The travel and visa agency my parents use already told us that there were no tourist visa for China anymore. This meant that we needed to replan our trip. We expected as much back in Holland and we bought a lonely planet for Central Asia to be able to come up with alternative destinations. Once we got final confirmation that it was impossible for us to enter china we spend a day divising a new travel schedule. This would take us to Shimkent, hiking in a neighboring nature reserve and, since Sierk never has seen a desert city, to Turkestan as well.
Next to Kazakhstan is the beautiful country of Kyrgyzstan. We were told that generally it is not a problem to get a visa for this country so we decided to include it in our revised schedule. We are on a tight schedule, since we both need to arrange our travel and travel it at the same time. This gives us little time to arrange a visa for Kyrgyzstan. To complicate matters further we decided to take the night train out of Almaty the 1st of May and that day is also a holiday here. We handed in our passports on Monday in the assumption that we would be able to get them back Tuesday evening, having one day spare before the 1st.
On Tuesday we learned that it would be beautiful weather and a good day to go up into the mountains. We woke up early in the morning and headed for the Ice Rink of Medeo and the mountains behind it. On our way to Medeo we were stopped by the police, who apparently took the good weather as a sign to check random cars at random locations. We were quite sure that my father, who was driving, didn’t break any law in the past few minutes so we were reasonably sure that it would be not too long before we could continue.
This was a mistake! My parents drive a company car and in Kazakhstan you need to have a permit to drive such a car. This permit is nothing else than a paper written out by your company which states (in Cyrillic writing) your name, the company name and that you are allowed to drive in the car, finished with some impressive stamp of the company. Obviously my parents have such a permit, less obviously, due to the Cyrillic only text, it had expired.
This was a grave error and my father was questioned by the police about this. While they were at it, they discovered that they couldn’t read both the driver license and the passport so he should have a translated version. There was something else as well but we never figured out what it was. The language barrier turned out to be rather high, which fortunately slowed matters this much that the police, annoyed by the lack of progress made let my father go under the pretext of him being 64. Not totally unreasonable since it would mean that he was just about one year from his expected death, life expectancy being around 65 here.
To prevent similar scenes at other police stops we decided to turn around and get the permit. Almaty is quite a big town and the traffic is thick and slow. So it took us the better part of the morning to get to the office collect the permit and get back up the mountain to Medeo. We ended up to be more than 4 hours later than planned and the weather was so lovely that we stayed in the mountains until it was too late to pick up our passports. We would pick those up the next day.
The next day was rainy and cold, the perfect day to do some shopping for our train trip and collect passports and get some plane tickets. We called Dima, the guy who runs the visa agency. He was not in the office, in fact the entire office was closed. Some calls later we learned he was in a very important meeting and would be available around 4 o’clock. We called at 4 and he wasn’t in there, we tried every half an hour. In the end we understood that they didn’t get the visa for Kyrgyzstan. They had been there several times over the past two days and every time they were told; not know, try again later. At the end they found out that the consul was gone and there were no visa written until the 6th of may. This means that once again we need to replan our trip, we need to come back to Almaty to try again to get a visa.
But those are worries for another day right now we are going to celebrate queensday with the dutch embassador.