The Long Way Round?

Manjali Mosque, Atyrau, Kazakhstan
Originally uploaded by rtw2007.

We have spent a frustrating couple of days hanging around in Atyrau waiting to be registered with the Kazakh authorities. We had understood that this would take 24 hours, but we have in fact only got our little blue stamp three days after arriving. This despite the fact that on day one we were registered both at the border and at a police check 800 metres later. How many official registrations can be required?

Whilst waiting in Atyrau, we have discovered more than a few issues with our proposed route. Basically, we had anticipated some very long drives, with a distance of about 2500km to be covered in Kazakhstan (a country roughly the size of the whole of Western Europe). But several people have told us that the road north of here is appalling (even by Kazakh standards), such that we have to add 450km to the first two days of our route. But that is nothing compared to the next issue. A 335km stretch of road heading back south is supposedly so bad that we will be down to 10km/hour at times and driving on sand (which our van doesn’t like one little bit). We have since read that the 335km stretch can take three days to complete. The locals are seriously proposing that we instead do a loop of almost the whole of the enormous country (which would amount to around 3,000km), rather than tackle that 335km stretch of road. This seems to us insane, particularly as we had been labouring under the misapprehension that the stretch of road in question was quite good, given that it is labelled as Motorway on our map. How wrong you can be?

So now we just don’t know what to do – if we go the long way then we will have to change our trip plans very significantly and apply for new visas, as our current paperwork will run out of date. But dare we risk the short route against local advice? Apparently, the Chinese are so fed up of there being no decent road from there to Russia that they are building a new road for the Kazakhs, but sadly for us, not in the next three days

Thank you very much to Arnoldo for sending us 35 new, post-RTW departure tracks for our iPod, which should at least help to keep us half sane as we trek around this enormous country….