Woke up late and had what promised to be my last shower for about a week. I went down to the hotel-front cafe and had an (almost) full English breakfast while writing up the previous few days' adventures. Having my hotel room until exactly 1530h (you pay for the full 24 hours), I had time to head to the internet cafe for a few hours to play around with the blog, catch up on world news, and to get my things moving on the slow boat (literally) to Perth, Australia.
Even though I was only 18km away from the border, I wasn't in any rush to cross the frontier because I couldn't enter Kyrgyzstan until after midnight when my visa period started. To make things more interesting, my Kazakhstan visa also expired at midnight, meaning that I had to cross over the border at exactly midnight to comply with most internal laws. (I had asked the Kazakh Embassy for a 31-day visa so as to have a day of visa overlap, but they saw it fit to only give me a 30-day visa.) Even more exciting was my lack of knowledge whether the border was a 24-hour crossing, which would have foiled my poorly crafted transit plans.
I waited at the cafe until ~1800h and went back to the internet cafe for a couple of hours to spend my last few Tenge. (I also found a 50 Tenge coin, which enable me to indulge in one last Turkish Doner before heading out of town.) 
I rode the last 18km to the border arriving at 2100h and had the opportunity to sit roadside at the (24-hour!) border for a few hours. Around 2315h I decided to start the procedure of stepping across the border (the entry into Kazakhstan had taken about 45 minutes including out-waiting the bribe-demanding guards). The Kazakh crossing took only about 8 minutes and I was out of the border station and heading the last 50m toward Kyrgyzstan. I actually thought i had about ~200m and was taking my time; however, I crossed into the new country earlier than expected and was immediately surrounded by border guards interested on what the hell a foreigner was doing on a bicycle at the border near midnight.
It took only a few minutes for them to realize that my visa hadn't started yet, so I was detained for questioning' for 38 minutes. To be fair, by 'detained' I mean 'given a comfortable chair and delicious tea'. The 'questioning' involved such penetrating queries as: "Canada is far, yes?', and, perhaps my favorite one from a junior immigration officer: 'How can my family and I immigrate to Canada?'. At exactly midnight, the Major of the Border Guard Service stepped out and stamped my passport and told me that I was free to go. Being quite hungry by this point and having eyed a nearby cafe for the last half our, I went and grabbed a delicious midnight pilmeny (dumpling) in broth snack. The owner asked where I planned to stay that evening, and, on horrified that I was going to camp out in the wilds of Kyrgyzstan, offered me a place to stay on the front porch (with what turned out to be the entire extended family). Fell asleep to the sounds of large transport trailer border traffic.
No comments:
Post a Comment