwind, so we were making magnificent time. As more light spread across the sky, my spirits began to lift. We were doing this. We were choosing freedom. There was to be no haggling with a cab driver, no messing with the bus system, we were just wheeling the 35 kilometers out to the airport, and it felt good.

We passed by the prestigious “Harvard of the Steppes,” Nazarbayev University and marveled at what time of learnings may be happening within.

As light poured over the steppe, we took a right turn onto a giant and savage highway. I called out to a cop who was deep in the process of extracting a bribe from a driver he’d just pulled over, “This way to the airport?”

“Da.” he said, scowling.

Excellent.

We arrived at the airport with plenty of time to pack up the cycles properly and to check in before departing. The airport itself was quite impressive, designed by the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa,and drawing from Uzbek and other central Asian architectural traditions, combined with that certain metal and glass je ne sais quoi that all airports share.

The interior was, quite thankfully, well heated, and we rolled the bikes in without attracting any attention from security. We proceeded straight to the elevators, and rode them up the the second floor, where we packed the bikes up right outside of check-in.

The packing went very well, and we even paid some enterprising young fellows to wrap both of our bikes in that protective film which had so terrified us when we were in Kolkata on the pilot study.

Our hearts fell through when we walked up to the Air Astana counter to check in. Not only was the woman grumpy but…

“You want to charge us WHAT to bring the cycles on the plane?”

We tried all our maneuvers: spitting business cards, explaining that they were not full sized bikes, weighing them and showing that they were not in excess of the luggage limit, encouraging them to be reconsidered as a simple “fragile bag,” but all failed. And in the end I headed over to a little glass kiosk and paid a grumpy woman in a ridiculous looking Astana airlines beret more money than I care to mention, even to you, dear reader. It was like a final blow, a final stab at the soul of AsiaWheeling before we left Kazakhstan.

But the universe is a mysterious and twisted place, full of both fantastic and terrible things. And as we wandered away from the check in desk grumbling, we thought: at least the airport was heated.

And then we opened up our laptops to work a little on correspondence for you, dear reader. And low and behold, free wifi was broadcasting through the airport. Very nice touch, Astana. You’re well on your way to redeeming yourself.

Plus there was a fantastic Beeline branded complementary charging station. More points for the Astana airport!

“This is great!” I said to Scott, uploading things to the intertron and typing away, “We just should have flown Aeroflot.”

“Yep.” Scott replied, “But to be honest, if the food is good on this flight, I might even be willing to forgive them.”

As the flight hurdled through the clouds into Russian airspace, we passed the time by reading Kazakhstan’s twice monthly English newspaper supplement Focus, which carried articles with names like “International Banks Growing Like Weeds in Kazakhstan.”

The paper also carried a number of articles focusing on an upcoming OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operating in Europe) summit which Nazarbayev very much wants Obama to attend.  Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai was scheduled to appear, and we spent some time discussing what the political press would be printing about the AsiaWheeling Holiday party.

The inflight magazine, Tengri, proved an unending source of entertainment as well.  Trumpeting a recent success, the airlines CEO wrote in his letter to passengers “Air Astana is pleased to announce that it has been ranked  third amongst carriers for the “Best Airline: Eastern Europe” award by SkyTrax.  The first two positions were held by European Union flag carriers, making Air Astana the best airline in Central Asia.”

Ouch, we thought.  Talk about damning with faint praise.  We imagined Uzbekistan Airways to be a magical non-stop in-air festival of plov, filled with smiles and free folding bicycle transportion and an in-flight catalog of pointy black shoes priced in sum.  We could only hope, dear reader, that our arrival in Russia would be joyous.

We woke up the next mooring in our grimy hovel of a soviet apartment in Astana, Kazakhstan, city of wonder and newness, to some violent knocking on the thick steel door of our apartment, I threw on a pair of pants and stumbled my bed bug bit ridden body over to the door, shirtless, just stinking of Ultrathon, and still working to get my eyes to focus.

It was our Babushka, the woman who rented us the apartment. Knowing that my Russian was bad, she was very careful to speak slowly and use easy to understand words. As far as I could tell, she had just come over at 8:00 in the morning to chat. So chat we did. She bustled around the apartment, noting approvingly that we had been “cooking” in the place (if boiling water for coffee and pouring bowls of cereal counts, then yes ma’am). After we had reached the full extent of my vocabulary and thoroughly chatted all the topics which I knew how to chat, she finally got down to business and we began brainstorming together places for me to hide the key when we left the next day at 5am to wheel to the airport. Finally we decided on a grubby little hole in the wall in the stairwell. And with that, she leaned over and kissed both of my cheeks. “You are such a good boy! Such a fine ‘sportsmen’” (which is the Russian term for a male or female athlete) “So brave you are! Can I call you my son?”

Oh, shucks. Sure you can call me your son, lady. And with that, she kissed both of my cheeks and gave me a big gelatinous hug, and disappeared through the door. “Be careful! Good luck, my son!” she called out as she locked the deadbolts one by one. The conversation had been a gleamingly positive interaction amidst the sea of Kazakh grumpiness. Why, showered as they are with money from the heavens, giant booming growth, and not that many people to spread the wealth among, can so many of the people we meet in this country get away with being so darned grumpy? Thank goodness for people like Nurbek (our RFID engineering friend for the bus)and our dear Babushka.

I then headed into the kitchen to burn the last bits of a lavender scented candle which we knew would do nothing to combat the mildew stench of the place. Scott rolled out of bed, no doubt awoken by our conversations, and we tried not to scratch our bed bug bites as we crunched mouthfuls of Imported Russian cereals.

From there we headed directly back to the ornate confines of the Radisson hotel, where we spent quite a few hours lapping up their wireless internet, which at nearly 20 k/s was the fastest we’d experienced in months.

When we began to get hungry again, we headed out in search of food. When we tried to do so, of course, the usual problem presented itself, namely that Astana has not too many restaurants, and what it does have is mostly hyper expensive. So we ended going to a grocery store where we purchased food for a picnic: dark bread, grapes, kefir, tiny oily fish, a couple larger smoked fish, some salty smoked string cheese,  loaf of raisin and nut bread, and a package of locally produced prosciutto type stuff.

It was all quite delicious and we talked about what a wild wheel we had had the day before as we dug into the food.

The rest of that day was spent bouncing from location to location in Astana, searching for internet, but always coming crawling back to the Radisson, which as far as we can tell, after trying multiple internet cafes, and even the supposedly wifi enabled mall, the only place in Astana where a fellow can actually connect his own computer to the interwebs. City of the future indeed…

The search for internet was reminiscent of our search for train tickets in Almaty. We would come into businesses, with the intention of paying them for use of the internet, and they would greet us with hostility and grumpiness. There were a few marked exceptions, but this was proving an incredibly tiring place to travel, not so much because of the logistical hassles, of which there were many, but mostly because of the constant drain of negative interactions with the locals. Kazakhstan had been a very important place to visit, but I was excited to get on a plane the next day and head back to Mother Russia. It had been some time for me, and I was excited to see which parts of my bright eyed and bushy tailed youthful experience of the place still held true now that I was becoming a gnarled and cynical traveler.

That evening, we were rolling by the giant medieval beer hall, “Line Brew,” that we had seen on our first wheel of Astana when we were called over by a couple of characters standing outside the restaurant smoking very thin cigarettes. They turned out to be sunglasses distributers for some of the larger malls in Astana and Almaty. And when we told them that we were sponsored by Maui Jim, taking out our Dawn Patrols as proof, they became very interested in what we were doing and invited us into the interior of the restaurant for a drink and some sausages.

