Well our travels have brought us to the massive grass plains of Kazakhstan !!!
At the moment we are in the very smart new capitol Astana, its a far cry from Russia.

Our last few days through Russia have been really testing; bad roads, bad drivers, bad camping and long days on the road.  Our route took us south through some of the really rough parts of Russia.  We had been camping on the side of the road amoungst clumps of trees mostly and have been totally massacered by the mosquitos !!!
Weve come to think that the mosquito must be the national bird of Russia, the only other bird weve seen there are crows eating roadkill.  We also got to meet the Russian transport police.  After a really minor overtaking manouver on a very very badly painted solid line we got pulled over.

He demanded my license which he pocketed and sent me to their car...there the captain or whatever began to explain in full blown Russian that I had to pay 5000Rubles for my trecherous crime.  I played dumb and handed him the phrase book, he paged through it for a while and this went on some more.  During this time all the other motorists were paying 1000rub.
We eventaully worked thier patience down and showed them 2000rub(+/-40 quid) and a credit card, they took the money gave me my license and told us to #$%^&*@ off.  We never really did that reciept...  

Although the border crossing took 6hours we were really glad to get to Kazakhstan.  Again we were quite lucky in that we were behind a friendly German guy who had done the crossing several times and really helped us with the paperwork.  He also told us about the notoriously corrupt Kazakh bordr guards, thankfully we didnt have...[Read More]