Well, what can we tell you 'bout Kazakhstan. Let's start with the positive things: people are really helpful and friendly, roads were in unexpected good conditions, camels are running around everywhere we like camels and if you reach the south of the country after driving 5 days to the kazakh steppe you will be freshly surprised about the amazing landscape which is covered by snowy mountains.
After a short recovery in a really nice resort, where we had a walk with huskies, we started our trip through the steppe of Kazakhstan. It's a perfect route if you are on a self-finding trip, 'cause the landscape isn't changing for days and the highlights of the days are some camels, cows or horses, which cross the roads.
After more than km we reached the first little town aralsk. The town itself could not be less touristy, even if it tries really hard. It is a hole. A dump. A desolate, poor, almost forgotten, dusty, depressing dump. You can feel it everywhere. Specially when you have a walk on the ground of the aral lake. For some really long, shocking moments about half an hour, which felt like 10 hours we thought that we were stuck in this place for a longer time, 'cause it seemed to be that no gas station, was having diesel for us.
After the 7th try to get fuel we escaped from this town, back into the infinite width of the steppe. Relating to cans with soups or gulash we found dates of expiry between the years !!! The next day we had a pretty unexciting day, without any inciedences, but this changed quickly the following day, when we passed a burning truck, followed by a car wreck that had been crashed into a cow. Then we arrived the hotel which turned out to be a brothel, where the prostitutes passed the hotel corridor with their high heels every 10 minutes the whole night.
After we complained about the situation at 2 o'clock in the night, we were upgraded to the superior suite including free food and drinks. Additionally we got our money back but in return we had to promise, that we wouldn't give them a bad evaluation. After this experience we were looking forward to the quite, monotonous environment of the kazakh steppe. To get some sleep after the last sleepless night we booked a nice "quite" room near the centre of almaty, but our nice quite hotel turned out be a karoke hotel, where people sang strange songs that could be written by scooter or an other electronic band.
