Everyone on the rally has nothing but praise for most Kazakh people. Everywhere we have arrived here we have been met with crowds and local festivities. They have treated us like heroes.
Unfortunately it is a bit intimidating when people thrust their kids in front of you to take selfies as you are trying to park. We have so much in the back of the car that there is no rear vision, our slow motion braking system hardly works and the engine is prone to overheating in traffic. I doubt if the crowds understand the risks they are taking….
We’ve managed to avoid killing any children so far!
Figure 1 The local band welcomed us…..
People thrust small gifts into your hands, they all try to grab you for selfies with them or with the car, they dress up, they provide bands and, for the organisers, fancy yurts.
Figure 2 Normally the organisers’ office is a desk in a field!
The Kazakhs are if anything even more car mad than the Siberians. If you stop by the wayside, expect to be surrounded by crowds. Mostly very friendly and offering help including one guy who offered a 200 km tow to Astana for free when our fuel pump had gone (the going rate on a flatbed is $4 per km). When there are problems they are more of lack of understanding than malice, like the guy who got out of his truck to inspect our fuel pump with, petrol dripping everywhere and proceeded to light a cigarette!. He seemed quite miffed when I shooed him away….
Figure 3 Two of the children we avoided running over….
Figure 4 We eventually got parked after driving through the crowds
We had another event free day. There was a fabulous run round a short circuit called the Ski Run (probably a langlauf track in winter) organised for us by the Astana Motor Club. We managed a quite respectable time. We skipped the gravel sections and motored gently in to Kostanay.
On the way we passed many acres of wheat fields. Kazakhstan is the world’s 10th largest wheat exporter and exported $1 billion of wheat last year to a range of countries. It used to be one of the main grain suppliers to central Asia but now increasingly sells its produce to China. All this will be boosted by improved infrastructure. Other major exports are oil and gas, copper (Mike noticed a number of hills that looked to have been made by copper mine tailings) and ‘radioactive materials’.
But while Nur Sultan had been very consciously modernised, it is amusing (though less so for some of the perpetually outraged Americans on the rally) to stay in a hotel that clearly hasn’t been changed since Soviet times.
Figure 5 Interesting entrance to the hotel….
There is a lady with an office by the staircase on each floor, presumably to stop people sneaking in! One lift for the whole hotel. Much of the building seems to be unfinished which is why it is so surprising that it is so out of date…there are no facilities except rudimentary wifi.
The hotel does offer car parking and its website announces that ‘Receptionists of our hotel are flexible persons’. The entrance is sand covered with a few old carpets.
But the rooms are at least huge and one of the ralliers found that he had SEVEN beds in his room (none comfortable).
Mike, who in his travels has stayed in quite a lot of hotels in out of way places, says it is the norm. And I got a good night’s sleep, which is the key test of any hotel.
We’ve changed time zone but it’s not yet clear whether the organisers have caught up. So there is some confusion about what time we are meant to be doing things. Some are operating on the actual time, some on yesterday’s ‘rally time’ (it is a convention on rallies that even when a time zone is crossed, for rally purposes you keep to the time zone that was operating at the beginning of the day).
Today we head back into Russia with another border crossing. Let’s hope it goes as well as the crossing into Kazakhstan.