Passport Problems
30 JulWe’re woken by the sound of a squeaky cart. The farmer and his kids are taking their milk up to the road in a cart, and they roll right past our tents. It’s only 5:30am. A red van stops and takes the milk, and they squeak back past us. With the sun almost up the insects have gone and we cook up some 2 minute noodles. They taste so good, I can’t describe the look on our faces as we eat them.
We take the rocker cover off the engine and check the tappets. All is okay. We retard the ignition some more. It’s really not sounding great, but there is not much we can do. With the timing this retarded we are a long way down on power.
We head off towards Qizilorda and get there quickly. It doesn’t look like a great place, and the Lonely Planet doesn’t say much, so we decide to push on the Shymkent. It’s another 480k’s. We stop briefly to finally get some decent fuel, 96 this time. On the way out of Qizilorda we get stopped by the Police. They ask for all of our passports. When they inspect Tim’s they complain about his photo. We always have our passports in our pockets, but Tim has been a little careless about keeping his inside a plastic wallet. At some stage, probably when we walked in Aral, he has sweated profusely, and all of the colour has run from his photo. The police take him away to discuss a fine for not having a valid passport. He escapes lightly and we continue. Now we have a big problem. We are due to enter Uzbekistan in 2 days, but Tim basically has no valid passport.
It’s across some more dessert, and the car is really struggling with the heat. Our maximum speed is now somewhere between 45 and 50, so we stop and advance the timing a little. No pinging with the 96 fuel, and the temperature comes down. We stop periodically and buy water, but a lot of the towns seem to be without power for some reason, and the water isn’t very cold. Although we still have stocks of water in the car, it’s 40 degrees, and makes you feel pretty awful when you drink it.
Finally around 6pm we arrive in Shymkent and find some accommodation. We are fully spent. My digestive system is still being tortured. Tim starts ringing the Australian Consulate in Almaty, about 700km away. It’s closed down. He rings the Australian consulate in London (business hours have finished in Australia) and they tell him to ring Almaty (they don’t appear to know that it is shut?). He must ring Moscow, but they are closed.
We head out for a lovely beer, and then look for a restaurant for dinner. Stephen and I both eat Mutton (despite my digestive condition I can’t turn down a good meal), and Tim has chicken. The food is simple buy quite nice. We order some wine from Moldova, but it’s awful. It must be corked and I complain to the owner, but she assures me it is normal, although she refuses to taste it! It has a 2007 date stamped on it. It doesn’t look like the vintage, is it a use by? We tell them to take it away and get 3 beers instead.
We discuss what to do about Tim’s situation, but we are short on facts. If he tries to cross the border to Uzbekistan with a photocopy of his passport, he might get stuck in no mans land and deported. What if he has to travel to Moscow and back? Should we continue without him? Should we wait? We discuss our progress so far. Somehow we’ve arrived in Shymkent 1 day ahead of schedule. This has been an unbelievable effort, as our schedule was really hectic up until this point. From now on the km for each day are lower. If our engine holds together we’re not in bad shape. We still haven’t had a suspension failure. Our route through Tajikistan is on far worse roads than what we’ve seen so far. We could just miss Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgystan and head for Russian and Mongolia? We decide to sleep on it.
We walk back to the hotel and discover our watches are out by an hour. They have been since Aktobe as Kazakhstan covers two time zones. The hotel is so hot, and we don’t sleep well, but at least we get a sleep in.
