Day 43 - False start to Uzbekistan
Kilometres intended today: 160-200
Kilometres done today: 0
Kilometres added to route: ~1000, inc. 600 off-road... 🤔
Standard hotel start at our end ....bike faff, cleaning faff, patching faff, drink tea faff, with the added new feature of a trip to one of the many filtered water vending machines, and the passing comment from Christian and Nadine that the border to Uzbekistan might be closed, because of construction works.
Without saying anything, Ben and I are both naively thinking "major border closed seems unlikely, but we'll check that later over coffee on our way out of town"...
After casually faffing till 1pm, we've both done some bonus faff to get mentally ready for ( / stall the inevitable) the 1500km straight road across Uzbekistan....I've given myself a haircut, Ben's got new bartape and a TV mount on the bars. Just a supermarket shop for supplies, then quick cafe stop for coffee, brunch, check weather and go.
This coffee shop looks amazing, so in out usual style we confuse the waitress by asking for something without meat and ordering twice as many meals as there are people at the table (standard state of affairs), and dive into admin to very very rapidly learn that the crossing into Uzbekistan is very much closed. We double check with the staff at the cafe, and they confirm without hesitation that it's very much closed, but that people can cross on train. Ok, seams easy enough.
Ah, but after going through all the 4 or 5 different train booking websites that exist, trying all the stations in Kazak, Russian and English to find why nothing is working, we learn that the train has to be booked 1 month in advance .....what???
Ok, so now back to the drawing board:
- 2000+ km detour on road to the next border?
- 1000km detour, inc. 600km off-road, to the next border?
- Train across Kazakhstan?
- Turn north west and fly out of Atyrau?
We weren't particularly enthusiastic about any of the options... So bought 2 rounds of dessert, coffee, lemonade and thought it over. 30 minutes later, we've devoured dessert and independently came to the same conclusion: 1000km detour with lots of remote off-road.
At that point it's 4pm, we're not ready for 600km of remote off-road, there's more faff and research to be done, so we plan to stay another night here . We go back to our hotel, the lady very reluctantly says that there's a room available (we are the only people at the hotel based on the completely empty carpark), but she sounds annoyed that this is going to cause her more work... so we try the next hotel, same type of response, so we try the 3rd... Same response, but didn't want to waste more time, so we annoy the lady at reception by booking in. She snatches Ben's passport off him, mumbles something and doesn't like that she doesn't know where my passport is from. A remarkably strange reception from 3 ladies in a row, when the general attitude to tourists etc. around Kazakhstan has been super positive. Strange.
A bit more research, and decision made....we head to the biggest supermarket in the area for 4 days of packable food that requires no cooking, and can be shaken, compressed and rained on (aka blow out resistant) ... We walk out without half the shop this time, and a meal plan consisting mostly of oats, olive oil and tomato paste for dinners, and oats and Nesquik for breakfasts, and all the food we can possibly consume for dinner tonight. Win!
(Emma)
Food spend today: 96.74 euros