They only drank Leffe beer, they explained, which here in Kazakhstan is frighteningly expensive, but they assured us that they were footing the bill, and proceeded to order a few sizzling plates of sausages. We talked with them into the night, over 12 dollar glasses of Leffe beer, about the sunglasses industry. One of them was a Slovenian chap, who had moved to Italy to play professional Soccer at the fall of the Soviet Union, and now had built a business for himself importing Italian luxury goods into the post-soviet world. The other was an Slavic Astana local, from back in the times when the city was a Soviet backwater full of caucasians. He spoke with gusto about the tumultuous changes that were happening in the city now, and summed it up quite nicely in Russian, which I will do my best to translate:

“For you it may be these bicycles and the Maui Jim. For us Kazakhs, it must to the Hummer and the Gucci.”

On our way back to the hotel, we ran into some rather inebriated Kazakh teenagers. There were four of them, who called out to us in Russian flagging us down to chat. We probably should have just ignored them as the old woman had said, but one of the lessons of AsiaWheeling has been that most people are friendly, so we decided not to, pulling our bikes over. Unfortunately, we immediately began to get a bad vibe from these guys. They were drunk and emotional, envious of us, and looking for opportunities to assert themselves. And not long after this group photo was taken, we began to feel downright hostility coming from them, even with the possibility of violence.  As we slowly made our way away from, they grabbed us by the shoulder and insist that we continue talking.

And so it was that we executed the first red alarm escape of AsiaWheeling. The fellows of course spoke only Russian, and as I was doing my best to dissolve the situation in my broken Russky, and Scott was doing his best to be endearing with the smattering of words that he had picked up since we’d landed in Uzbekistan. We were discussing in English our plan to, once we had found an opening, just hop on our cycles and disappear. We began to wheel the bikes away from the guys, which made them irate, and they began to close the gap.  Then it seemed our last chance before they would have encircled us. So we hopped on the cycles and began pedaling.

The guys did not give chase, thank goodness, for they looked fast, and with there being no handicapped access ramps in Astana, our escape route would have been easy to intercept for a man on foot, so robbed as we were of the ability to wheel up onto the sidewalk. All said, it was a hair raising experience, and we were quite happy to lock the door behind us, retreating into the rotting, stinking, and insect infested apartment that we were calling home. We hustled to pack up our things, slather on the bug repellant and go to sleep, for we had to get up in a few hours to wheel to the airport in time to catch our Air Astana flight to Novosibirsk.

We woke up that next morning in our rather filthy apartment in Astana, Kazakhstan and wandered into the kitchen to begin boiling water for breakfast.

As I fiddled with the single electric hot plate style burner that had been placed on the no longer operational and rather rusty soviet stove, I found myself scratching all over my stomach and sides.

A strolled into the bathroom and picked up my shirt to see my body dotted with bites… bed bugs. Well, I guess they would come sooner or later. Tonight I would need to figure out some kind of new strategy, but for the meantime, it would serve me better to focus on making this coffee.

That I was able to do, and soon I was joined by Scott, who also seemed to be rather covered in bites. We both grumbled a bit and sat down to a crunch audibly on mouthfuls of cereal and some of that delicious 3.2% milkfat Kazakh milk.  I have the not-so-enviable habit of salting my cereal, so we had purchased as well, a large 10 cent bag of salt, which I was happily utilizing.

The entire apartment had a dank mildew smell to it, so the evening before, we had also purchased some lavender scented candles, which we figured would be helpful in mitigating the smell. They turned out to do very little, however, other than provide a bit of flickering cheer to this otherwise soulless place. What we really needed was some heavy duty Sri Lankian or South Indian incense, but we were a very long ways (north) from that part of the world.

With stomachs full of coffee and cereal, we then went at the long overdue task of washing our clothes, which were positively filthy. The Uzbek and Kazakh washing detergents are some of the best in the world, we’ve found. They have a way of getting your clothes really, deeply, unprecedentedly, clean. The reason for this, we’ve heard, is because the regulations here in the post Soviet world allow for the use of certain chemicals which in America, Europe, and even China are illegal due to their terrible impact on the environment. Whatever the reason, we found ourselves the proud recipients of a batch of really, truly, clean clothes, and this was something to be proud of.

We strung them up in a system of clotheslines that we erected in Scott’s room.

With that task done, we set to wheeling. We began by heading out to the edges of the old Soviet part of town. You see, dear reader, Astana was originally a small soviet city, mostly populated by ethnically Slavic peoples. But when the new republic of Kazakhstan was formed, the new government felt that it needed to create a new identity and a new capitol city for itself. So, fueled by millions of oil dollars, it began construction of a concept capital in Astana, flooding the city with ethnically Kazakh peoples, and building a new city center across the river form the old soviet center (which is where the train station and our apartment were).

The soviet part of town was pretty hard scrabble, with crumbling single story homes, no sidewalks, and large plots of dirt playing the role of yards.

We wheeled on through the rougher parts of the Soviet section of Astana and on towards the river. The general quality of the buildings and the expensiveness of the cars on the street increased steadily as we approached the river. We rode past a giant stadium, with these magnificent air intake valves,

and the giant housing development of “Highville Kazakhstan.”

But it was when we crossed the river on the main central bridge that we began to see some truly gigantic and startling buildings. The first of which was probably this monstrous Wayne Manner style gothic behemoth.

We rode on from there onto a street lined with ridiculous themed restaurants, all of which were separated from the highway by a row of small trees. As we looked closer, we could see that the row of small trees was also filled with the bodies of napping construction workers.

We took a right to head into the strange themed restaurant development, and wheeled it thoroughly, gawking at the startling, over-the-top presentation of Greek, Chinese, Turkish, Korean, and Traditional Russian architectural styles. About half of the restaurants were completed, and the other half were still under construction. All of those that were finished were staffed by magnificently costumed workers, who scowled at us distractingly as we rode past.

From there we headed into a giant mall, where we ate lunch. The mall was uncomfortable, eerily quite, mostly devoid of people, and full of unused shop fronts.

We ate at a shockingly branded Russian style restaurant, where we ordered a meat cutlet, a piece of chicken, some beat salad, three thick pancakes with sour cream, a pickled herring and mayonnaise salad and two manty. The food was not bad, but not amazing either, and the plates on which it was served were some of the flimsiest and most untrustworthy pieces of dinnerware ever to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting diner.

From there we rode on to the Khan Shatyr, a huge shopping center, built under a giant translucent ger-style tent structure that was carefully designed to capture the sun’s radiation to aid it in staying warm during the brutally cold Kazakh winters. The ger, as I am sure you already know, dear reader, is the preferred nomad-friendly collapsible home popular among the Kazakhs and other Central Asian nomadic cultures. It looks like this:

Which is only vaguely like the khan shatir, which looks like this.

The closer we got to the Khan Shatir, the more gigantic we realized it was. We began by circumnavigating the thing, riding our speed TRs all the way through the huge oval of parking lot that surrounds the structure. Then, though we had already been in a mall that day, we decided we needed to go in.

It was really something inside there, bathed in light, and full of white paint and potted trees.

Like the mall in which we’d eaten lunch, it was full of tons and tons of unused retail space, but unlike the mall in which we’d eaten lunch, it was also full to the brim with Kazakh families out to enjoy the afternoon.

The first thing we did inside was stop into the architecture museum, where we could pour over the plans for the new giant indoor city that the Kazakhs are planning to build.

With oil money showing no signs of stopping, the government of Kazakhstan is planning to build an entire Khan Shatir style indoor city, complete with Venice style canals and a 3/4s size golf course!

