Sunday 28th August
Around 6am we picked up a dishevelled
looking Alf from the airport whose last few days had consisted of 2 long haul
flights, a wedding and shuttle rides between Torquay and London. Fair play, he
was allowed to be hungover and tired. If he thought he’d be returning to a
sunny paradise, he was wrong. For what felt like only the second time on the
trip it was wet, windy and cold.
We began the trek northeast towards
the border with Russia at Pavlodar. The resulting drive was very flat and
unremarkable but this was more an indication of Kazakhstan’s vastness than
anything else. The border crossing turned out to be the quickest on the trip
yet thanks to more easy-going Kazakhstani border officials. Speaking to another
rally team at the border however we soon realised how fortunate we had been
throughout Kazakhstan. They had been pulled over by the police on numerous
occasions and had to pay over a hundred dollars worth of bribes. We, on the
other hand, had just driven illegally without insurance for 6 days and hadn’t
been pulled over once. Oops. Maybe it was something to do with the suspicious
looking 2D policeman at the side of the road….
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| Yep, that's a cardboard policeman checking our speed |
Continuing to preach the notion that ignorance
is the best policy we decided not to bother with insurance in Russia either. As
the border guard said, Russians are drunk on vodka water 24/7 anyway so no one
really cares. When he moved over to our packet of fags (or go-to bribe offering)
on the dashboard, him and his cronies erupted into fits of giggles. They were
pointing and laughing at the purposefully grotesque health warning of a
bed-bound chain-smoker on the front of our Marlboro Reds. In a manner that
exuded “Putin and I fight bears in our spare time” he snatched a cigarette and
began to puff away. Russians are hard as nails.
Posted by: Rich