Into Kyrgyzstan
Into Kyrgyzstan

Into Kyrgyzstan

Putin has just flown in to Kazakhstan, so it was time to leave. Up at 5, breakfast at 6, and in the bus at 7.

Took a pit stop at the local supermarket to buy things for lunch, then it was off to Charyn Canyon. The locals call it the mini Grand Canyon, which is somewhat of a stretch, but it looks very similar, and has been carved out by the river in the same fashion. 160km long, so its a decent attraction. Spent an hour walking down the steps to the canyon floor, and along for a couple of kms, then having lunch watching the vista.…

gregd999 Silk Road 2022
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Walking Tour of Almaty
Walking Tour of Almaty

Walking Tour of Almaty

Almaty is a very green city. Roughly translated it means ‘home of the apple trees’. Haven’t seen any apples, but there are a huge number of trees everywhere, and lots of parks. Wide boulevards, very attractive. Lots of walking and e-bike streets. They even erect bicycle repair poles, complete with a rack to hang your bike on, and spanners and allen keys to effect your repairs.

Unfortunately the city is surrounded by tall mountains in a bit of a basin, and with the number of cars choking the streets, the pollution is very bad, but its a lovely city to wander around in, so that’s what we did today – the only free day on the trip.…

gregd999 Silk Road 2022
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Almaty
Almaty

Almaty

OK, your first cultural lesson. Stan means ‘land’. There are seven ‘stans’. Just like we have Eng-land, Scot-land, Ice-land and so on, there is Kazakh-stan (land of the Kazakhs), Kyrgyz-stan (land of the Kyrgyzs) and so on. Seven of them actually. We’ll be going to four of them, bypassing Afghanistan and Pakistan because they are rather dangerous at the moment, and Turkmenistan because we felt like it.

The tour group consists of 13 – all from Australia. 4 couples and 5 singles. All of retirement age and, as you might expect of a group flying to Kazakhstan, all of them are very well traveled.…

gregd999 Silk Road 2022
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Borat Country
Borat Country

Borat Country

After what seemed to be a fairly long wait – almost 6 hours – we boarded our Singapore Airlines 787 to Delhi. Never seen so many young kids on a plane. It was more of a creche than a flight. Couple of screamers of course, and given that it was 3 in the morning and we’d been going for 24 hours, it didn’t help the disposition much.

Sat on the tarmac for almost an hour while they walked up and down the aisles yelling two names. Yep, two people checked in and lodged luggage, but never fronted, so eventually we sat there whilst they found and off loaded their baggage.…

gregd999 Silk Road 2022
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Off To The Stans
Off To The Stans

Off To The Stans

Pretty normal first day. Picked up in the wet by the Conn-X-ion shuttle bus, and taken down to Brisbane airport. Arrived around 11, and waited patiently in the queue for check-in to open. They couldn’t print the boarding passes for our last leg to Almaty, but the baggage got checked all the way through, which was a relief otherwise we’d have to get PCR tests to enter India to retrieve them.

Only three flights this afternoon from Brisbane international, so the terminal was pretty empty and quiet. Not as quiet as a few months ago, but still half the shops haven’t reopened.…

gregd999 Silk Road 2022
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3, 6, 9

Our last morning in Morocco. I’ve been told to make sure that before we leave I tell you that Casablanca buses are new, comfortable, and out of keeping with anything else in the city. So now you’ve been told.

Picked our way down the roads and excuses for footpaths to the station, had a coffee, and boarded the old train to the airport. Morocco at its best this morning. We boarded carriage 1, coz that what was printed on our tickets, but was shooed out by the conductor who shrugged his shoulders and said we should be in second class.

There was an almighty crush to get out of the carriage first when we arrived at the airport.…

gregd999 Portugal, Spain, Morocco 2022
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PCR Test Day (Mar 29)

Unfortunately we were woken at 2:00am by an elderly mother in Melbourne who decided to touch all kinds of buttons on her iPad one lunchtime as she munched away. Not once, you understand, but three times my phone rang in the middle of the night. ‘Don’t know what those button are all for’ we were told. ‘Did I ring you? Sorry, didn’t mean to’. Then the Imam starts at around 5:00am, so all in all …..

Resto Zayna

Today was the last day of our Iberian itinerary, and was designated as our PCR test day. We need a negative PCR result to be able to get into the USA tomorrow.…

gregd999 Portugal, Spain, Morocco 2022
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Casablanca (Mar 28)

Well, it’s not often that I say this, but really you can give Casablanca a big miss. Other people we’ve met have said the same thing, but we thought they might be exaggerating a bit. No they weren’t. 

The pollution irritates your throat. The cars are old and noisy. The buildings, so lovingly constructed by the French between the wars, are dirty and neglected. Fountains don’t work, like lots of people. There doesn’t even seem to be a nice centre to explore like other cities. 

Casablanca is a business and commercial centre of five million, with the rubbish, the noise and the pollution to match. …

gregd999 Portugal, Spain, Morocco 2022
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My Mosque Is Bigger Than Your Mosque (Mar 27)

Unlike Egypt where it is thought unseemly to build a pyramid bigger than your father’s, here in Morocco its definitely the done thing to build a bigger mosque than your dad’s.

The Old City

We walked up to the old city here in Casablanca for the start of our city free walking tour. We saw the relatively small mosque built by Sultan Youssef of Morocco who was king from 1912 to 1927 during the time the French ‘occupied’ Morocco (although this seems to have been at the king’s request to shore up his weak support and control his opponents). The mosque was built next to the old city walls in an effort to give the native moroccans a mosque of their own away from the french settlements and occupied areas, and to be fair there were only about 200,000 people in the city at the time.…

gregd999 Portugal, Spain, Morocco 2022
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Casablanca Here We Come (Mar 26)

Checked out and trudged down to the train station. 

Really, Morocco is one of the worst countries for pedestrians. If they have a bit of a footpath, it will suddenly narrow, then you’ll have a tree, a post and a hole all vying for the little bit that’s left, then you’ll come to where they have ‘borrowed’ the bricks from the footpath for some reason, then you’ll get to a curb with no ramp. All in all you end up carrying your suitcase a fair bit of the way.

Green men displayed at traffic lights don’t actually mean its safe to cross.…

gregd999 Portugal, Spain, Morocco 2022
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