The blueprint was really impressive, and reminded me of some of the none federation spaceships in Star Trek: the Next Generation.

From there we continued on, up to the next level, from which things were no less impressive. This level too was full of unused retail space, and also a new joint venture between KFC and a local company, which they were calling “Rostik’s.”

Nice one KFC.

Soon we found ourselves in a totally overwhelming video arcade/them park section of the mall, which made me feel like I was on some kind of none too enjoyable hallucinogenic drug.

We looked up at the sky and could see the sun beaming through the strange translucent roof above us.This place was too weird for words.

We needed to get out.

And so we did, but if we were thinking that would make this strange trip end, we were most certainly wrong. We headed next across the street towards the center of the new urban development in Astana. We stopped part way there when we noticed the locals were lining up to have their pictures taken in front of this giant statue of Luke Skywalker and a naked lady.

We couldn’t resist joining in as well.

From there, we headed on, under the giant overarching office-building-gateway of a  government building and onto the main drag, the Sheik Zayed Road of Kazakhstan, if you will.

Then the buildings became truly bizarre. For one reason or another, this place put us into a strange dreamlike state, and we rode through it as through in a trance, only half believing the things that we saw.

Part way through, we realized the physical part of us was thirsty and we wandered into a completely empty grocery store, where we wandered down unreal isles filled with all thousands of bottle of the same brand of water. So we bought some with the Technicolor currency of this strange land, and headed back out.

We continued further into the madness, past giant blocky structures, and slender towers, towards the central monument, a golden orb, suspended in the points of a giant crown, which is the symbol of this bizarre city.

We continued on from there, towards the large parliamentary building at the other side of this futuristic drive.  The government building is framed on either side by two truly unsettling golden rook shaped buildings.

Barely able to believe our eyes, we wheeled on. The parliamentary building was giant, and very impressive, seeming always close by, but proving always to be larger and further away than first estimate.

As we approached the gigantic government building, our fellow pedestrians thinned out and eventually disappeared, and eventually they were replaced by a very heavily armed and dense military presence.

With all the solders eying us as we wheeled, we decided it might be prudent to make a right turn and head over to investigate a huge turquoise curled up behemoth that turned out to be an opera house.

From there, we wheeled on, past the huge blocky center for measurements and standards, and the most monstrous Chinese business hotel of the entire trip. I imagined it being like a Mecca for Chinese business hotel connoisseurs, with the finest disposable slippers, the most delicious complementary toothpaste, the fastest in-room Ethernet jack this side of Seoul, and plenty of branded towels. I am speaking, of course, about the Petro-China Hotel. A place, no doubt, built for all the PetroChina executives that came to do business in Astana and couldn’t, until the establishment of this place, find a decent Chinese business hotel.

From the Petro-China hotel, we wheeled on over a newly laid and still quite sticky tarred gravel road.

When we saw a giant white mosque, we decided to turn onto their sprawling grounds to give them a look. They were quite beautiful, mostly gardens, with manicured and sporting raised cobblestoned paths for wheelers and strollers to utilize.

It had been a wheel for the record books and we were, I must say, a little burned out from all the wild things we’d seen. Astana was proving to be like nowhere else on Earth.

And so we wheeled back, stammering to each other, and attempting to find some previously constructed schemas with which to process what we’d just experienced, back down the giant newly paved main street of Astana and eventually back through the forest carnival area that we’d explored the day before. As I mounted the bridge back across the river to the Soviet side of town, I felt a wave of relief washing over me. Finally we were going back to a hard scrabble raw place, where things made sense.

We got back to our squalid apartment, and spent a few minutes just drinking water and attempting to relax. What a wheel that had been!

That evening we wheeled around hungrily for quite some time trying to find a restaurant that was less than 20 dollars for a plate of food. We finally settled on a pizza place, which made us this kielbasa and hot dog supreme pizza, with a side of corn and tongue salad.  It was none too tasty, but got the job done.

Once we’d filled our stomachs with matter, we headed over to the Radisson hotel, where we were able to, after a little sweet talking with the ladies at the front desk, manifest for ourselves two free 24 hour passes on the lobby wifi (Great Success!).

When midnight rolled around, we hopped on the bikes to wheel back to our apartment. As we rode, I realized that for the first time on the trip, the air was cold. I could have used a sweater, or a leather jacket even. The smiles of Indonesia certainly felt very far away as I covered my body in Ultrathon brand high intensity bug repellant and climbed onto the bed bug ridden couch on which I’d be sleeping for the next couple of days.

We woke up on the bus just as it was landing at the Astana bus terminal, which unlike in many cities, is conveniently located right next to the train station.

From there, our friend offered to walk us over to find a hotel. It had not been a good night of sleep for him, and he was eager to get to sleep, so we were extra grateful for his assistance.

The first hotel we wandered into was none too fancy, offered no internet, and was nearly 80 dollars per night, so we moved on. “This is one of the cheapest hotels in town,” our friend advised, “maybe you two should look into getting an apartment.” This sounded like a decent idea, so we headed back to the train station where crowds of old women in headscarves were calling out “apartment for rent” and wandering around.

We selected an especially sweet lady, who took us back to her grubby but very spacious soviet style 3^rd floor walk up. It was sort of a gross place, even by asiawheeling standards, but we decided we could do it, and the price was less a third of the cheap hotel, so we pulled the trigger.

We locked the bikes in the apartment and headed out with the old woman to make a copy of the key and to visit and ATM so that we could pay her.

Scott headed off to find money, and I wandered into a bustling and very Russian feeling market with the woman. She made a copy of the key and came back grinning. “I can tell already. You two boys will be like my own two sons.” I thanked her for the compliment. She then began to tell me about all the dangers of Astana. “Astana is not safe like in the soviet times”, she cautioned. “Kazakhs like to fight and some like to steal. Be careful. If anyone comes up to you, don’t let them know you speak Russian. Don’t speak to them. Don’t look at anyone. Don’t do drugs here, the police will find you and beat you. Lock the door to the apartment when you sleep, or else homeless people will come in at night.”

Fair Enough and duly noted, ma’am.

We met back up with Scott, paid the woman, and headed back to grab the cycles. It was high time now for a little Astana wheeling.

Our first stop was another one of those Kvas wagons, where we had got another frosty glass of the good stuff, served up for the people by a yellow aproned lady.

We headed from there in search of some breakfast, which was perhaps even harder in this new town than it had been in Almaty. We did eventually find a place, though, and it was a weird one, something like a cross between a traditional Russian Traktir, a Bob Marley themed joint, and a luau. We ordered some small and somewhat tasty Russian salads, a plate of four very tasty Manty, and a very oily and bizarre cup of turkey soup.

So with a little food in our stomachs at least, we headed further into the city. We noticed a heavily decaled Ford Fiesta, and stopped to investigate it. From what we could tell, it looked like it belonged to some Scottish guys, doing the Mongol Rally, a race from London to Ulaanbaatar for Charity. Good on ya, mates.

We stopped into a medieval themed restaurant, where we confirmed that they did indeed have wifi, but that we would need to buy both food or drinks from them, and a 3 dollar per hour internet access card to use it. So the place ws noted and we wheeled on.

We pedaled from there to a large river that bisects the city of Astana, and rode along it until we spotted a pedestrian bridge. We wheeled up and over that bridge and into the park on the other side. The park was full of people and rides, all hidden amidst a sea of trees. It was a very mysterious place to wheel through, feeling simultaneously like a forest and a twisted carnival.

