China - the big push to Kashgar

We had heard that the crossing to China would be hard. It did not disappoint, even though we had arranged a guide. Without transferring through China to Pakistan, there was only one other way of stitching together the two halves of our trip. That involved Tajikistan and Afghanistan, which was certainly not on the preferred country list!
Other than my worries about whether or not the guide that we had arranged would turn up, I was concerned that we had no paperwork to present the official with confirming that we had a guide, and our meeting time of 11am was unclear (China runs on two times - Beijing and local, which vary by 2 hours).
After leaving Narin, we headed South for around 200km to the first Kyrgyzstan exit point. Our passports were stamped and then we set up camp for the night (yes, it was raining again!). We were within 60km of the Chinese border and there were no hotels. A local on horseback did invite us to stay in his yurt, but by this point, we had already set up our tent and it had rained hard. To get to the yurt, we would have to ride over grass with our road tyres and we risked getting our bikes bogged into the grass the next morning when we exited. We did not want anything to potentially make us miss our meeting the guide at the border to regrettably had to decline. Especially given that it was freezing cold that night (at an altitude of over 3000m), there was a constant rumble of trucks rolling past us and we only had nuts, raisins and a melon as food!
In the morning, we gathered our things and got back onto a worsening track towards the second Kyrgyzstan border, where our bikes were searched, we filled in some paperwork and got another exit stamp?! We received a stern warning that if China did not let us in, our visa would not permit us to return to Kyrgyzstan. We were really reliant on our guide turning up as otherwise, we would not be allowed into China.
Around 10km later, we were at the first Chinese checkpoint. It consisted of one man, who spoke no English. He took a look at our passport, asked us something that we didn't understand before eventually sending us on (without any stamp). Around 20km later, we got to another checkpoint, which was much more thorough and happily we were approached by our guide. Phew! He had turned up after all. Booking stuff over the phone and internet does work!
The guide helped out with translation, our bags were searched with particular interest that books did not contain any political material and then we were on our way...
...to the next checkpoint 80km away. We still had no stamp in our passports and yet we were around 90km into China! The next (and final) checkpoint was down a pretty badly surfaced gravel road with very little grip, so we crept along before finally reaching a pristine surface and the final checkpoint. After they returned from their siesta, the border control police searched our bags again, scrutinised the paperwork (some of which the guide had got wrong but duly corrected) and then an hour to 2 later, we were 'free' to be escorted to Kaskgar.
In China, we are only allowed to use our bikes under the escort of our guide. Given that there are no legible road signs at all and that speed limits change without any warning, it was probably a good job that we had a guide. Whilst it was pretty expensive to arrange, with hindsight, it took a fair bit of stress out of the whole procedure.

