ASIA: Oral (Kazakhstan) - Tashkent (Uzbekistan)
8/01/2007 – 12/02/2007

Oral is the first Kazak city on the way (we got Asia!), after getting our registration we look for a mechanic to tight our front wheel bearings that in Russia started to be noisy.

To reach Aktobe it’s an adventure...the road is a complete disaster, with deep potholes, heaps of snow. We get the second city after two days and a lot of driving hours.

At 40 kms far from Aktobe we stop beside a café for the night, our roof rack is broken and we don’t want to worsen the damage. During the night seven chaps knock on the windows. Soon everything deteriorates, some of them try to steal things inside our trunk on the roof, others try to broken transmission parts under the 4WD. One of them menaces Claudio with a piece of glass another try hard to open the door through the half open window. Claudio after a few tries is able to shift away thanks to the low gears the only way to move with the cold engine. Shut the window. Someone try to cling to the car. I yell: “switch on the beams” and in response: “hold on tight”. It’s on the 14th January 2006. We spent the rest of the night awake under a filling station’s light.

The report’s damages: the spare wheel’s cover stolen, counter meters’ cable broken, the trunk’s strap cut and transmission’s knuckle joint damaged. The next day while soldering the broken roof rack our 4WD got its windshield damaged and a really bad work as well.

Aral, once the city was washed by the homonymous lake, we can see the boats run aground close the previous harbour. Nowadays is a desert during summer time while in winter turns in a large white stretch. The head of the Soviet Union in order to irrigate the Uzbek cotton fields decided to divert the rivers from the Aral Lake. This caused the partial dry up of the lake. Climate change took place around the lake as well as in the south-west of Kazakhstan and in the North of Uzbekistan. Our roof rack breaks down again in two points. We get it fixed again and it is still resisting.
We get Almaty, once the capital city of Kazakhstan, we stay in the only hotel that we can afford, it seemed to have a kind o parking (not guarded but in front of the reception). The next morning the right window is broken.
We spend more than a week in Almaty looking for spare parts for our 4WD but we are lucky only for the wheel bearings. A mechanic changes them, for the others spare parts we opt for a carrier from Italy to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. We leave Almaty with our too expensive Uzbek visas delivered with a week of delay.

After spending four hours at the border we get Uzbekistan and its capital 12 kms far away. We have to withdraw money but from ATMs there is no cash available, the bigger size of the Uzbek notes is 60 cents of euro. We change some dollars at the Sheraton with a very high commission.

We find a friendly B&B to stay. In only five days we get all the visas needed to go ahead (Tajik, Kyrgyz, Kazak and Russian one). The package with all the spare parts for our Suzuki is just arrived. Tomorrow we leave for Samarcanda.

Claudio and Patrizia