We paused in the middle of the forest carnival area to buy a couple of cups of sticky black Nescafe from a kiosk. The woman inside seemed put off that we had arrived to do business with her. But we fought threw the negative energy and bout a couple rounds of joe.

A little more caffeinated, we wheeled on, finding ourselves soon at the foot of a large shopping complex called Mega.

So we locked the bikes outside and headed in, figuring we had an apartment now, we might as well grocery shop. We spent quite some time in the grocery store, looking at all the brands, choosing the appropriate canned coffee and buying things to make cereal in the morning.

On our way back to the room, we rolled by this giant gaudy Radisson, which also advertized wifi. We filed that place as well as another possible means of connectivity while in this city.

As we wheeled back by the Mongol Rally Ford Fiasta, we caught the owners just as they were climbing in the car. They turned out to be one Scot and one Pole, and the two asked us to leave our mark on their many times autographed vehicle.

They were leaving that day to head up to Russia. You see, they had run into similar registration problems in Kazakhstan, and were thinking that rather than deal with the massively corrupt officials and the mind numbing bureaucracy of this place, they would just nip back up to Russia where things were sane. Fair Enough.

As a parting gift, they gave us this bottle of Polish Ketchup. They also shared some of their tools with us, which allowed us to tighten Scott’s handle bar post back up, which had been rattling around like mad as of late.

That evening, we utilized a particularly interesting kind of business that we have hitherto only seen in the post soviet world. It is a made to order beer bottling operation. One enters, looks at the giant list of kegs that are on tap, and then the attendant will fill, pressurize, and seal, a plastic bottle for you, from a half liter to two full liters.

It’s a great way to try weird local brews, so we chose one of the brands at random and purchased a liter to bring back with us.

We began the day by attempting to head out to that mojito branded coffee shop that we’d indulged in the day before, but we were sorely disappointed to find it closed. Now we were in a bewildering Kazakh pedestrian mall, and before we knew it we’d been seduced by a Starbucks copycat joint, where we proceeded to spend an unearthly amount of money on cups of coffee and wifi.

Little did we know upon entering that in order to be issued wifi passwords, we needed to spend a certain amount of money, we found this fact out after already ordering our cups, so we just decided to go whole hog and began ordering soups, salads, baskets of bread, Doner Kababs and the like, in order to reach the expenditure required to achieve wifi access.

It was good to be on the internet. Just that brief session left us with a much more positive general outlook on life. We bounded back to our cycles and headed from there up to Transavia where we picked up our passports, paying them another unearthly amount of money.

We then headed off to find train tickets on the next day’s train to Astana, the brand new, Dubai-esque capital of Kazakhstan. We began first at what would seem the logical place to buy tickets: the train station. But we should have learned our lesson from our trials in Shymkent. The train station was a desperate madhouse full of people cutting in line, screaming at each other and ticket selling windows that would close at a moment’s notice sending their lines to disperse out into the room, frantic, frustrated, and ready to cut anyone without the means or the chutzpa to defend themselves.

On top of that, the people in line with us all seemed to be headed to Astana as well. “Oh, you won’t get tickets,” they said “No more tickets here. We’re going to take the train to a nearby town and from there take a bus.”

This was disheartening but also information that was none too trustworthy. People tell us things all the time on AsiaWheeling and half of it is lies. The art is deciding which to listen to and which to disregard. We profess by no means to be masters of this art…

Regardless, eventually we gave up on ever getting service at the train station and, after calling Mr. Berghoff for advice, headed out to find a private train booking office. Luckily these, were on every street corner. Unluckily, it seemed that there was indeed some truth to the communications that he had gotten from our fellows waiting in line at the train station. Tickets seemed few and far between.

Right off the bat, we had the opportunity to buy two first class tickets, for about 80 dollars each, but that seemed monumental (we later found it was, by Kazakh standards at least, not), so we continued on. We would wheel for a bit, spot a ticket selling office, and then I’d go running in to ask the same questions in Russian. Do you have tickets to Astana for the day after tomorrow? No eh? How about bus tickets? Sorry for asking. Do you have any idea who might be able to help us? No? Well sorry for wasting your time.

Each interaction was exhausting. For one reason or another, the people of this city were unreasonably grumpy. I thought I’d known grumpy, living in Russia, but this was a new level. Each interaction felt like an open conflict, wrought with distrustful looks and judgmental comments about my not planning ahead. I was trying to do business with these people, trying to give them money! Why were they angry at me?!?

And so it went for another couple of hours, negative interaction after negative interaction, all of them explaining in one way or another that we could not get to Astana. We’re booked this whole month. Only one ticket available, for 100 dollars. There are two of you! Scoff! Good luck getting to Astana! Why did you not plan your trip in advance? Astana is a popular destination, how can you expect me to accommodate you at the last minute? Buses?! Can’t you read!?

Honestly I could only read as many words as I knew, which was not that many. I was becoming increasingly sapped of energy by the negative interactions, and soon I confessed to Scott that I could not do this much longer. So we decided to just ride to the bus station.

And off we went. It was no short journey and required a fair bit of asking for directions. When we stopped to ask a very old man with a long white beard who looked like he could have walked right out of a 1980s Hong Kong Kung Fu flick, I realized that it was the first positive interaction I’d had in eons. It felt good, giving me some more energy to pour into the ride.

Also, stopping at a roadside milk stand to buy a little Kefir helped as well. The Kefir here in Kazakhstan was really outstanding, rejuvenating in fact, hell I’ll call it magical. The packaging was also incredible.

We found the bus station to be plenty crowded with people trying to get to Astana as well, and we rushed through the jungle of loading busses to dash inside. I was even able to wait in line without being cut.

There was a good feeling to this bus ticket thing, even if it was, assuming I understood the woman correctly, going to be at least 16 hours of riding through the empty Kazakh steppe.

But the tickets were cheap and available, and armed with assurance that we would eventually get to Astana in time to catch our flight to Novosibirsk, we hopped back on the bikes, feeling like a great weight had been lifted from our shoulders. We pulled over to the side of the road on our way back to taste a little bit of the Kvas being served up by one of the many giant steel tanks, operated by yellow aproned ladies that lined the road to the bus station. To dispose of the cups, one would skewer them with a long vertical rod.  This puncturing would signal that the cups were “spent” and prevent patrons from thinking they may be reused.  There may also be a small part of everyone at needs to puncture a plastic cup at 3:30pm in Almaty to sustain sanity.

It was a long hard wheel back to our neighborhood, and we realized we were plenty starving by the time we got there, so we headed into a little Russian bakery to have a snack.

We spent the rest of that day working on correspondence for you, dear reader, and woke up the next morning bright and early to wheel to the bus station. We felt we needed to get there early, in order to ensure a spot for our cycles on the bus. And we were lucky we did, for a few wrong turns added a fair bit to our time wheeling to the station.

Once we got there, it was not obvious at all where we would find our bus. The station was packed and chaotic, and signs and markers were few and far between. Eventually after talking to a number of people, we found our way to a deserted back section of the station, where I wandered over to ask once again of a fellow sitting there on a bench next to his duffel bag where we might find out bus.

He turned out to be going to Astana as well. He was actually a Kazakh PhD student fresh back from America, and heading to the new capital to give a report on what he had learned on his visit (Nice!).  He was more than happy to show us the proper way to purchase luggage permits for our cycles and bags and how to snag the front spot in line to load them into the belly of the bus. While Scott was chatting with him and a group of fellow travelers who were forming around us, I snuck off to buy us some of the larg triangular shaped Kazakh Somsas. They were full of meat and cabbage and very tasty.

