They 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 they realised why there were so many mosquitoes around the previous night, they 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 barren landscape fairly boring at times.

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

Heading into Turkestan they 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 they went to Shimkent where another team had found a hotel and were really looking forward to an en-suite after 6 days in the steppe! That night they were with Alan & Bernie as usual and with team 30, ERF Massive, Tony, Andy & Darryn.

We found the 4* hotel and while booking in a man came to ask what we were doing there, he had seen the van with a Swiss website address but English number plates and as he was Swiss he was curious. Paul spoke to him in Swiss German and he was quite shocked to hear his own language so far from home. After chatting for a while we found out he was on his own travelling through this part of Asia, then onto Russia and up to the North Cape before returning home to Switzerland. He had to wait in Shimkent for a few days to get the relevant visas to continue.

They all had dinner together (which was very poor and all moaned about, not helped by Bernie ordering some non local wine which cost more than the meals together) and after carried on in the bar with more beer. Going to bed late that night they found the beds to be less than comfortable but being the worse for wear just went to sleep, it wasn't until the next morning they realised there wasn't a mattress on the beds just hard wood!!