Almaty and the psychotic drivers

Since the second that we entered Kazakhstan, the driving has been 'colourful'! Many of the other cars and trucks are excited to see foreign travellers and frequently honk their horns, flash their lights at us and pull up alongside us to ask 'at que da' (pronounced 'a koo der'), which means 'where are you from'. Once they have welcomed us to their country, the drivers then like to aim their cars at us and then overtake where there is nowhere to go and try to barge us off of the road! It certainly keeps one alert! We hear 'at que da' so frequently, that we've started an 'at que da count', where we count how many times a day we get asked the question. The record is somewhere around the 60 mark.
When we finally rode into Almaty in the south-east of the country, over 8500 miles since leaving London, driving took on a whole new level. The cars were zig zagging everywhere, trying get past eachother. Indicators are merely a decorative item for the cars and speed limits don't exist. They race off of the traffic lights before cars coming the other way have even cleared the path and are impatient beyond belief. One local traffic 'rule' seems to be that if you are coming onto a roundabout, you have right of way over those already on it (the opposite of in most other countries), and very disconcerting to do! To make things more interesting, this only seems to be the rule sometimes.
When we finally found the centre of Almaty, we started to search for a hotel. There weren't too many around, and those that we found were either ridiculously priced (even by European standards) or fully booked. Eventually, we settled into an allegedly 4* hotel that did have space until we moved across to a friend's house a few days later. We could finally relax, sort out the various problems that our bikes had sustained over the tough Kazakhstan roads as well as to give them a good checking over, given that we'd already completed over a year's worth of mileage in the space of just 6 weeks...
Almaty is a tricky city to navigate. There seems to be little in the way of a central square, and it isn't set up for tourism at all (which is fine, but not what you'd expect from such a major city). Most of the sights seem to be around it, with the Charyn Canyon to the East and the Great Almaty Lake and mountains at Medew to the South, which are impressively stunning.
Right now, we're in the hands of the Kazakhstan postal service whilst we wait on the delivery of a new shock absorber from London for Jim's bike and then we'll continue our journey through Kyrgyzstan to China.