Then we were on the bus. It was going to be a very long ride, and with no bathroom on board, I was careful not to drink very much water. I tried to write as we drove but so bad were the roads, and so violent the resulting bouncing around of the bus as it went over them, that I found computing a complete waste of time. I chose instead to stare out into infinite of the steppe which just rolled mesmerizingly by.

A few hours into the ride, the crew started playing highlight reels from Kazakh dog fights. Dog fighting is a very popular spectator sport here. It’s also savagely violent. We could not tell whether to be amused or slightly sickened by the footage, so we settled for a combination of both.  This popular music video should illustrate the theater of brutality in Kazakh popular culture.

Perhaps 5 hours in, we stopped at a little melon selling operation in the middle of the steppe. The people there were really going for it, producing melons here in the middle of nowhere, so we decided we should support them by purchasing a few.

Our new friend helped us to choose the best ones.

One of the melons had been painted silver. This was, I believe a marketing gimmick, though it might also have had some mystical significance.

About 8 hours in, we stopped at a roadside restaurant called “Café Tranzit.”

Here finally we were able to have some Kazakh food, which was very interesting.

We ordered a few dishes, one of them consisted of large pieces of stewed mutton and a great many raw onions, another was a borsch like soup, featuring a heavy dollop of mayonnaise instead of the traditional sour cream. They also had their own variation on Lakman. I would say Kazakh food is a little like Uzbek food, only less approachable.

It was Ramadan at the time, so our friend was unable to join us in eating. However, most courteously, our bus driver waited until the sun had ducked down behind the outhouses before he left, giving the more observant Muslims on the bus a chance to eat quickly before we left.

We drove on into the night, bouncing over the terrible roads, dodging potholes, and slowing down to drive through sections where the road just dissolved into gravely steppe, until suddenly there was a large noise and the bus pulled over.

Everyone got out and the driver and his team began to go to town working so solve some issue that had cropped up with the suspension of the bus. Fixing it required taking the wheel on and off a few times, and inflating and deflating the cylinder that controlled that wheel’s pneumatic suspension repeatedly as well.

I was unable to tell exactly what they were doing, but in an hour or so’s time, and a bunch of hissing valves, clanging metal, and Kazakh swear words later, all was more or less well again, and we hit the road. Now Scott and I were able to drift off to sleep, and were even able to rest a few hours longer into the morning than expected, with our bus arriving 3 hours late in Astana, getting us in, instead of at 4am, at the much more civilized hour of 7.

I rolled around as the sun worked its way into out room at the Hotel Turkistan in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Scott was still sleeping. I could not remember what time he’d come in from his adventures with our new and rather tiresom fabulous friend last night. I hoped the adventures had gone well. I was more than happy to be able to sleep through them. Scott woke up as I was typing away on my computer on correspoindance for you, dear reader.

“I had a hell of a night last night.” He said, looking groggy, and scratching at his stubble, I’ll tell you over breakfast.

And so we headed downstairs and climbed on the Speed TRs, rolling out in search of breakfast. As was becoming the rule for Kazakhstan, it was not easy to find a restaurant, but eventually we road by a little down home café that looked decent, nearby another branch of the Silkway City.

We sat down and ordered some coffee, a basket of black bread, and a couple bowls of Солянка (Solyanka), my favorite Russian soup. They arrived quickly, and Scott told me the tale of the previous night as we ate. It sounded like a pretty raw experience. I gave him my condolences and poured a little of my coffee out onto the pavement in mourning of our lost warbucks. I hope you buy yourself something really nice, officer.  Like a new gold tooth.

From there, we strolled into the Silkway City, looking to investigate the opportunities for internet to be had inside. We did find a ridiculously priced branch of a St. Petersburg internet café that I’d used once called CafeMax, and an interestingly branded tea shop, but little more that was of interest.

We were not quite ready to hop on the cycles and begin wheeling again, so we headed out on foot, trusting that the phone booth where we’d locked the Speed TRs would keep them safe.

So we began strolling, past some truly amazing looking structures. And some really bold Kazakh jeans advertisements.

We continued on, enjoying the closer look that strolling gave us as compared to wheeling, past a pink and blue wall covered with tattered advertisements, and on through an underpass where an fantastic fellow was playing Ukrainian tunes on the accordion.

He was so good that I decided to throw a few Tenge in his shoebox and listen to him play for a bit.  His artistry and imagination served as a breath of fresh air.

We strolled from there into a large pedestrian mall-type area, where we were able to purchase a few more cups of coffee at very reasonable prices from a street vendor who’s sole advertisement just said “mojitos” in large pink letters.  Large scale advertisements continued to flank the pedmall, giving up pause to dissect each one in critical investigation.

With that coffee in us, we bagan to perk back up, remembering Hosam and the Syrain BBQ we’d had, and that life was good. And so climbed back on the cycles, and completed the long wheel back up to Transavia. We had burned a bridge you might say, with our fabulous friend, and we felt it was important to express to Katya that no one was to be authorized to pick up our registered passports except for us.

When I wandered into the office, I was pleased to find it still there, thinking for a moment before I opened the door of all the movies about long cons in which the conned individual runs back to the office only to find it a vacant rental…

We wandered around for a while outside of Transavia, in that office/residential park, looking at the kids playing. This entry into Kazakhstan had been quite the trial by fire. We were changing, and we could feel it. Or maybe that was just hunger. Regardless it was time to eat again.

So we headed into the nearest grocery store, which turned out to have plenty of ready to eat foods, which we purchased with abandon.

We ate a picnic lunch of the things we’d bought at the store in the shade of a giant green awning. We were joined there by plenty of Kazakh business men and women on their lunch breaks, also mothers who were picnicking with their friends while the kids played in the park. Particularly delicious was this “grandma” brand kefir, which was a very mellow an approachable version of the more tart and mildly carbonated classic Russian drinkable yogurt.

So with that we climbed back on the cycles and attempted to wheel on. But somehow through a mismanaged series of field commands, we ended up siphoned into a Kazakh military training area, where were decided to dismount and walk our bikes through the field where all the concrete barracks were, so as to most politely arrive at the other side where we could see a promising looking highway.

The barracks were stange buildings, covered with ads to joint the army or the Militsiya (as the police here are called). Each window also had a large concrete chuck sticking out next to it, presumably to keep the occupant from sticking his head out the window and Bro-ing out to hard with his neighbors.

Past the barracks, we got in the highway. And we followed that highway on towards a district of giant glass office buildings, which we were only able to access by means of a half build and very creepy pedestrian underpass. Once we finally got close, though, we found the structures to be quite impressive.

From there, we took a right, and continued to head towards the outskirts of town.

It was easy not to get lost, since the whole city is on a slant that always indicates which way is north (down). The street signs were even marginally helpful.

And so we wheeled on, out of the commercial district and into a kind of suburban area. Here the roads got more narrow, and navigation became more difficult. We had spotted a large and very bizarre structure in the distance, and were interested in more closely investigating it, but we found it extremely hard to get to, being again and again siphoned down roads that lead the wrong way.

Eventually, we found our way back onto a more major road, and wheeled along the sandy sidewalk-esque trail that ran along it for a bit, which lead us to a huge hydrologic engineering project, along which a road ran that looked like it just might lead to our strange structure.

And here it is. Speculation as to what this thing is is more than welcome in the comments.

On our way back, we managed to myander our way onto this much more manicured path, which lead us through a bizarre manicured forest of miniature trees, right back to the giant glass office building district. From there, we began wheeling north (downhill) past a huge university, with this devastatingly attractive observatory complex

and on down into the large park that separated our hotel from the southern more affluent and businessy part of the city.  We wheeled into through park and not long into our explorations stumbled upon this startlingly brightly colored church, which also might have been a palace.

