May 13 China to Kazakhstan by train

These train journeys, overland travel, are what this trip is about.Twenty-four hours of mountains and desert wishing some of the time that we were out in a car there amongst it all. As with our train journey to Urumqi, it was a marvellous trip with fascinating and surprising scenery.

We could be in Australia - but for the snowcapped monoliths lowering in the not-so-distant background. We whizzed past sandy desert dunes with tussock grass and scrubby bushes just like the Australian outback complete with the ubiquitous fluttering kestrels/hawks hovering for food. Water catchments were dotted here and there, and occasionally, we clattered over long bridges spanning wide shallow mud-coloured rivers with stony beds - obviously they flood seasonally. They looked rather like our outback rivers but without the river gums. We learnt that some of the melt water from the mountains is piped underground to farming areas. Further west we saw horses grazing and small mobs of cattle being herded by men on horseback. As we got closer to Almaty, we passed cultivated fields - flowers, rice, onions, grape vines, fruit orchards, tree nurseries.

The unavoidable processes of getting there?! Well they are simply as they are and part of the deal - a lengthy process while the officials repeatedly check our sanity at paying for a 4-berth cabin, many flights of stairs that nearly ‘did us in’!  Much wracking of brains trying to fathom departure info (symbol-matching - it’s all in Chinese of course), a really long wait at the border where the entire 8-carriage train - that was carrying 4 passengers plus staff! had to disembark and go through Customs etc. Yes you read correctly - 4 passengers on the entire train! Then after six hours, we were on our way - this time there were escalators to carry us and our load back to the train and our little cabin. What luxury!!

We arrived in Almaty at 11:30pm! The station? Well it looked rather antique like something from a western movie - step down bloody big steps onto broken asphalt and walk ...... where to? We felt rather lost but this time there were a couple of people to follow - we hoped they were going where we were going.  Then a man with a trolley appeared out of the dark and took our luggage for us - lucky lucky, as we had to cross a couple of sets of train tracks, no such thing as platforms! we tipped him well - bless him.

After sleeping on hard train-seats, sinking into a soft bed once we got to the hotel was sheer bliss! In the end, it really is the journey that we love; the rest, the small inconveniences is just part of the deal. But there will come a time when ........

More mountains! We were at border control waiting waiting ....

Add a touch of red sand and we could have been in Australia

We crossed a number of broad rivers 

The mountains looming over the arid landscape were so beautiful

Sunset over the distamt mountains