2013.08.02 — Friday

We awoke in a very active cow pasture. This was also grasshopper country. We set out to Aralsk at a great pace. The fabled roads indeed persisted to Aralsk. But we didn’t pass a single gas station ‘tween pasture and our destination. We lost Jon Hay within sight of the city (town?) and her bounty of fuel. Fate would have it that we had a shake of gas in one of our jerry cans due to a slight overestimate in Jon Hay’s capacity at a gas station days earlier near the Russia-Kazakh border. It was just enough to get her up and running again. We topped her off and filled our two ten-litre cans.

After Aralsk the road situation took an unwelcome turn. Dust. We were driving through inches of soft, loose, dry, dirt, which did little to dampen the blows dealt to Jon Hay by the underlying substructure of not-a-real-road. Towards the end of the day, as we neared Turkestan, the roads were once again mostly paved. The Kazakhs are undertaking massive efforts to improve their infrastructure, and a proper four-lane highway (two lanes in each direction separated by a guard rail) is materializing between Aralsk and Shymkent. But, rather hilariously, such a highway is hard for the locals to wrap their heads around. In practice, both sides of the guard rail support cars in BOTH directions. Despite obvious efforts, the highway operates more like two, parallel, two-lane highways. It’s fascinating to see cars enter from on-ramps the wrong way. The problem is actually exacerbated by the guard rail, as so many unofficial exits exist in the form of intersecting dirt roads.

We pulled off the highway at dusk to set up Camp Kazakh IV, the final installment of the Camp Kazakh series. We camped near a quarry or gravel pit of some kind, which provided only limited concealment from the road. When full darkness set in a police officer on the main road, which was some distance away, hit us with a spotlight and activated his lights and siren. Unclear what they wanted us to do, so we did nothing. They eventually got bored and drove away. We deployed our folding chairs and took in another astonishing night sky before heading off to sleep.

Camp Kazakh IV.