Kazakhstan

Last night I boarded a sleeper bus. I had never heard of such a thing, Instead of seats, they have beds. Cool idea. They were long enough for me. They consisted of about 4 and a half feet of flat cushion, and then about a foot of rising head support at one end and about a foot of foot space at the other. Your feet are underneath the next guys head!!! (and the guy behind you has his feet under yours, of course).

 

I don't know why they bothered to call it a sleeper bus. Mine left Urumqi about three minutes early (20:57), pulled across the street, and sat there for thirty minutes while more people got on.  Then, we drove off into the gathering sunset, and after 40 minutes stopped for dinner or something. If you have ever taken a bus overnight like this,  you know the important thing is to memorize what bus you are on, so that when you wander off to use the bathroom during a break, you get back to the right bus. I forgot to do so. But I remembered quickly, ran back and memorized my bus. It was the goldish-gray one right next to the white one that was not parked right. Then I went to the bathroom—I won't tell you about that in the blog, but it was pretty interesting—and came back. My bus was gone. I ran to the next bus (there were twenty maybe at the stop), but that was not it. I ran back and forth a few times, and just before bursting into tears,  a nice Muslim man and his friend, grabbed me. Apparently I had memorized the wrong bus…..Mine was the white bus that had parked funny—my stuff was safe. I hugged my bus (or at least its windshield wiper) while my Muslim friends laughed.

 

I slept well enough, I guess. But  the ride was not easy. We had to cross a huge pass, and the road was under construction for more than three hours of the twelve hour ride. Then a few shared taxis, and three hours in border formalities, and I was out and heading to Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. The area reminds me of California. It is curious. Terrain kinda like our desert, but lush and green. Hard to explain.  Its is a desert, but watered by 15,000 foot mountains surrounding it.

 

One story of annoyingness: Trying to get out of China, one of the last border authorities notices my computer. And calls over a higher authority. The higher authority calls over an inspector, who has me start my computer to check if I have anything objectionable on it. He calls up all the picture files to see if I have anything from Urumqi with the soldiers (There were lots of soldiers in the streets.).  He went straight to the "MY PICTURES" directory and looked at my astrophotos…..Ok…..then he starts making comments about how slow my processor is. Did I need that from the 19 year old Chinese Border Authority?  Satisfied that I had no objectionable pictures (and for some reason not noticing that he had seen absolutely no pictures of China on the computer at all-- since he was looking at the My Pictures folder, and not the "Asia Pics" desktop folder where I had been storing them). He asked if I had a camera. I pulled out my Canon 20 D…..He says "Oh, an old one. But probably still good." Did I really need that? After checking that there were no Urumqi soldiers on the card, he figured I was a good guy, and told me so, and that I was free to go.

 

I did not bother to tell him that my Urumqi soldier pictures and movies (what few I had) were on the other camera in my pocket.