We were surprised at the flowers.

With Isatay Taymanuly

Onion domes.

Well almost.

The other side of the road this time.

Same river, different sheep.

Makhambet is also the district, and a village north of us.

He keeps horses, cattle, sheep and goats.

Sultan Beibars was born in this area and became a Turkic Mamluk Sultan of Egypt in the 13th century.

We conversed in a combination of English, Kazakh and Russian, with the help of Russian-English computer translator.

A bit of a struggle as we couldn't spell or type in cyrillic characters.

A hose from engine to cab heater had worn on the chassis. Result, a pinhole leak that would only get worse.

A result of tee-ing into the hose to install the Webasto heater about 80,000 km ago. 

I was able to shorten the hose and rotate the tee connection. 

Couldn't have been easier. The answer to "address" was "driving". Lovely lady copied what she needed, filled in the forms which we signed, and stamped our immigration entry forms and passports. Our visas are now registered.

We then tried the slightly less ornate supermarket.

With 4 and 6wd Russian Kamaz buses.

A big, several km, detour..

Just a few oil tankers in the rail yard.

We caught a bit of rain in the bucket.

There's nothing special about our camp sites beside the road. Just far enough away to not be too accessible.

And some road furniture.

The land is relatively flat.

The A27 bypasses it but its not obvious so many people meet the end of the road in the town.

Our gps map is terrible and our digital map not detailed enough.

In the last couple of days I'd thought to write an addition to one of my web pages that reads a gps usb dongle and places a marker on a googlemap. Kazakhstan has sufficient mobile internet to let it all work. Wouldn't have worked in Mongolia due to limited internet. Morocco it would have been useful.

A smart phone or tablet with built in gps would simply have needed an "app"

The 200 km at either end is not too bad.

The middle bit from Makat is terrible.

Sealed road that is horribly broken.

Edit:- in 2024 I thought to investigate. Its the terminus for the Makat - North Caucasus (Georgia) looping gas pipeline. Looping just means two pipes in parallel, providing more storage and buffering against demand. A vast hub of pipelines leading to it, and a big one leading away, parallel to our road. A video made by a Croatian company helped, the cyrillic script over a control panel translated as "compressor station". I guess surprised at the scale of the site, 6 very big compressors.

But no way of dodging the bumps.

All ready for winter.

Not grass.

Every village has one.

And there are some that don't have a village.

Collected some water from rain.

And photographed whatever was near.

It could have been a bad move.

Bridges are the highest point for miles (or is that kms).

I lost concentration and we went for a bit of a slide - 25m sideways. Not a nice feeling.

Stopped here to release the front hubs. We aren't traveling fast enough to feel any vibration from the front drive shaft but its an indication that something is not quite right so better to careful.

The craters are up to a metre deep.

Like some slow motion roller coaster.

We read somewhere that Kazakhstan's roads were the best in Asia.

That may well be so, but this one has missed out on some maintenance.

I haven't seen a maintenance crane like this since the 1960's.

I've become used to the yellow specialised vehicles

We'll decide when we reach the road junction which way to Aral will be easier.

While its nice to be past our bureaucratic hassles that started with the China Visa application and become more stable, and to have about the right momentum, we are a bit tired from rough roads.

Where is Goldilocks when we need her!

We are camped about 300m from the rail line.

Nice to watch, but could be noisy.

Not just the clickety-click, but the whirring of metal on metal, the squeal of wheels on corners, the rumble of the diesels, and not to forget the clunk-clunk of  flats on wheels. From locked  wheels while breaking.

Passenger trains have so far had 15, 17, 18 or 19 carriages. Nothing predictable like 4 or 8.

It must make booking seats interesting!