I am sure the truth lies in-between.

We were riding through what for all intents and purposes seemed a sunny and pigeon filled park

When it all of a sudden starting to downpour, in broad daylight, forcing us to seek shelter.

The rain disappeared as quickly as it had manifested, and soon we were off wheeling again, now through puddles on wet pavement. The rain was quickly evaporating, though, leaving a most dramatic mist hovering above the ground. The next thing we stumbled across was the famous Almaty WWII memorial. It really is a very impressive structure, with a certain angular brutal feel to it that one usually only gets in two-dimensional art. Bravo communism for making this one.

It’s true Kazakhstan is no longer a communist country, but man oh man am I glad they kept some of this soviet stuff around. Take the crest on this building for instance.

Like something from a video game, or an action figure set, or even star wars. It’s just too good.

That evening, we met up David Berghoff, head of Stantours. Stantours had played an invaluable role in our planning of central asia, and is a fantastic resource for readers out there interested in visiting the region.

We met with David at a beer hall called Stad, where he to our great surprise and excitement, ordered us all glases of Shymkent brand beer.  Following that was a “stinky fish” from a river that flowed into the black sea, transported quite far to this restaurant in Almaty.  We began telling him the story of our registration and the fabulous fellow, which he found neither surprising nor profound, until we mentioned where we’d dropped our passports off.

“Transavia!” he exclaimed. “They’re the Russian visa mafia, you know that?”

Fair Enough, Mr. Berghoff. Fair Enough.

And then we arrived in Almaty. It was the morning and the sun was blazing outside the window of our train car. Scott and I hustled to collect our things and grab the Speed TRs to get of the train before it headed to its next station.

We were not sure exactly where the station that we had arrived in was relative to the rest of the city, and knowing that there were very few cheap hotels that were authorized to admit foreigners, we figured it would be good to consult a map. The easiest to get to and most useful map we could think of was the one in the Lonely Planet PDFs on Scott’s computer. Unfortunately, his computer had been drained down to the last drop the night before, so we needed some electricity. Thus began our journey around the station looking for an outlet. We found one, upstairs, behind the lip of what looked like an out-of-service wine bar concept.

We plugged in and were just booting up when we were apprehended by the railway police. They explained to me in Russian that what we had just done was in violation of the code of the railways, and therefore against Kazakh law. The police officer looked very sternly at the both of us, made a clicking sound in the back of his throat, and demanded to see our papers. We produced them.

“Not registered yet, I see,” he muttered in Russian. “You have only two days left to do your registration…” He reluctantly handed back our documents and gruffly directed us to follow him to the elevator. As we headed over, he also pointed out that we had used the escalator to move our bikes, which it turns out is also against the code. I apologized to him a few more times. He brought us to the center of the railway station’s lobby and told us to wait there for him, which we did.

Then some more time went by, and he was nowhere to be seen. We scanned all around the station… where was he? Finally, we decided to just make a run for it, and walked our bikes out to the exterior of the station, asked another security guard for directions into town, quickly thanked him and raced off into the traffic.

We stopped for lunch at a pizza place we spotted on the way, not because we necessarily wanted pizza, but because we couldn’t find a Kazakh restaurant. They’d been easier to find in Tashkent! While at the restaurant, Scott plugged in his computer to charge and got on the phone with potential hotels. The pizza was okay, and the coffee, I think, was a little better than okay, but never trust an addict getting his first dose in a while.

As we munched pizza and mayonnaisey Russian salads, we commented on how much less of a food culture there was her than in the Uz. In Uzbekistan, there were amazing restaurants everywhere with very unique food. Here, on the other hand, it seemed as though the locals were looking to other cultures to tell them what to eat. Perhaps this was because the culture was nomadic. The Uzbeks had built great cities and had farmed, forged a civilization, and thrived in a sedentary way for the past 5,000 years. The Kazakhs on the other hand had been nomadic until the Russians came a few hundred years ago and began to trap them in cities, forcing them to consider things like restaurants.

All this discussion of the differences between Central Asian cultures was interesting, but we had some work to do. We wheeled hard into the city, and began stopping into hotels and checking the prices. One of the first that we found was actually a Chinese business hotel. The place looked amazing, and Scott was able to speak Chinese with them, but even with brotherhood pricing, it was a far cry from the normal Chinese business value. So we wheeled on.

Soon we were in a dense market, and though all our investigations of maps and questioning of the locals had brought us here, there seemed no way, try as we might, to actually locate the place. At our wits end, and beginning to worry that we would not be able to find a hotel in time to register ourselves, we were suddenly accosted by two young women. “We are studying English,” they said. “We heard you talking and wanted to know if you needed any help.”

Thank goodness. Not only did they know of the hotel we were looking for, but they led us right to the door, commenting as we walked there that is was “the cheapest place to stay in all of Almaty that would not steal from your room.”

Great. We thanked them profusely and checked in. We explained our predicament registration-wise to the front desk as follows: We had entered the Kazakh Republic on a Friday, too late in the day to register in Shymkent. Saturday and Sunday they had been closed, and now we were arriving on a Monday here, with tomorrow being the last day that we were eligible to register. The woman at the front desk commented that usually the registration takes a day or two, so if we were to have any hope of avoiding the $100 fine, we had better head out tout de suite.

And so we did, armed with a few signed and stamped documents that the hotel had prepared for us and a little map leading to the OVIR. Unfortunately, the OVIR proved much harder to find than one might hope. As we continued to strike out on finding the place, we began to walk into more and more random businesses asking for help. A certain travel agency wrote a name, a phone number and some Russian words I did not understand on a yellow scrap of paper. I literally put this in my back pocket, hoping that we could find them without having to negotiate a miscommunication ridden phone conversation with someone whose relationship to the OVIR was in no way clear due to my poor understanding of Russian.

So we kept wheeling around the gently sloping streets of Almaty for hours, feeling the OVIR was always just around the corner, but becoming increasingly worried.

I say gently sloping because the entire city of Almaty is on a hillside and gently slopes down to the north and up to the south — very confusing I know.

We were at our wit’s end when we asked a particularly fabulous looking gentleman in the street for directions.

He was quite cordial with us, and immediately snapped to action. He did not know where the OVIR was, but he was willing to wander into a nearby hair salon, whipping the door open like a western gunslinger, and to get on the phone with the woman, Katya, whose number had been given to us by the travel agent whose office we’d stopped into earlier.

And so we began the process of hailing a cab. Like in Uzbekistan and Russia, all one needs to do is stick out one’s hand, except that here in this city all the cars were actually quite nice, many of them were luxury brands, and it would not be uncommon to actually get a ride in a BMW or Lexus SUV as one was flagging down a cab.

The downside of this fact, we soon learned, is that many of them are unwilling to put folding bicycles into the back seats of their cabs, and that it’s much more expensive. So it took us quite some time to find a cab, and even when we did find one, it was only willing to take us back to the hotel to drop off our bikes and not all the way out to the OVIR… or at least we thought we were going to the OVIR… until I asked our new friend.

“Where are we going?” I asked in Russian. You see, he spoke no English.

“Transavia,” he replied.

I had no idea where Transavia was, but we began piling our cycles into the cab. As we were doing so, a very animated fellow showed up on something that looked not unlike a folding bicycle. “It’s my new invention!” he called out to us, and began stammering in bits of English and Russian. I was interested, mostly because the man was obviously mad, but was forced to apologize, saying that we were in a bit of a hurry. We piled into the cab and sped off.  Today seemed to get only stranger and stranger.

