Crashing at the Border
My mother used to tell me if I didn’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all. So here goes. The Altai are frickin’ gorgeous! Growing as they do out of the fields of sunflowers in the rest …
Southern Exposure
Kulunda – unremarkable save for its place on the border. Having lost our way in the dark and seen more of the town than we wanted we finally consulted a map. Our campsite was on the way to Rodino (sans …
Back in the USSR
“You need a form like this! For your car!” The boyish-looking immigration officer demanded for the third time as he pointed to the small rectangle of paper that was our pass through the border crossing. You pick it up when …
Kazakhstan – A Few Final Words
There’s a lot to like about Kazakhstan. The roads were faster than we expected, traffic was minimal, and Astana a surprisingly easy town to get around in, but after 48 hours we’d had enough. Stopping overnight in the capital gave …
Fear and Loathing in Astana
Editor’s note: This recently discovered manuscript sufficiently closely paralleled our experience in Astana that it is reprinted here in full. The edge was coming off the mescaline and my mind cleared just enough that I could see the jack-booted thug …
Stepping Out
Our crossing from Russia was efficiently uneventful – the quickest border crossing of outside of the EU so far. The biggest immediate difference was passing from the Caucasian to the Asian in a matter of 500 metres. We looked for …
The Huts of Baba Yaga
Russia is a modern state. By that I mean it has all the trappings that you expect, fast food, highways, high fashion, fast cars and an apparently burgeoning middle class. Fortunately, it hasn’t been completely overrun by global homogenization. Roadside …
Highway Patrol
The cops are everywhere. At at least to our eyes there seems to be lots of them, but we were hyper-sensitized by other traveler’s tales of being pulled over by bent rozzers looking for a bribe. In Russia and Ukraine …
What’s Samara U?
Our earliest start of the week ended by mid-afternoon as we wandered like lost kittens in the swirling streets of Camapa, or in English, Samara. Our Cyrillic skills are improving steadily. Part of the trick is remembering symbols from high …
Volgograd and Beyond
Premium, groaned Tom, thank god we didn’t by the cheap stuff! Without too many more details, suffice it to say it was well into the afternoon before Tom took the wheel. We broke camp just outside somewhere and were headed …