I completely forgot to mention in my last article (well Ellen forbade me from writing about it until we were out of the country, which we're still not, ha!) an amusing incident at the border.
We left our coach to go through Chinese customs, and for somewhere in the middle of absolutely bugger-all we were amused to find the station reflecting the teeming chaos of our bus with huge crowds of Kazakh traders being forced into some kind of order by men with guns. This was our queue t do our now-perfect 'harmless yet stupid foreigner' act by walking along-side the aisles, ducking under the barrier, and standing gormlessly between the passport booth and the end of a queue. On plunking our documents down in front of a guard we then proceeded to understand absolutely nothing until we were processed and sent through. This is not the amusing bit, it is only the warm up, However it did prompt me to wonder if this was arrogant behaviour, or fair play: certainly every single other person there would press home any advantage they had in order to get through painlessly, it just so happened that my advantage of being foreign, harmless and thick trumped there's. My chess-playing instincts tell me that yes, its certainly unfair that I have an advantage but given that I do it would be irredeemably stupid not to use it.
Moving on through we got to no-man's land where in one reality, the one we should have been in, we waited for our bus to come through and boarded it for the 3 km journey to the Kazakh entry point, and left on foot with all our bags to go through immigration. Unfortunately we were not in that reality: in ours we hopped on the first mini-van leaving all our stuff behind on the coach, got to the Kazakh border ahead of practically everyone, breezed through immigration and spent 3 hours in a relatively empty coach-park scratching our heads wondering where everyone had got to as it slowly dawned on us that maybe, just maybe, we had made a little mistake. This was confirmed when we saw our unseasonally grumpy driver bustling towards us gesticulating something about backpacks. Ah. We were frogmarched back to the coach by him who, understandably, had no intention of driving our stuff through himself (this is not after all an area where all traders behave themselves all the time), given our bags and told to go back through Kazakh customs. This seemed fair enough, apart from the fact we now had our entry stamp but we were sure that would not be a sticking point; fair enough that is until we saw the crowds which by now had reached unbelievable proportions and which spelled another 3 hours of waiting to go through.
'Bugger' was the only coherent thought I had at the time, but luckily I spotted a couple of stern looking soldiers striding purposefully through the barrier on their way to the other side. 'Quick' I muttered to Ellen and tucked in behind the marching boys, smiling reassuringly at any official who cared to glance our way and nodding 'I'm with them'. And so it was that with the utmost cheek we stole into Kazakhstan through the mother of all crowds in approximately 30 seconds without being processed, only realising when we got to the other side how mind-bogglingly stupid we had been and giggling uncontrollably at having got away with it this time. I don't think we'll try the same stunt at the Iranian border though, eh?