With bikes safely back at the hotel, the cab dropped us off in a giant towering development of mixed residential and corporate office space. All of our cell phones were out of batteries, so I ran over to a convenience store to buy us all some more credit for our SIM cards.

And after a quick call we found the place.

Inside the building it was stark and white and very clean. Desks were lined up against each wall with strikingly similar looking blond women behind them, all typing away on computers. The entire room looked up at us as we came in.

Our friend asked for Katya, which I remembered was the name on the card, and a beautiful woman came out from behind a door. I did my best to explain our situation to her, and our new friend chimed in where need be. Eventually she understood and told us not to worry, that she could help. And so we gave her our passports and left.

It felt great. Another problem vanquished due to AsiaWheeling’s carefully honed radar telling us when to and when not to trust strangers!

Feeling great, we asked our new friend if he might want to go out for a coffee or something on us. He seemed interested. He began to hail a cab, but we explained that we like to walk, and if he was okay with it we’d prefer to move a little.

He seemed mildly pouty, but agreed. And we began to walk on, chatting. He explained to us how he worked as a hair dresser, how he had just saved up enough money to take out a lease on a new Lexus, telling us about his apartment, pointing out the handsome building in the distance. It really sounded like this guy was coming up in the world of men’s hair in Almaty… who knew? He explained to us as we walked that Scott’s shirt was too dirty. It’s fine, we assured him, but he pressed on. “It’s too dirty for my taste,” he said. “I’d like you to get a new one.”

Considering he’d just saved our asses and all, we decided to humor him and we followed the guy into the Silkway City, a posh Almaty mall chain, where we purchased for Scott a tee-shirt with a giant “I love Kazakhstan” on the front.

With that done, we headed out in search of coffee, but ended up instead at what our friend claimed was his favorite place, a joint called the Café Bar Excellent.

It was perhaps 6:30 pm and the place was almost completely empty. Our new friend decided to take bishop ordering for the table some pitchers of beer and a few plates of meat and French fries. It was, we were to learn, a Turkish restaurant, which is the most popular type of restaurant in Kazakh cities. I am not sure where the Turks get all this brand equity, but trust me, at least in Kazakhstan, they have it in spades.

This was fine with us, we were hungry anyway, and so we dug in, and enjoyed the beer. It was Heineken, the expensive stuff, not nearly as tasty as Shymkenskoye but as it is always, consistently not bad.

Communicating with this guy was tough. He spoke no English whatsoever and had very little patience for my poor Russian. But struggle on we did, into the evening, continuing to eat and chat as the sun ducked below the horizon.  When the bill came, our friend made no pretense of paying a cent, but we figured he had helped us today, and so we paid and got ready to leave, explaining to him that we had a lot of work to do.

He then began to get very disgruntled. “Don’t leave!” he pleaded with us. “Why won’t you stay longer with me?” We attempted to explain that we were tired, that we had lots of correspondence to write for you, dear reader, but he was not having it. He was becoming quite upset, and putting his foot down. “No! Stay!”

He then began to explain to us about his friends who he wanted us to meet. He told us about all the beautiful women who would be joining us, along with a photographer from (presumably Russian) Vogue.

Finally, in an exhausted last ditch effort, we were able to leave, but only promising that we would meet back up with him when we were done working. As we parted ways he demanded cab money from us (and quite a lot of money at that… twice as much as our cab fare) to get back to his place. This we gave him as well. As we piled into the cab, I turned back to Scott, letting him know that I was too exhausted by this character to do any more hanging out tonight. “My recommendation is that we just screen his calls,” I said.

Scott felt obliged to spend more time with the guy, and figured it may not be all that bad. “I’d like to meet this photographer from Vogue,” he said. And so it was that I went off to sleep, and Scott headed out to reencounter our fabulous friend…

………………………..

As Woody settled into bed, my phone rang at 10:00 pm on the dot when our purple-shirted and elaborately coiffed friend said he would be calling.  He was outside, and so I descended the stairs and spilled onto the filthy, poorly lit street surrounded by deserted market stalls.

There was no Lexus in sight, so I moved further into the street to peer in both directions.  Just then, a station wagon pulled up and dispensed Mr. Fabulous.  Now began the first extended Russian language practice session I had on my own.

After greetings, I asked him, “Where are you friends?”  He replied with something like “Oh..friends.  Astana.  They’re all in Astana, darling.  Yes, Astana.”

Oh, okay.  Well, do you have none here?  Who are we meeting?

I was told to hush, and decided to be patient and give him the benefit of the doubt.  We walked to find a place to chill.  Oddly enough, despite passing numerous attractive and lively options, we found ourselves back at the overpriced and not-so-great Cafe Bar Excellent.

I decided to bide my time and converse with this fellow as much as possible.  After rudimentary English and Russian lessons, I asked again, “Are you friends coming?  Are we going to meet them?”  He seemed to be assuring me that there would be some further socializing while periodically whipping out his mobile phone and firing off text messages.

Time passed, and we ordered another drink.  I was starting to grow impatient and suspicious, as I could barely think of enough things to mime or express in completely mutilated Russian.  He certainly wasn’t talking about much but seemed to be enjoying himself.

After hours passed, I motioned that we should be leaving, and if we were going to meet someone else we could find another spot.  We asked for the bill, and a waitress, who probably wondered who this odd couple was, brought it to the table.  And there it sat.  I waited for Mr. Fabulous to make a movement.  Maybe toward his wallet or maybe toward the bill.  He did not stir.

I brought it up in pantomime, motioning toward the check, suggesting we go Dutch, or do it the German way as the Turkish say.  He had no money, it seemed.  Exasperated, I paid and got up.

We strolled down the street for a bit and I signaled that I’d be heading home to catch some shuteye.  He brought up his friends once more, and not understanding what he was trying to communicate, I followed him into a park and sat on a bench as he made a call on his phone.  After the phone call, he began to make moves.  Big moves.  And I was not about to make out with a Kazakh guy in a park in the middle of the night.

“Hey man,” I said in Russian, “I like girls.”  Literally translated, I told him, “I have once reveled in a woman.”  It was all I could say.

There were no friends.  He spoke no English.  No photographer from Vogue.  No effort to pay bill.  Where the hell was I?

Had my people sensor somehow gotten warped?  His fragility and helpful nature seemed to suggest that he was not one to be a predator, though he’d been weaving complex webs.  “I’ve got to get out of here,” I resolved.

“Wait!” he exclaimed, and communicated that he had no money for a cab home.  How did he get here in the first place, I wondered?  “Look,” I told him in English, hoping my tone would permeate any language barriers, “I’m not paying your cab fare.  You relied on us for dinner, for cabs, for an entire evening, and you lied to us.  Find your own way home.”

Was this the right thing to do? Or was I being shallow?  Tough love isn’t easy. It’s tough (as the name implies).  I had never said this kind of thing to anyone.  But something compelled me to simultaneously cut my losses and teach this guy a lesson.

So I began walking.  Not wanting to take cab myself for the couple of blocks home, I strolled north down Almaty’s slope back toward the hotel.

As I turned the corner onto the street of our hotel, a police car pulled around me from behind and three officers  alighted from the vehicle.  I was certainly the only thing they were interested in.

“Documenti,” they signaled, “papers.”  I gulped.

My passport was at Transavia for registration, so I produced a photocopy and records of my flight and visa to the country.  This seemed not to interest them.  I was told to empty my pockets on their patrol car.  Keys, wallet, cell phone, some random receipts now laid on their trunk.

