50mph syndrome

5000 miles and counting...

We're now in Tashkent after trooping the length of Kazakhstan and traversing Uzbekistan. So much has happened since our last full blog entry, not helped by the fact that blogs are blocked here as they're seen as politically unsuitable. We can't even read what we've written.

Having fallen into convoy with the Mongol Bikers and the Sand Badgers in Atiyrau, we've seen off the searing 45 degree heat of the Kazakh desert, a complete lack of roads, towed beached cars out of sand, encountered scorpions, black widows, wild horses, camels and various mechanicals and come out relatively unscathed.

Atiyrau was a wonderful start to our Kazakh adventure and after driving the world's longest and straightest roads, we pulled into the first hotel (which turned out to be run by teenagers)with Mongol Rally cars parked outside. After a brief photoshoot with the security guards we headed out for a beer and a sandwich at the only place open in town...only to meet the General Director of KazTransGas and pals! After a some hilarious banter concerning Litvinyenko, Abramovich and Putin we found ourselves our latest sponsor! 100 dollars peeled off a fat roll of cash is impressive anywhere. We'll be putting this kind donation to towards our tally when we get home (no secure card payments here...)

It's probably worth mentioning that whilst it's always good to meet other ralliers, other ralliers going the opposite direction is less amusing. Before entering the desert we met 3 rally teams heading north. After rumours of bandits and highwaymen, meeting this bunch was the final straw. They had bandaged feet, ruined cars, red eyes, dirt from head to tow, and looked like the kids from Lord of the Flies. With much trepidation we continued, only to find the roads were more like mortored a battle field, punctuated with deep sand. 4 days later we emerged unwashed and caked head to tow in cement like dust and with a broken motorbike. The cars will never be clean again...

Richard nearly had us through the Uzbek border in under an hour until they decided to close for a 3 hour lunch break to watch browse porn on their laptop, leaving us surrounded by 40 inquisitive Uzbeks who it seemed had never seen a motorbike before. Finally cleared the border to find no towns for 300 kms. Pressing on to get the Sand Badgers leaking gearbox sorted turned out to be a mistake and as night descended we lost Sand Badger Tom for 45 minutes, suffered 4 motorbike breakdowns including a complete loss of bike head lights, lost our fuel filler cap and hit a cyclist at 2am...well me didn't, Mongol Biker James did. What could have turned out to be an absolute catastophe worked out okish, solved by a can of Savlon and half a litre of Vodka. Onwards we rolled through mosquito infested swamplands where exhaustion struck and hallucinations at the wheel ensued, including coloured cows and walls in the road.

We finally rolled into the ex-Soviet chemical testing ground of Nukus at 3am to find a hotel. We emerged the next morning to confront our mosquito ravaged reflections in the cracked mirrors.

We stayed another day in Nukus, as James had a serious visa issue and a twisted bike to sort out. Also, Tom's Peugeot needed the gearbox looking at. We took it to a Daewoo expert called "The Master" and he fixed it up good.

Nukus to Samarkand was the plan for the next day. We got up early, had breakfast and hit the road. Or rather hit the town looking for petrol. After an hour of pointless driving around a man very kindly offered to escort us to a petrol station. When we got there he revealed himself to be a TV reporter and we then had to do an interview for Good Morning Uzbekistan. When we got out of town we drove 400km through an endless desert. All was going well until it got dark and the number of cyclists and donkey carts increased as our speed dropped to a crawl. All you can say is that driving at night in central asia is scary and bloody dangerous. We decided to pull up short at Bukhara