Today we (or at least I) felt the full weight of trying to cover the 1100km from Semey to Almaty in 4 days. Now our Australian and US readers may be surprised by this comment as 1100km would be an easy 2 day drive in either country, but in Kazakhstan, in our truck with the rough paved and unpaved roads today made it clear that our goal would be tiring and tedious. So for much of the day we bounced along, mostly on rough paved roads, at less than 50 km/h covering a little over 300km in almost 7 driving hours.

Throughout the day we saw a number of very distinctive cemeteries, composed of very elaborate brick and occassional mud-brick structures, sometimes with domes and sometimes with pyramid as tops. Throughout the day these seemed more numerous than villages and at times we thought there were more dead people in this land than living.

The countryside was broad grassland and gently rolling hills, a surprising number of smallish rivers, occasional small modest villages and occassionally a village had a nicely tree-lined main street.

Towards the end of the day we spotted a truck on the side of the road with two men working on the front lefthand wheel. Now in this land of rought roads and many old trucks such a sight would in and of itself not be worth a remark, but these guys were wearing bee-keepers protection over their heads!! We stopped to photograph this scene and noticed that a number of the trucks parked in this area were carrying large stacks of boxes that were infact bee-hives. We thought bee-RV. It was then that we recalled, having heard about but never seen, that in the US bees are transported to fruit growing areas to fertilize the plants. Over the coming few days we saw this phenomina a few times and it looked more like the trucks were carrying bees to good grazing areas rather than to areas that needed flowers pollinated.

Just up the road from the bees we came upon a pair of cyclists and could not resist stopping to chat. The couple turned out to be Adrian and Tyler, a young America couple on a cycling vacation through Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. We chatted for a while before moving on our separate ways.

We will be very keen to hear how they get on in Mongolia.

A little while later we found a track heading east and camped in the grass about 100m from the road.