Into Kyrgyzstan

On our way from Almaty (Kazakhstan) to Kyrgyzstan, we followed the mountains to the border. The temperature was somewhere in the high 30's and we took frequent drink stops, although we had perhaps planned to run out of Tenge (the local currency) a little to finely, meaning that we had a light lunch!
The border crossing was a breeze, being simply stamped out and then stamped into Kyrgyzstan, although we were surprised to see an Aston Martin with British number plates being driven back from Japan to the UK at the border. Strangely enough, the border police took extensive interest in them and I am sure, extorted what they deemed to be appropriate 'fees' from them.
By the time we were on the road in Kyrgyzstan, it was around 4pm, so we headed East along Iszy Kul (Kul means lake) to find somewhere for the night. We cruised through what turned out to be the only town on the north of the lake and next thing we knew, it was getting dark, our headlights were as good as useless and there was not a hotel or guesthouse in sight. We plodded on, eventually rolling into a tiny village where a local offered us use of his living room (for a price!). It seems that the Kyrgyz love money just as much as the other Soviet countries. We were even charged 10 times the local price for admission to a national park area, which immediately put us on the 'rip off the tourist defensive'. Not a good start for our perception of the locals.
The house where we stayed for the night was pretty traditional with a mini farm in the back, an outside clay stove and a tin bowl for a sink. Needless to stay, we left early the next morning for a short 20km ride to Karakol, the main town for the region.
As we rode into Karakol, unusually we decided to stop at a tourist information office where miraculously, we stumbled across a friend of mine from London (also riding a motorcycle)! I had known that he would be in the area, but it was by pure chance that we were in the same place at the same time.
We checked into the same hotel as Matt and then proceeded to sit around chatting for a couple of hours before heading to the Lake for a quick dip with the locals.
For the next couple of days, we joined forces with Matt as we headed for the Chinese border. From this point on, it seems that we would meet more and more Westerners after having seen only half a dozen over the past 2 months. Among the Westerners that we met were 3 Swiss girls (Dyer, Corrina and Anne-Marie) who were cycling (pedal!) around Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. We camped with them one evening (when it poured with rain) and they put us to shame by being much more competent at setting up their tent and at coordinating dinner from the simplest of ingredients.
We pressed on to the South, where Jim and I would go to the Torugart Pass border with China and Matt would peel off and try his luck at another border. Foreigners are not allowed into China with their own vehicles without a serious amount of paperwork and permits, which only we had and the Torugart Pass is regarded as the among the trickiest of border points at which to cross.
On our way out to the border, a bee managed to get caught in my helmet, which ended up stinging me. Not a pleasant experience, but I managed to stop rather briskly before he could have another jab at me!
After a couple of hours of track roads with little grip and constant rain, we found Narin which was a decidedly dull stop off and quickly moved on towards the border with China. The scenery on the way was stunning but there was hardly anyone around except for some trucks carrying loads from China and herdsmen with their yurts.

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.

A big old place!

From Atyrau (in the West), we had around 9 days to get across to Almaty (in the East). This doesn't sound like a lot to cross most countries, but Kazakhstan is the 9th largest country in the world and the roads are not always that great. Combine it with the fact that in order to get from one side of it to the other, one has to zig zag up and down it and that there aren't too many towns to stop off at and all of a sudden, we had quite a number of big days to do to cover the 2200 miles to our destination.

On the first morning, we tried to visit the Caspian Sea, but the road was just so horrendous that it would have taken hours to cover the final 12km to the coast, so we headed back into town to prepare for the long road up to Aqtobe without any fuel stations or towns along the way. This was to be a 600km section, a large part of which was on unsurfaced and pot-holed roads. Our bikes have a fuel range of 450km, so we each bought jerry cans to carry extra fuel and large bottles of water to keep us hydrated.

