Where has all the oil gone – the engine was full only 800kms ago; it can’t just disappear! There’s no alternative but to stick what oil we have in the engine and look into the problem later.Kazakhstan

Highlights
- Almaty – a really pleasant, modern place
- Snow leopards in the zoo
- Chilling with other travellers
- Moving on again after weeks of being in the same area

Lowlights
- Incompetent visa agents
- Trashed bike engine
- Kazakh roads

From the last mail about Kyrgyzstan you’ll remember that we left with a decidedly “under the weather” bike. The starter motor was only functioning on 1 magnet when it should have 4, the carbs were still in need of a good clean out (so the engine was really badly balanced) and there were some nasty rattles coming from the engine.

So what is the most unprofessional way you can enter a country? Pushing a fully laden bike across no-man’s land rates pretty high up on the list! The starter motor would occasionally whiz the engine over, but at the border it decided to make us look like a couple of clowns from the state circus. After Georgie had done the paperwork (her usual function at borders, for which I am very grateful), the bike started ok and we rattled and spluttered into Kazakhstan.

Just 2 kilometers after the border the scenery changed and we finally start to cross “the steppe” – a huge plain that we had been avoiding for the past 3 months. Our trip through “The Stans” had been devised so that we’d go through interesting places (both visually and culturally), rather than just riding across the continent through thousands of kilometres of mind-numbing steppe, or further north through thousands of kilometres of mind-numbing Siberian forests. But now we’d have to do some riding on the steppe, on our way to do some riding through some of Siberia.

The Steppe

For anyone who has not experienced the steppe, imagine a huge plain, sometimes farmed with wheat, sometimes just left to dusty weeds. Unlike American prairies that have rolling hills and constantly changing shapes and forms, the steppe is FLAT, with occasional shallow valleys between 10 and 100 metres deep. You ride along the steppe seeing nothing but dry fields and distant hazy hills, drop into a valley, across a pot-holed bridge and back up to the dry fields and views of distant hills. Add a good dose of blistering sun (or icy winds in winter), a few scratty towns and the odd police checkpoint manned by bored doughnut eaters and that is all there is to see along a strip of land that stretches right the way from Hungary to the Pacific. Ok that’s a bit harsh, and there are small details that gladden the heart – the proliferation of insect life, small mammals and eagles that fly along with you and peer into your eyes as you peer into theirs’. But it’s not an ideal place to take a long holiday!

The noise of the engine didn’t seem to be getting any worse when we were riding, but was pretty deafening when we stopped – hmm – not good at all, but perhaps the tappets just needed tweaking? Ever hopeful but more than a little worried!

We arrive in Almaty and fight our way through the traffic. The stress of the traffic and the noisy engine start to get to me and then I can’t see any street names – how the hell are we supposed to find our way to a hotel? I pick a fight with Georgie (sorry – that was bloody silly) and then the oil pressure warning light comes on (for non-biking readers, this is VERY serious). Shit what a nightmare. Where has all the oil gone – the engine was full only 800kms ago; it can’t just disappear! There’s no alternative but to stick what oil we have in the engine and look into the problem later.

Georgie points out that the signs advertising “LG” products about 40 metres before every road have the street names on and things become a little clearer. Cheap hotel - $5 per night – safe again!

In my first mail about the trip I made a joke about “I might be surprised by Almaty and end up writing nice things about it”. Well here goes because it really is a good modern city with stuff to do, see and buy! And a bloody good job too as we were about to spend 10 days there waiting for our Russian visa to be processed.

Next day we have people to see and things to do. We have to register with the local police (more pointless admin, but vital to avoid a fine when leaving the country), we have to pick up our invitations for the Russia visa from our agent and we have to visit DHL to make them aware that a smelly second-hand starter motor is winging its way from England.

Off to the visa agent and hey, they don’t have the invitation – it’s in Moscow, but we need it in Almaty and we’ll have to pay $45 to have it couriered. Great – good start to the day. We paid $200 for the invitations and we don’t have them. I start pointing out that we have a contract with the agents to deliver the invites to Almaty but the agent (stunningly pretty but f******g useless) goes into “no my problem” mode. I decide to pay for the couriering and fight the agents in the UK, where professionalism eventually prevailed as they refunded my $45, but not until I pointed out that the local bimbo made a list of mistakes so long that I suspected that she had never processed a Russian visa before. If anyone is thinking of coming to Russia or Kazakhstan, you can mail us and we’ll tell you which agent to avoid!

