03 Aug Kyzlorda and the Pee Police
Leaving Kyzlorda for Shymkent July 31st
Amazing how much better we all feel after a half night of good sleep and a shower! Plus we had some real coffee this am in the odd little bar of the hotel Nomad Palace.
It is about 45C now, and we’ve all passed around Cale’s leftover baby powder prior to getting back on the bus. Stefano’s black shirt took a hard hit from the powdering, making him look like the world’s worst drug smuggler.
For a change, Kaz has decided to give us good roads, perhaps to make up for the awful run last night. Yesterday even the cheerful and uncomplaining Caroline said, about the Aral “non-Sea” that the dictionary definition of shithole should reference that place. Don and I took a Christmas card picture there, just to remember it properly.
The rear brake caliper has been giving us some trouble, with Tommy having to repair it again last night before making it to Kyzlorda, and the bugs were swarming him so badly, he said at one point there were three in his mouth. Huge mosquitos.
Don just shared his tangerine with Sarita and I, and it is hard to describe what a hot tangerine tastes like, but Sarita says it was sautéed in the skin, truly a rare delicacy.
We now routinely get stopped by the police, which has not been too bad, really. They ask if we are Americans and if we are tourists, and then let us go. I love that the Brit, the Kiwi, and the Italians are just lumped in with us USA types in these exchanges. They do not love it as much.
We buy water at every fuel stop, and it gets super hot immediately. Makes it hard to keep up the amounts we need to drink in order to stay hydrated.
Caroline reminded us that we’ve been in Kazakhstan for 6 days. Why does it seem like a month? We played Steve Earl’s Six Days on the Road to mark the event.
Road recap to date:
Day one: border to Atryau–absolute crap, with massive potholes an drenching rain filling said potholes.
Day two: Atryau to Makat landfill–vintage asphalt on main road with dirt tracks alongside for when you give up all hope for a semi-smooth riding surface.
Day three: Random Kaz town landfill to Aktobe–unspeakable horror with craters worthy of the moon surface; even locals called it “extreme”.
Day four: Aktobe to Aralsk–semi decent roads where we are able to occasionally break 60kph on the good stretches. Practically Chamber of Commerce postcard roads.
Day five: Aralsk to Kyzlorda –vengeful gravel mixed with quicksand and heaping piles of hate.
Day six: Kyzlorda to Shymkent– asphalt, sweet glorious asphalt…for a while. Then a return to a road paved in the souls of disappointed tourists.
It is so hot that electronics are failing. 121 F according to Sarita’s all-knowing iPhone. This must have been what my friend Ken Leard was thinking when he said we were going to Godforsakistan. Little did you know how accurate you were, Ken.
You know, I’m sure it gets up to 120-130 in, say, Phoenix, Arizona, but there you’ve got air con, ice, real paved roads, and signs you can actually read, instead of Cyrillic, which we just make up new names for what they might say. Here, we’ve naught.
The camping choices at sunset were Mosquitos or drunken hordes of young people, so Pietro volunteered to take yet another long night drive to get us closer to the border with Kyrgyzstan and our eventual goal of Issykul, an alpine lake that has begun to sound like shangri-la to us after the hot days in Kaz. The temps are cooler at night, but we still sit in pools of sweat on the vinyl seats even at almost 11 pm.
It looks like the Kaz fan club lost another member at our last bathroom stop. When Pietro stepped outside to pee, a man came running up to say it was not allowed. Pietro promptly complied, but this was not enough for our one-man crusader against public urination. He complained loud and long, of course in a language we cannot understand, and also indicates he had photographic evidence with his 1980s era camera phone of Pietro’s law breaking and that the police were on the way.
Fortunately, Don and Stefano arrived back from their gas station foray and we rolled on down the road in as much haste as our bus would allow, all the while waiting to be chased by a bribe seeking cop.
The final word: Pietro still hadn’t peed. Nor had any of the rest of us! It was so absurd, considering that the absolute filth and horror of the pit toilets we’ve seen, including the one behind the municipal building in Aralsk, and here was a man suggesting that “going” behind the bus in darkness, just like dozens of truckers we’d seen doing the same thing was not acceptable? Ridiculous. Ah Kaz, you really do suck. And so do your self-appointed piss police!
Finally stopped at around 3am not far from the border town of Taraz to spend some quality time in a truck park. Into Kyrgyzstan at first light!