May 14th - Welcome to Kazakhstan 

Its time for us to say byebye to China. We reached the border (100km away from Yili) around lunch time...Thinking they will be busy eating their lunch and not give us too much trouble regarding the bikes and documents...

Chinese border was easy, we spoke Chinese, told us the trip story and we got easily our Exit stamp...Welcome to China again said the police man :)

Then we have to ride trough a corridor for 7km...A unique way until the Kazack border. 5 min later, here we go...Not the same story, old buildings, we have no idea where to go and what to do...So the Kazack welcome us and we start the ling and boring procedure, they checked the bikes at least 3 times, we had to line for 1 hours to get our entry cards. Then do the same things for the bikes...I would like to say i missed the quick and clear Chinese procedure.

I forgot to mention, Nicolas`s visa is expiring on the 15th, so it was time for us to leave China...and we made it in 31 days from Shanghai to the border.

After 3 hours, we ride thought KAZACK lands, not much difference so far...But as soon as we reached our destination the Charyn Canyon, waouuuuu things are becoming more serious. Do you remember the beautiful window desktop picture. ITS HERE !

We heard a lot about the Charyn Canyon and his 80km long on the Sharyn river, so we decided to do our camping spot there for the night. Beautiful rock formation, so we ride until the end and park the bikes....Time to reach the river and set up our tent there...

By chance, we met a group of 30 young Kazaks having a BBQ. So they kindly invite us for some meal and drinks. They are architects students in Almaty...Most of them speaks english so, no problem for communication. They left around midnight and we went back to our camp.

The night was good and we slept pretty well. We even found some small cottage and we squatted their entrance for the night.

Kazakhstan is like in the 80`s...Old VW Golf, Mercedes, and of course the famous Lada...People here speaks Russian, Kazak and some English...

Kazakhstan was the last of the soviet republic to declare independance.

So the language barrier starts here for us. Fortunately Nicolas has still some base from his Czech expatriation few years ago, so we manage to communicate a little bit. For me i am close to zero words so far...

The petrol station are also rare and all pump imported from Germany. We are still getting some SP95 i the best case. in the worst it will be SP 80 but not sure our bikes will accept.

Food, its getting close to what we used to eat in Europe, some meat, vegetable, milk, yogurt, fruit ...No more Chinese food and noddle breakfast...Convenient store, you can find Mars, bounty, Twix...hehe