Golden dunes

Cassie:
As usual, an update on today's road conditions. As I had feared, the roads seem to be getting worse and worse the further west we head. There's less of the lovely tar roads now but the dirt roads are due to us being diverted off the tar roads as they work on them. At one point we hit a bump in the road so hard that the car got knocked out of gear! We're back to that hey Kazakhstan? I was hoping we'd left all those sorts of roads back in Siberia and Mongolia. Oh well, so far it's all easy going in comparison to the roads we've travelled on during this trip. Just a matter of rolling with it and taking the bumps in our stride, we'll get there.

Tomorrow we'll be going through Aral and will stop to find the "port" of the Aral Sea. Hopefully when we find that we'll be able to see all those fishing boats that were stranded and left to rust in the sand. It'll be cool to walk around and have a look at them, get some photos.

We met and chatted with some Czech Republic guys at a petrol station today. There were four of them in two Land Rovers who'd come through Ukraine, Russia and into Kazakhstan the same way we'll be going. They were on their way to Almaty and asked us if there was anything worth seeing in this country from the way we'd come. Hmmm, interesting. Perhaps we aren't the only tourists here that are feeling a little bit underwhelmed? I gave them a couple of ideas that we didn't do because of sickness and not being bothered taking 2-3 days out of our way to see. They were the Singing Dunes and Charyn Canyon. I also told them about the mausoleum we saw in Turkestan. It's worth seeing, even though it is devoid of any interesting cultural items and full of scaffolding inside and out due to the construction. They seemed thankful that there was something to see and told us that the road from Aktobe to Atyrau is awful. Hopefully it's no worse than anything else we've experienced on this trip.

Today we've seen beautiful golden sand dunes. Our camp happens to be amongst these golden beauties but we've had to pick an area that has some vegetation growing on the dunes as it's quite windy. Once that wind picks up in the more sandy areas it's like getting sandblasted! Today we've been through a few small whiteouts which was pretty cool. At one point we had to stop the car briefly (only very briefly just in case someone was coming up behind us!) because we couldn't see an inch in front of the windscreen. It's awesome to watch the sand drift across the road at points. Thankfully today hasn't been as hot. We were concerned how we were going to cool the car down enough for us to sleep without being able to open the windows because of the sand in the air. That hasn't been any problem thanks to our choice of camp. The sand in the atmosphere does make for a spectacular sunset. The sky is starting to glow bright orange as I'm typing this.

Again, the Spot message doesn't seem to have gotten out so we've put our location in this blog post instead.


Position: 12-08-24 20:37:27 +0600 +0000
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