So that put a delay into the proceedings – we’d be in Kazakhstan for a few days. Plenty of time to receive and fit the starter motor, which eventually arrived 4 working days after it was ordered. Great service from Motorworks in England (sales[at]motorworks.co[dot]uk) and DHL. It’s funny how systems work sometimes. When we ordered the starter motor, we also ordered a new spare ignition unit (as I’d fitted my spare, having fried the original unit in Kyrgyzstan). I quoted the part number which ended with the digits “X3”. The sales guy at Motorworks read the mail and though I wanted three ignition units and I thought – “hey ho, I’ll return them back in the UK”. When the package arrived in Almaty we realised that the guys in the despatch department in Motorworks had got their thinking heads on, as they’d only sent one ignition unit out – great. But what’s this in the bottom of the box? It’s a “free electronic egg timer” – a nice freebie, but what bloody good is it to me on a motorbike in Kazakhstan???? It now resides in the kitchen of a chambermaid from Almaty.

Almaty – a place with posh shops, delicatessens which sell really good food, a proper camping shop, expensive restaurants, smart cars and tree-lined streets. The city nestles in the foot hills of the mountains that separate Kazakhstan from Kyrgyzstan, providing the residents with ski resorts in the winter and water throughout the year. The place still has the soviet legacies of concrete apartment blocks and a strong police presence, but the people there have embraced change and are living it up. Which all contrasts with most of the rest of Kazakhstan where money and water are in short supply.

Mr Stalin said he wanted a BIG monument

The Russian influence can be seen in the dress sense too. Girls wear next to nothing in the Russian style, and when the men bother to dress up they look like mafia or scruffy schoolboys; but who’s looking at the men?

And then a real shock – what’s that green weed growing by the cigarette kiosk. Bloody hell, it’s cannabis! And there on the verge, and there on the square, in the pleasure park, all over the place. In a former soviet republic – what is going on? And so started a bit of a mystery on this tour; we’ve spotted cannabis growing all the way through eastern Kazakhstan, into and through Siberia and now in Mongolia (I’m writing this mail in Ulaan Baataar). It seems to grow where people have been, like nettles would grow in the UK. Along roadsides, as a weed in fields of wheat, and LOTS around dachas in small villages. So was the use of cannabis a way of people surviving the communist system (which passed 12 years ago) or has it developed since? Did the authorities try to stamp out its use or did they turn a blind eye to it? Were people smoking the stuff or making rope and shirts from the fibres? I need to find out more about this when I get home, but if any readers have any information, I’d welcome a mail. Whatever the reasoning, I’m amazed that a plant that I thought was “exotic and tropical” seems happy to grow in Siberia!

Simon takes an interest in horticulture

The hotel attracted a flowing river of backpackers, mainly heading to or from China, via our bedroom which turned into a bit of an information bureau/tearoom – Georgie has never seen me being so sociable. We became friendly with three backpackers - Annette the Aussie, Helen the Kiwi and Marshall the Canadian. Marshall was a scream – a 6 foot 4 dyslexic, ex forest fire fighter, ex oil field worker, with an eye for adventurous travel mixed with the attitude of Dillon the hippy rabbit from the Magic Roundabout. When he heard about our trip he decided that he’d have to try the biking experience for a few weeks and I got pressed into helping him to find a suitable bike to buy or hire.

Finding any type of shop or service in former soviet countries is a real challenge. In some big cities there are “Yellow Pages” but finding such documents is difficult as they’re sold for about $40 so nobody has them. You can be standing right next to the most wonderful shopping centre full of shops and stalls selling exactly what you want. But it will be in a building that looks like a disused warehouse, an old public library or an apartment block, with nothing on the outside to tell you what might be on the inside. The secret is to ask the locals and ask lots of locals. Most will shrug and say “I don’t know” or more annoyingly “no, there is nothing like that in this city”, but the occasional person will tell you what you need to know.

So with that in mind we started to look for a motorbike. I had heard that there was an “avto bizarre” (car market) in town so we headed down there. After a small cock-up when we found out that the locals also call the bus-station the avtobizarre (silly as most people want to buy a ticket for the bus and not the whole bus!), we found a market full of stalls selling bits of cars and one stall with bike bits and hey presto, a 1988 Ural motorcycle up for $300. It ran, it rattled, it had vinyl “Harley-style” panniers. The front brake was lethally non-functional and the rear brake pedal would almost scrape on the floor before if gave any bite. But it had just been rebuilt (oh no, teething problems!) only 120kms before.

Marshall, Annette and Chug-a-boom

After a day or so of deliberating, discussing the possibility of putting a sidecar on the beast (so that all three travellers could ride on the bike and probably die together), the bike was hired for $40 for 10 days – not a bad deal. And so Marshall and Annette headed for the hills; the bike broke down and got fixed, and then got ridden through pastures and rivers. They slept in a field and were woken at midnight by a horseman who bummed a cigarette off them and sold them some milk. Last thing we heard was that they were planning a bigger trip – but we’re not sure how that went.

