Getting in to Kazakhstan

The aim when going across a border is to do so early in the morning, but we got off to a slow start and didn't get to the Russian/Kazakhstan border until around noon, which was only 50 miles from Astrakhan.
Getting out of Russia was relatively painless. Although we went to the front of the queue, we still seemed to end up waiting around in the heat for the best part of an hour. We chatted with some of the Kazakhstan locals (neither of us understanding very much, but plenty of pointing and hand waving). We noticed that a number of them had rows of gold teeth, although it would be some time before we understood why as we didn't consider it to be something that would be opted for.
When we finally got to the beginning of the Russian exit process, a couple of questions, some tap tapping on the computer and then the delightful sound of the stamp in the passports and we were off through no man's land to Kazakhstan. We followed a trail, along a gravel road for around 4-5 miles until we reached a river with a queue of cars and trucks waiting to cross. There was a platform being pushed by a barge to ferry people across, so another wait (despite more queue jumping) and we were at the gates of Kazakhstan. Evidently, the Russians had kept us waiting as there was a big queue and something of a wait at the Kazakhstan side and they hadn't wanted things backed up any more. Two coaches were in front of us, so we knew we were in for a long wait as each of the 50-odd passengers had to be processed.
Finally, around 2 hours later, we were invited to begin the process. It started with immigration form filling, then after a bit of a wait, we got to the passport desk, which was easy enough for us, but plenty of questions and paperwork required for the bikes. Three quarters of an hour later and we were told to go to the 'red building'. On our way, we were told to go to the white one first! So, off we went, and after 45 minutes each of our hand written customs forms being typed up and then printed out, we were asked for $20 each. This didn't seem normal. It seemed that we were being charged for a form filling service, so we left the white building and after a smirk from the customs official, filled out the forms ourselves, took them to the red building and 5 minutes later, all was done and we were on our way. We had almost fallen for one of their scams, but foiled it at the final hurdle!
It was now around 5pm (or so we thought) and we still had 300km to ride to our evening stop at Atyrau. Another late arrival.
As we cleared the Kazakhstan side of the border, we rode all of 1km before being stopped by a policeman who wanted to see our paperwork. Obviously, the fact that we'd just been through scrutinisation at the border should have indicated that all was in order and that we were legitimate, but still, he wanted to take some details for his little notebook. More delays and we were finally on our way.
The roads were not as good as the Ukraine and Russia, but good enough. A few small pot holes, but at least we didn't get stopped again.
A couple of hours later, we rolled into Atyrau, our first Kazakhstan city. It was surprisingly clean and the locals that we asked for directions were all friendly.
It was quite an effort just to find a hotel, of which there only seemed to be a small handful, all of which were considerably more expensive than we'd expected. Kazakhstan is the third world, so paying over $50 certainly would not have been expected. Paying almost $100 seemed outrageous, but we were soon to find out that (apart from petrol at 40p a litre), it is not a cheap country to visit at all!