30/8 - Samarkand to ....Tashkent

The first hick-up of the trip plan … :-((

 

Preparing for the later border crossing, we were stupefied to recall that the visas for Kazakhstan were issued with an entry date no earlier than 1^st September 2009. Nevertheless, we hit the road to Tashkent confident that we could talk ourselves through :-))

…

Murphy's law… the day started with a speeding ticket, announced at 140 km/h though we never crossed the 100km/h in accordance with our GPS… Chit chat and it ended up with our very first participation to the yearly police gala dinner despite no invitation ticket received :-))).

 

Trustful in the Lonely Planet and the road signs, we crossed Tashkent asap to target the border crossing by 3pm… Big surprise when we discovered that the border was closed as it was in re-construction. The friendly local community explained us that the only available pass was around 80 km back where we came from at Chinaz :-(, where we turned off the engines at around 5 pm and 160 km detour further.

 

Immediately blocked at the first Uzbek gate, we though convinced them to allow our joker ("Baba" the "youngest") to go and convince the Kazak side… Despite heavy socializing with the Uzbek soldiers (men's talk ;-)), we had to wait for a phone call upon Baba's return… which as you can imagine, never came. Our strategy didn't work …. But Worse….!!!!

 

…

 

During this 2 hours waiting, we realized that the 30^th was the Constitution Day in Kazakhstan, falling on a Sunday, therefore pushed on to Monday (i.e. Kazak Embassy closed) as well as Tuesday the 1^st September is the National day in Uzbekistan… therefore, there we stood, forced to wait until 1^st September 7am before being able to restart the border crossing, annihilating all efforts and progress made previously. The pressure is back on us now as we will need to drive around 1,500 km to Astana before 3^rd September, 4pm, landing time of our families and Birthday of Baba…

 

Advice to travelers, never try to cross a border without the right visa around bank holidays.

 

To be continued…