Day 36 - Shop til you drop!

Another new country! Once we'd left our outrageously hot hotel room (there was no way to control the radiator) and done a pretty pathetic job on the breakfast by our standards even though it was good, we set out for Aktau and a shopping spree. We needed various bits of equipment, some bike parts and more layers!

We were not however, efficient, despite our best efforts. In fairness to us shops were hard to find, often in apartment blocks way off of the street or buried in big shopping centres. We managed to get all of the layers we needed in an outdoor store, and a screen protector for Emma's Garmin and headphones in the same centre, but had failed to find the first bike shop by 12:00. We back tracked again to counter my sugar dip with a bubble tea, and got chatting to an employee there who gave us some great tips about the steppe we're heading out to, and where to find the bike shop which has moved, thanks Askar!

The city is cool, and clearly has disposable income, but either the 9 year olds are concerningly stylish or I'm concerningly unstylish (it's probably both) because they were all very dressed up and out apparently alone.

Gas was a fun one. We tried a hunting shop, who pointed us to a bazaar (like an actual real one where real local people buy stuff not like the tourist ones in Istanbul) who pointed us to another hunting shop where we eventually found the correct gas for the cooker 🥳.

Happily it seems to be the same here as I experienced in Mongolia, rather than simply help you with a problem, people fully take it on themselves. It becomes their task to solve. For example, in the market someone saw us struggling and took us around four stalls, as far as driving with us following to another, phoning around, and also wanting to drive ahead and show us to the correct store 2km away. What we hadn't even realised is he'd called ahead so when I walked into the hunting store looking lost (actually once I'd finished manoeuvring my fully loaded bike of 2 days food + water through the shop doors very unsmoothly) a guy approached and said "gas?". Took me a second to work out our helper had called ahead!

There was just one moment of misunderstanding when he was insisting I stay here with the bikes and he'll drive Emma to the next shop which triggered "no way, absolutely no way" red flags for both of us, but in his mind he was just simplifying the problem and it was only a few hundred metres in the car.

By the time we had the gas it was nearly 5pm and I was pretty fed up having spent the whole day pushing to do things quickly and get cycling and somehow it still all taking ages. So we recalibrated, commited to starting tomorrow and went to the beach to watch the sunset with a couple of beers. The Caspian Sea! Bordered by lots of countries that really don't want us. That's a story for the grandkids: "I once drained a can of strawberries into the Caspian Sea" - I'm trying to match throwing a stone into Myanmar Grompy for both relevance and randomness!

So rather than a cold windy tent in the middle of nowhere as planned, we've got a double bed each and another breakfast in the morning!

Food spend today: 53.99 euros

And for the really keen (or nosy), here's the shopping list!