Steve's Cycling Blog

My Thai dinner was superb – vegetable spring rolls and a red duck curry – flavours which are so common in our everyday diet at home but which I haven’t had for two months now. Mind you it worked out at just over $30 USD so it should have been! Even at that rate I have no idea how the restaurant survives since other than myself there was only one other family of five people dining in the entire time I was there.

This morning started off slowly with breakfast, bike maintenance and a tragedy

Blown front left – what’s a kiwi to do without his jandles…?

Which lead to Michael and I heading down to the market for a new pair of jandles for me, some glue to make a repair on Ruth’s bike and a hunt for someone with a sewing machine to fix my sleeping bag bag

Getting my sleeping bag bag fixed – total cost $1.50

From there we took a trip up the cable car to admire the view of the city – unfortunately the clouds and the haze weren’t really co-operating, so we couldn’t see terribly much. We also did our ‘Kazakhstan’ flag photo – sadly the person we asked to take the photo didn’t do a terribly good job.

Michael, myself, kiwi flag, the finger of our photographer, and Almaty in the background)

Back down into the town and Michael headed back to the hotel while I continued wandering (photos below).

I’d managed to find some postcards (having said yesterday that they didn’t exist) so spent some time back at the hotel writing those and had something that I wanted to post to New Zealand (keep an eye on your mailbox Anna) so needed to find the post office as well. I managed to get stamps for the postcards no problem, but sending my other package was more of a challenge – I’d not been able to find an envelope so had wrapped it in a plastic bag and taped it all up, but once at the post office they needed to inspect the contents, they also had to go into a ‘special’ Kazakh-post envelope (so much for all the looking for a large envelope).

The problem with the ‘special’ envelope was that all the instructions were in Kazakh (of course) and nobody at the post office spoke English (understandably), so I had to make a trip back to the hotel to get some help from the reception staff there with translations. With everything filled in it was back to the post office (with my passport, which they needed to see), and this time I was successful! The irony of all this is that I’d had a very similar experience in Turkey trying to send something to mum only a couple of months ago, so should have been able to avoid some of the back-and-forth 😉

By now it was dinner time and I’d spotted a restaurant called Entrecote which had ‘duck breast’ on the menu earlier in the day so that was my destination. I wasn’t disappointed!

Ducky goodness for dinner!

Again the meal was fantastic, and the service great, but then I’ve paid (almost) western prices so one would expect it to be – while the rest of Kazakhstan has been really cheap, Almaty is comparatively very expensive – we’re getting western-style services and facilities but paying western prices which makes me think that for the ‘average’ Kazakh person Almaty must be unachievably expensive as a place to visit.

Calling these two days ‘rest days’ is something of an oxymoron – I reckon I’ve walked about 25km each day and am about as tired as if I’d been riding every day – perhaps ‘non-riding days’ would be a more accurate name!

Back to the hotel, bags packed, and into bed somewhat later than ideal by the time all was said and done.

Riding data

No riding today

View from my tent

Actually still up after dark!