We left the others in the morning tinkering with their cars making last minute repairs and headed off towards Shimkent. It was a lovely warm and cloudless morning, just after leaving the camp we realised why their were so many mosquitos around the previous night, we had camped in the middle of lots of paddy fields! Scott was slowly finding more and more bites as the journey went on.

Horses were sheltering from the sun in bus stops and cows were wandering aimlessly down the middle of the road. Roads were again dead straight and seemed to go on forever, making the journey in the barron landscape fairly boring at times.

Occasionly we came across brand new petrol stations from time to time, a sign someone was making money from the local oil wells. Filling up we was charged a massive 21.2 pence per liter, and topped up the van with diesel for a whopping £8.48p!!

Heading into Turkestan we stopped to take a look at the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi.  It was commissioned in the 14th century by Timur but was never finished due to his death, he had been the local ruler as part of  the Mongolian empire.

That evening we went to Shimkent where another team had found a hotel and were