Leaving Samarkand for Almaty, after only a two day break was really, really hard, especially leaving the fabulous company we met at our hotel (Daniel and his girlfriend Suzi, Paul, and a French trio, Arthur, Sophie and Ann Helen), plus the stunning city architecture and of course the glorious weather.
Because of car troubles with Moo Moo's piston rings in Kiev, we knew we needed to go into the centre of Almaty before heading North through Kazakhstan to Semey and onto the Russian border, so we headed straight for the Russian Embassy at 4pm to try and get some Russian visa extensions done, otherwise we would probably find ourselves stuck at the border unable to get into Russia again.
Bad idea. Tucked round to the side of the main Embassy building was a sort of make shift bus shelter with a bench and loads of people waiting to get into the consulate section. Luckily we bumped into an American who spoken excellent Kazakh and had been living in Almaty for about 8 months. We also met Fiona, trying to get a visa to take part in the Moscow Marathon and two guys, one German the other Swedish, who made our trip feel positively tame, as they travelled across Europe, Asia and onto China using local transport. Serious stuff.
Rob, the American guy said that this was his fourth or fith attempt at getting his transit visa over a 3 week period, mainly because the Embassy only managed to process 2 or 3 visas a day, which vacariously seemed to run on some days from 9 - 1 and on other days 3 - 7. So not that encouraging. But at least we had had a good chat by the time we all left to go back to our hotels at just after 7pm that night and discovered that they had just changed the rules (again) so that visas for foreign nationals would only be done on Tuesday mornings !!!!
Needless to say, we were outside the Russian Embassy at just after 8 am the next day.
D.
And this one, of the Russian Orthodox Church, was taken whilst we were awaiting the outcome of our Russian visa dilema.
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