The road to Aqtobe did not disappoint in terms of being unsurfaced! The pot-holes were massive and required us to zig-zag around them constantly until it got to the point where there was just no road at all, so we headed for the parallel sand roads that the cars and trucks took. Riding on sand isn't easy, so we were slowed right down to just 40km/h. Every 70km or so, there were roadside café/diners, so we still managed to eat well enough and get cold drinks every couple of hours.
Around halfway, we stopped for the evening near to a café in the middle of nowhere and camped. Within seconds of setting up camp, some locals had tracked us down and started looking around, pointing and asking questions (which we did not understand). They were out collecting animal dung to burn on fires and half an hour later, their brother turned up on a motorcycle with a side car to pick them up.
In the morning, after a relatively comfortable night's camp, we went to the café for breakfast and then headed on our way for another long, slow day. Riding off-road is very tiring, but there are no choices but to just continue on. Turning back only presents more bad roads, but eventually we got to Aqtobe, both exhausted, but glad to have seen the back of dirt roads for a while... ...or so we thought.
After the gruelling ride up to Aqtobe, we spent 2 nights there to refresh ourselves as, as far as we were concerned, we had a straight with 4-5 nights' stop offs for our run down to Almaty. Aqtobe was another expensive place to visit, but when you get into town late, it's getting dark and you're tired, it's easier just to give in and pay rather than hunt around for accommodation for hours on end.
So, well rested, we began our cruise down to Almaty, with the first day being a 600km ride down to Aral. By 11am, we had completed 300km and looked forward to arriving in Aral at 2pm, checking into a hotel, looking around...
...but no! Suddenly, the perfectly surfaced road, where we had been averaging over 100km/h ended! It did not become pot-holed like, but just turned to gravel, bumps and nothing. It was also a likely sign that there would not be fuel for some time, and, as we had not expected this, we were not carrying any extra. Some 150km and 4 hours later, it was still a very poorly surfaced track (the word road here would be inappropriate), there had been no towns to pick up food or cold drinks, the fuel reserve light had been on for over 100km and there were hardly any other cars/trucks in sight. Hmmm.
At this point, I went over a big bump as I was too tired to avoid it and two of the bolts on my rear sub-frame (basically, what holds the seat on!), sheared, and the seat slowly collapsed onto the rear wheel. I was only going 30km/h at the time, so ground to a halt to gather my thoughts. Jim, who was riding up ahead of me, came back to give me a hand and we had replaced the bolts with new, super strong ones within around half an hour and were back on the road.
Eventually, we stumbled across a farm, where we hoped that they may have had some fuel, but no such luck. But they did tell us that there was a fuel station 25km down the road. We rode, being as gentle as we could on the accelerator. Our odometers were reading 269 miles when we finally got there. As we'd been riding quite quickly on the silky smooth road earlier in the day, we hadn't expected to get more than 280 miles from a tank, so a refill was most welcome. The fuel station involved a man woken from his Sunday afternoon nap siphoning the log grade petrol out of a barrel into a jerry can which we then poured into our bikes. The cost was more than double anything else that we had paid in Kazakhstan, but at least we were back on the road. The bumpy road! The road kept catching us out. Just as we thought that it was surfaced again, the potholes returned, then went away and then back again.
Finally, after a further 150km of bumps, we hobbled into Aral at 9pm. The hotel was horrendous and overpriced. It was so bad that we didn't even go into the bathroom for fear of coming out dirtier than when we went in! Dinner was underwhelming, so we went to bed hungry and grumpy.
An early start saw us out of the hotel before the bugs could wake up and, today, the road was a fair bit better than the day before, although there were fairly frequent interludes of pot-holes. Jim realized that the shock absorber for the rear of his bike had gone and was feeling all of the bumps. Meanwhile, I noticed that one of the 4 sub-frame bolts had fallen out of my bike and another was loose! I had no spare, so made a temporary fix to the one that had fallen out and began a regular but tiresome and necessary routine of avoiding bumps and stopping every 50 miles to tighten the loose bolt. It was a rather uncomfortable feeling that out of 4 bolts, having 2 replacement ones, one missing and the other loose, but it worked out OK (and was more permanently fixed at the next big town).
At around half distance, we came across a roadside café, where we were delighted to find cold drinks and surprised to be greeted in English by a group of 3 French, American and British people being shown around by a young Kazakh girl. These were the first westerners that we had seen in a good couple of weeks. We exchanged stories and off they went, whilst we caught our breath from the tiring (but not yet finished) day.
Then, 10 minutes later, along come a German couple who were overlanding in a Toyota 4x4! They had travelled around Central Asia over the past 18 months and were almost home. We chatted with them for an hour or so, fascinated by their adventures and picking up plenty of recommendations along the way. Finally, we got back on the road(!), in, what must have been around 45 degree heat and we were back to dodging pot-holes and tightening my bolts every couple of miles.
Three to four days later, after some unremarkable towns (one of which whenever we told people that we were tourists, they looked at us surprised that tourists came to their town!), we were within sight of Almaty. The roads got better and better, as we skirted around Kyrgyzstan, through stunning mountain roads and into the city where psychotic Kazakh drivers take lunacy to a new level.