Always time for some extra custard...and End of Blog Blog

10th June

Having arrived in Almaty we relaxed. Sunday we wandered about Almaty - not the most exciting place, but it has noticeably improved since we were last here five years ago. There are now manhole covers, cafes and restaurants. There also seems to have been a road re-surfacing programme or maybe our memories from five years ago are not as correct as we think they are.

We 'wasted' the Sunday. Park, War Memorial, Bazaar and café. We then took the cable car up to the base of the Almaty Telecom tower which was perched on a hill above the city. We thought that we would get a better view of the Tian Shan Mountains from there, but the truth was the view was better from our hotel balcony in the city. Ah well! What we did find there however was the Almaty amusement park - coconut shies, rifle ranges etc. And a photo opportunity with an eagle. Anybody who has not seen the film 'Eagle Hunters' should by the way! The captive eagle struck us as being very cruel. We were quite ashamed on reflection when we realised that we didn't normally have the same reaction when we see birds of prey on stands at fairs in the UK. Is an owl any different? Anyway, the eagle was quite magnificent and a bit scary. Go and see the film!

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Having 'wasted' the Sunday, our job on Monday was to get the bike to the freighters. All fine and dandy and no issues going back to the freight depot near Almaty airport, where we had started all this five years ago. We had restrained from buying our return plane tickets in order to ensure that all the customs requirements with regard to the bike were completed first - and avoid what happened in Azerbaijan when Paul was stopped from boarding the plane, had to wait an extra four days in Baku and buy another ticket. Once was enough.

 

So after delivering the bike to the people in charge of the packing case/frame wrapped in cling film - (we were not 100% sure what was being planned), we went to the office and dealt with passports and the bike documents.

The question then arose about the Kyrgyzstan certificates. Well, what Kyrgyzstan certificates?  We weren't given any. Problem! We should have been given some when crossing from Tajikistan to Kyrgyzstan - not sure by which side - but it was immaterial really, we didn't have any from either. There were worried faces in the freight people's office; visible stress, quite a bit of animated Kazakh or Russian being spoken, "We need to speak with Customs people after lunch - go back to hotel". So we leave them with the bike - it was being crated anyway, and we return to the hotel. We tell them that we would really not want to go back to Kyrgyzstan in search of paperwork that should have been given to us if we can avoid having to do so.

And then we wait. And wait. It was a long afternoon. We only have an internet connection in the hotel, so we passed the afternoon there. Sometime in the afternoon we received a call asking whether we had been to either Armenia or Russia on this trip? We did not understand the relevance, but as we had visited neither this time round it was not an issue for us. 

Wait some more. Probably it wasn't that long really but time was dragging and until the bike was sorted, we daren't buy plane tickets. Suddenly there was a solution! If we appointed the freighters to act on our behalf and signed a contract with them, in theory they should be able to sort things out with the Customs officials and it would probably be a good idea to say 'thank you' to the Customs Officer. So we shook the dice again, passed 'Go' and paid, rather than received, the '£200'. After a few spelling corrections to the seven page contract which seemed to have been prepared for someone else and not properly updated.

Now for the airplane tickets. They thought that it should be OK and the "Azerbaijan issue" should not arise. According to the Customs Officer there was no record of the bike having entered Kazakhstan, we were told. They also did not believe that the Kazakh systems would cross reference our passports showing that we had entered the country on a motorcycle, so all should be good.

 

So we took the risk. The plane was now @9 hours from take-off and we would have 'some' time to eat, wash, sleep and get to the airport. But not that much. And not enough time to complete all the on-line formalities which meant that there was an extra $40 to pay at check in to have boarding cards. Of course the airplane tickets had increased in price by $100 during the afternoon.

We wrote this whilst on the airplane somewhere above Central Asia on our way to Kiev where we changed for London. We are on our way home and there is every possibility that our luggage and the bike will make it too.

All's well...

We made it home on Tuesday the 11th June; our luggage the day after and the bike the week after that. We are all now recovering and trying to get back into the swing of things.

We started this blog in 2014. It was about our trip round the world on our Electraglide, London -Sydney - New York. It was a bit daft then, it seems even sillier now. However we have now been round the world, two up on a Harley Electraglide, which is perhaps not the most appropriate of motorcycles for such a jaunt.

The idea of the trip came out of our desire to visit our eldest son, Xavier, in Sydney, Paul's reluctance to flying all that way and some psychological rehabilitation for Paul post-cancer.

Of course things didn't work out due to further health issues and we failed to make the start line; or, one could perhaps say, that we moved the start line from London to Almaty. It has taken four instalments over five years to complete what we had envisaged would take us six months. As well as Almaty to London via China, South East Asia, Sydney and New York, we also knocked off some of the trip on a summer run from London to Sofia via Istanbul. We then pushed the frontier back further East in 2017 from Sofia to Azerbaijan before breaking down outside of Sheki. So this trip has now closed the loop. And there have been other jaunts to St.Petersburg, Spain, Portugal and Ireland in between the longer trips.

The blog was about going round the world. We have done that now and the blog itself is looking a bit dated. So it's the right time to end it. What have we learned on the way? Well let's have dinner together and we will tell (bore?) you all about it!

In the meantime - the next little adventure beckons though we are not committing to what that is yet!