The return of the warmth

After a bit of a more recreative night we wanted to try to cycle the last 130 km to Balkhash all at once to arrive there a day earlier than planned. Unfortunately, the wind wouldn’t let us do so as it had rotated and was now against us. 17 km/h was the most we could achieve that day (in comparison: the day before we hardly fell beneath 20 km/h at all). For this reason we decided to just try to cycle as far as possible in order to arrive in Balkhash early the next day.

ehm, but there hasn’t been anything the last 70 km either?!?

It was really annoying to proceed so slowly… Furthermore, the whole day we saw no shop, no gas station, no real cafezi. There was only a very small cafezi where we could buy some ice tea and coke and the owner could take a photo of us. 😉
Soon after we were stopped by a family who also wanted to take a picture of us. In return they gave us a little box of sweets.

thanks for the chocolate!

Arount 30 km before Balkhash we decided to find a place for our tent. When we thought to have found one there was a creepy collection of animals’ skulls and other bones nearby.

one of the skulls…

the whole thing

So we searched for another place and found a perfect one where we could also shower (during the day it finally got warmer again) and afterwards have a nice dinner.

nearly romantic 😉

Relaxed and in a good mood we headed towards Balkhash. Although we only had 30 km to cycle the strong head and side wind made it really hard for us to proceed. Nearly everytime a truck took us over we went astry from the road. At one of the first cafezis in town we had our second breakfast / lunch. Then we received 1.000 tenge as a gift from other guests and again photos were taken. Funny enough, those guests were just coming from Bishkek where we are heading to, and they were going to Astana, where we were coming from. 😀 “Kak Astana?”, they asked us and we just said “Wooow!”.

the first time that Alexandra wasn’t the tallest 😉

Balkhash itself was a bit of a disappointment for us. As there is a big and sometimes even beautiful lake we thought that there would be some tourism and therefore some according infrastructure. But no, there are only about four hotels, hardly any restaurants/bars and nothing else to see. After we had visited each and every hotel we decided to take the cheapest one and to stay there for two nights. After that we will start our final spurt in Kazakhstan: the last 600 km are waiting on us and we still have ten days left for that – should be enough, hopefully. 😉