Another day in KZ

Graeme:
haha oh well some cool stuff to talk about today.
We got smart and started as late as possible today. Maybe 0830-0900. Just when it was too hot to lay in bed. Yesterday evening was wasted as we were stopped two hours too early in daylight and heat terms. Today we stopped just before sun down and although it's still hot, we didn't get sunburnt relaxing or cooking. The flies were atrocious too! We've really enjoyed today. Perhaps it's getting the distance behind us, but either way it's been good fun.

Some BRILLIANT roads today. They are laying huge dual carriageway concrete roads. They will be terrific in about a year. It was like this for the majority of today's drive but because it's still under construction, it means jumping on, then back off it continually where elements are incomplete, like new bridges etc. Woah, is that carriageway word really old!? like horse and carriage or are they just saying it will carry double? Another side effect of it being under construction, is all of it is 50kph speed limit. From here on, the names will be obscured to cover my ass:

We found the speed limit when we, in a long line of traffic were all pulled over by the Maurice. Of the five or so vehicles stopped, we were the last to be processed. Rather than processing us at the drivers door, I was indicated to follow the officer to the other side of the road to a waiting Maurice car. There was a young fellow in the back seat leaning over the parcel shelf doing speed checks. Ahh, maybe we were caught speeding? Sure enough, after a few clicks through on the camera the young police officer presented me with a view of the camera. Sure enough, a photo of our car visible maybe 5mm high on the 1" screen with a few tiny on-screen-displays that I didn't have time nor opportunity to read. The Maurice officer in the front pulled a laminated card out of the glove box and pointed to the infringement section that was the 40kph and over speeding bracket... the top one, with 32000Tenge ($214USD) plus some other stuff which I assumed were demerit points etc. I was a bit
perplexed because we hadn't seen a single speed sign other than at sections where there was active road works. Oh well I thought, stupid me. But again, when five people are pulled over in one go, that makes me think perhaps I was not the only one who got it wrong. He flipped behind the infringement notices to a blank page and wrote very slowly $100. OH AWESOME!!!! I was giddy with excitement at the prospect of my first 'Unnoficial fine'! Cocky as hell, I grabbed his pen and crossed straight through it, rewrote my counter offer of $50. In retrospect he had me, as he had my passport and more importantly all of the irreplaceable car documentation. He gave the subtlest of nods through his face concealing aviator sunglasses to indicate that was OK. Still thrilled with the experience we were buying I went back to the car to get our USD, none of which we had used this whole trip. As we counted out $50 I thought, gawdarnit, I should have offered him $20 at how quickly he accepted t
he $50. Oh well, I returned to their car and delicately placed the notes on the pad and he was careful not to touch them. They handed my documentation back and I evaporated to the other side of the road again as if I never was there.

I was cacking myself for about 5 minutes on how awesome that experience was we just bought. We'd done over 16,000KM and this was the first time! Cassie was not impressed as you can imagine. Only one or two posts back I said how suspicious the speed signage was in this country. Well, it meant we did 50kph all day which blew as the roads were stunning and it meant been overtaken continually as only two of the four lanes were open in most sections.

I'm going to stretch and say the locals driving here is worse that the worst Russian driving. I know you've probably heard it all before, but these mob are the pits. The lane splitting is atrocious, pushing you into an embankment or off the road as a result of deliberatly poor overtaking choices. The question stands, if we were not veering off the road the make space available, what would happen?!
It's difficult to split memories as they all seem to merge into one, but one near accident today was memorably pointless. A stream of traffic, all doing 20, bumper to bumper. About 3 cars ahead, one ass clown goes flying up the inside round a corner as fast as his heap of crap would go, and swerves as hard as possible to miss an oncoming car, with the flow on effect being pushing another two cars off the road. It's staggering how little we're alarmed by it now. At home, if someone is a bit premature in use of an overtaking lane, you get pissy. Here, the fact that a school bus overtaking a truck, over a hill doesn't even raise a sweat any more. We were thinking also, what do we do if someone does have an accident? That might actually be one of those 'leave it to the locals' scenarios if there are plenty around.

It's weird to talk about roads and driving, but then again, it's all we did again today. Cafe stop was good. Saw a new estate of houses... 500 of them, all mint green.
Roundabouts here, the person IN the roundabout gives way. erm. In positive Graeme fasion, I tried for hours to think of why that's better. As far as I can tell, it's not. The whole system grinds to a halt if the roundabout gets full.

As we're ending the end of our driving for today, we had to stop at a fork in the road to check our direction. It wasn't just your usual left/right fork because the sign included a roundabout and a lane coming towards us. We were honked by a truck in a 'stupid tourist', laughing kind of way and I thought, the jokes on you mate... you live here!