And so to fix the bike. Three hours to clean out the carbs – still full of mud and water from the drowning 2 weeks before in Kyrgyzstan. New throttle and choke cables fitted on one side. New starter motor fitted and wonderfully functional – Georgie can put away her running shoes. Drop the oil in the engine and gearbox – no water, grit or metal particles there. Remove the oil filter and sump – same result. Hey we might be in luck! Adjust the tappets, new oil in.

So where did all the oil go on the road to Almaty? Well there were a lot of hard deposits on the left hand spark plug and none on the right, so now I think that I have scratched the left hand cylinder bore and oil is gradually burning in that cylinder (although there is no vapour trail behind us and people riding behind us can’t smell burning oil). The rattling from the right hand side seems to be either piston slap or maybe something around the valve rockers – so I’m not worried about that. And the problem of burning oil – well we have to add a litre of oil every 600kms, which is a pain and an expense, but at least it is controllable and predictable. I don’t like the idea of taking the engine apart for a rebore (or even just new piston-rings) while we are out here. Not that I’m worried about doing it (it’s an easy process) – just finding a reliable workshop to do the boring will be a challenge and I’d have to take the bike apart twice – once to find out what is wrong and then again when the parts required have been shipped from England. All together too much hassle when I’m on holiday – the problem isn’t critical so I think we’ll just burn oil until we get back to the UK. And at the rate it is burning now we will consume between 75 and 100 litres of oil in the next year – oops!!!!

More time to kill in Almaty – let’s visit the zoo to see the Snow Leopards. Snow leopards live in the mountains to the east of Almaty and are one of the national symbols of Kazakhstan. The president has announced that he doesn’t want the country to be an “asian tiger economy”; he wants it to be an “asian snow leopard economy”. Nobody is quite sure what this means as the leopards have a reputation for being stealthy and secretive rather than bold and ferocious. But anyway they are pretty with a tail that is a long as their body and as fluffy as a giant pipe-cleaner.

We had the option of heading up into the hills to visit Medeo where the 2010 Winter Olympics may be held. It is supposed to be pretty and alpine, but we were “all mountained out” and couldn’t be bothered.

Eventually the visa invitations arrive and we fight our way into the Russian consulate to get our visas. 10 days after we arrive, we are ready to leave Almaty. But we still have to be careful. The standard of driving in Almaty was truly dreadful and we saw about 10 crashes in the few days we were there. Part of the problem was the pot-holed roads (making everyone swerve around all over the place) and the proliferation of trees didn’t help as drivers could rarely see the oncoming traffic as they pulled out of side roads. But the biggest problem was the fact that nobody takes driving tests – all you need is $25 to buy a black market driving licence and off you go, to wreak havoc on the roads.

Out onto the steppe again for a 1000km ride up to the Russian border. Luckily the hottest of weather held off but the roads deteriorated as we drove north. The towns also got rougher and were replaced by garrisons and airfields as we skirted along the Chinese border. One town we passed through used to have a steelworks, but it no longer produces steel and most people have moved away. The 20 or so massive apartment blocks that they used to inhabit have been stripped of everything, including their window frames, so their hollow stare follows you as you drive by. Reminded me of Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream”.

Shopping for bread the Kazakh way

We spent two and a half days riding up that stretch of road, rough camping along the way. The first night we pulled off the road and camped in some hills. I got the map out of its waterproof case to plan the next day’s ride and realised that we were actually only about 10kms from the Chinese border. The only thing between us and China were a few low hills. That night we collected and filtered some spring water – possibly “Chinese mineral water”!

The second night we camped on the steppe and discovered a lushly vegetated lake, full of fish, ducks, dragon-flies and kingfishers, all hidden in a fold of the landscape just 1km from the dusty highway. Again I tried to catch our supper using the fishing rod and some sweetcorn (good for carp!) while Georgie prepared a tuna fish and sweetcorn stew.

The final half day was on one of the worse pieces of metalled road we have encountered. The road up to Semey (Semipalatinsk in Russian) is as neglected as the whole of that part of the country. The only alternative route is through the notorious “SemiPalatinsk Polygon” where the Russians tested their nuclear weapons. The place is still dangerously radioactive in places (although people still live, get sick and die there) – not a good place to camp and drink the spring water. For the same reason we avoided buying mushrooms and berries from roadside vendors until we were well into Siberia.

Into and through Semey – a really ugly soviet mess at one end (with high voltage power pylons running through the centre of housing estates) and a smooooth new road and Japanese-built suspension bridge at the other end. Over the river and whooo – forests again – like someone had suddenly decided that the Siberian woodland would start “north of that river”.

A fairly informal border crossing out of Kazakhstan and there lay Russia. We should have been frightened, but we’d just done 13 countries and Russia was just “another border” – weird; a bit of an anticlimax.