People here are just damn nice!

It's our penultimate day in the Stan of Kazakh today. Leaving a country always leads to over-indulgant bouts of reflection and scrutiny and this is no different. I think things would have been hopeless here given the lack of Russki spoken by Mart-o and yours truly but peoples' insistance on persevering in understanding our often bizarre notions of holidaying has made this leg of the trip one of the easiest. Example: On the train from Almaty to Semey, we got chatting to Zarina, fellow passenger in our carriage, who lived in Ust Kamenogorsk (the next city along from Semey) she was having a great time practicing her school girl English and we were happy to talk with someone who didn't think we were mental for being in a country where we didn't know a soul. We swapped numbers and with big kisses and hugs all round said we must contact her if we came to Ust Kamenogorsk. Just as well! Marty and I did indeed end up coming to Ust and turned up at a hotel we thought would be in our budget to find out it was 10 times the price. A bit stuck with no other options, we sent our new friend a text message and she immediately got the ball rolling, had her English spekaing daughter give us a ring back with directions to a great hotel on the edge of town and what we needed to do to get there. When you're in a new town, with no idea of the geography, you don't speak the language and you're carting round a couple of unweildy rucksacks that wipe out half the passengers whenever you're on a bus, Zarina's help was nothing short of miraculous for Marty and I. The next day as Marty and I were about to head into the city for a mooch about, Zarina's smiling face peeped around the door with her husband and daughter and ushered us into a waiting car to give us a tour of their city. And then they took us out for a slap up lunch of local treats, plied beer on us (we're now developing beer bellies) and gave us the opportunity to sit down and shoot the breeze for a while.

Like I say this is just one of the brilliant things that's happened to us since we've been here. With the Russian improving by the day, and the capacity for booze back up to an non-embarrasing level after the tee-totalism of India, we reckon we might be just about ready for Russia... Siberia here we come.