“Have you been drinking?” the cop signaled, placing two fingers on his neck, as is the Russian custom.  “A little”, I replied.

“Narcotics?  Drugs?”

“No, none, not at all.”

“Your shoes.  Take off your shoes.  We need to check them.  Unlace them.”

I bent down to untie the shoes, and midway through I was instructed to stop.  “Get out of here,” they motioned.  I put my possessions back in my pockets.  And I was free.

Walking away, I checked my wallet.  It was lighter.  Not the kind of lighter when Kazakh Tenge is missing.  The kind of lighter when the proud greenbacks of Barack Obama have been embezzled and siphoned into the hands of Almaty’s finest.

And right then, at the entrance to our hotel, two men with beers in hand seemed thrilled to see me.  They cheered “I love Kazakhstan,” and insisted we take a photo.  So here I am, in Almaty, at the end of one of the weirdest days of my life, loving Kazakhstan.

We woke up that next morning at the Ordabasy Hotel, feeling great about being in Kazakhstan. The sun was shining, our air conditioning unit was purring along, and we were just about to head down for a little complimentary breakfast.

Despite the fact that we had slept in until almost noon, the hotel restaurant was more than happy to serve us, nervously placing a modest breakfast of deep fried dough, covered in sour cream, in front of us. I can’t go as far as to say it was delicious, but it got the job done, sticking in our stomachs for hours and hours after we ate it. Thankfully, there was plenty of coffee.

We left the restaurant and grabbed the Speed TRs from where we’d locked them near the stairs. From there we poured out onto the streets of Shymkent, taking in the majesty of the Ordabassy Hotel in the sunlight. We were positioned perfectly, right in the center of town where there was a giant roundabout and a huge pyramid tower piercing the sky.

We spent a little while investigating the tower and the associated fountains.

And from there, just practiced the usual algorithm of choosing a direction and wheeling hard.

We crossed over the Shymkent rail station and proceeded on into the unknown. They say that Shymkent is really more of an Uzbek town, misplaced into Kazakhstan when the original lines had been drawn by Stalin’s ethnographers. That hypothesis was supported by the presence of the giant, Uzbek style melon and vegetables market that we stumbled upon.

The smell of Dynia was so strong as we rode past, that we had to stop. We lingered, inhaling the sweet mellow Dynia smell and chatting with some of the sellers, like this young man.

From there we wheeled way out to the edge of the farmland that surrounds Shymkent, and then back to the city. After we arrived in the city, we headed to the train station, where we went to purchase tickets. The lines were insane, and at the rate I was getting cut by hurried old women, I would have been better off traveling backward in time trying to get service.

So we headed outside and paid an extra $2.00 per ticket to have them booked through a private agency. With tickets in hand, we headed back into town and began bouncing between malls and coffee shops looking for working wifi. It was not easy thing to find by any means. Many businesses advertised it, but few of them had networks that actually worked. It was always the same excuses too. Come back tomorrow, it will be working. Our network admin is away this week. Internet is out in the whole city, it’s not our fault.

Eventually, we found a Turkish restaurant that had a network with the actual Internet behind it, and connected. It felt good to feast on the Internet at reasonable speeds. It was still nothing fast, maybe 10 kbps, but to anyone who’s ever gone from 2 kbps to 10kbps, feel free to chime in with what a pleasure it is.  The place also had probably the most ornate ice of the entire trip, formed into rosebuds.

We headed from there back to the Ordabassy, put on our pointy Uzbek shoes, and left just in time to meet the Ladies of Shymkent. Unfortunately, half way to the restaurant, we realized we’d forgotten our dictionaries and had to run back. Thus, we were 15 minutes late.  When we got there, the ladies were playing cards, already a few beers deep, and scolded us for being late. I guess this was not a culture where being “fashionably late” was encouraged.

Soon the whole crew arrived, though, and all was forgotten. We ordered a feast of Shashlik, vinegared onions, and bread. Then these ladies proceeded to take us on a fascinating journey through the grizzly underbelly of a Saturday night in Shymkent. Most interesting, apart from a plethora of very insightful questions about America and the west that they asked, was the ever-present danger of being killed by a Kazakh man. A drunk Kazakh, we have been told by many people (Americans, Uzbeks, and these women as well) is nothing to run afoul of… a drunk and jealous Kazakh was doubly bad. And ways to run afoul include: dancing alone, not talking to them, talking to them, cutting in line for the bathroom, not cutting in line for the bathroom, being incognito, being clandestine, and being obtrusive.  Accidentally bumping into someone was akin to signing one’s own own death warrant.

For instance, we would be dancing to insane Russian techno-rap-opera music, and when the ladies of Shymkent would need to visit the toilet, we would be told to sit at the table and wait for them, since dancing alone would surely bring violence.  In our visits to the men’s room, Scott and I would suddenly be surprised by a shouting match breaking out in front of us.  Our strategy was to press our backs up against the wall and look toward the moldy ceiling, lest one of the aggressors grab us by the shirt and scream at his opponent, “Is this guy with you?”

Wild Stuff.

The next morning, we had agreed to all meet once again so that they could send us off on our train to Almaty. And when we got back to our hotel to set our alarms, it hit us. We had strolled into a new time zone. Though it had been almost all northward travel, Kazakh time was an hour different than Uzbek time! We had been an hour and 15 minutes late, not just 15.

We were lucky they had put up with that kind of behavior.

Regardless, the next morning we met up with the Ladies of Shymkent, and bid them farewell.

A few even hung around to walk us to the train station.

We looked at our watches and it seemed we had just enough time to make it on foot, so we strolled back to the station with them, and folded up our bikes on the platform.

As we were trying to get onto the train, there was some issue with our ticket and our status as foreigners, but our two beautiful friends managed to talk the conductor down and we climbed on the train.

We waved goodbye one last time and relaxed into our bunks. I soon struck up a conversation with the young men traveling in the section next to us. They were all sergeants in the Kazakh army’s new sergeants program, and they were very interested in our trip and in telling me about how important the new sergeants program is. They were patient with my terrible Russian, but I am pained to report that despite much lecturing, all I can honestly say about the Kazakh new sergeants program is that it is very important, possibly the only thing that can save the broken Kazakh military system.

Anyone with more knowledge is heartily encouraged to share in the comments.

While Scott headed over to investigate the on-train samovar, I was called by the conductor into his private office.

In there, he pointed out to me the problem what had caused the mild uproar outside on the platform. It seems that through some fat fingering on the part of the bookers of our tickets, we had actually purchased tickets leaving from the station after Shymkent to Almaty instead of tickets originating in Shymkent proper.

He explained that while there was no ticketing conflict, this was a big problem, and that I could solve it by paying him about $5.00 right there and then. Sensing foul play and not wanting to pay an unnecessary bribe, I began my first triumphant weaseling out of a bribe in Russian, hopefully the first of many. I agreed to pay him the difference in ticket price, but demanded that he produce some evidence as to the price of the two tickets. We continued to go back and forth, he saying that there was no up-to-date price list on the train, and me suggesting that we compare the difference between our ticket price and that of one of the sergeants. Eventually, in desperation, he just asked “are you going to pay me money or not.”

I said, “Maybe not.” And he told me to get out of his office.

Feeling excellent, I returned to find Scott to have also bonded with the sergeants. They had given him a gift of some bread, and later took him out on a mission to buy chickens  and horse meat sausages from people selling them on the station platforms of the various cities we rolled through.

The chicken was great. The bed was comfortable. The people of Kazakhstan were proving to be monumentally welcoming. This country was on the fast track to an AsiaWheeling seal of approval.