Okay, is this really happening?

When we finally decided on our route to Australia, Kazakhstan was the first jewel. A vast undiscovered land with hidden treasures and camels!

I spent a while ‘discovering’ Kazakhstan, usually before work at 4.00 in the morning on days I couldn’t sleep, and eventually I found somewhere for us to stay for a week. A stunning spot by a beautiful lake, next to a small mountain, in a forest. I made my first tentative foray on booking.com and we all felt like the adventure had begun.

Everywhere was a long way from anywhere in Kazakhstan so we were going to spend two days on a train wherever we went so we might as well go to the most beautiful place we could find…and then one day in early September, we changed our minds.

I think it was the Georgian minibuses that did it for me…the ‘less is more, but none is a score’ approach to an easier life…and whilst our lake by a mountain did sound amazing, quite soon after our two day train journey would follow another three hour bus journey and another 26 hour train journey, and because our eventual destination, the sleepy backwater of Almaty, sounded charming, it might make sense just to cut out the beauty spot and go for a bit more rest.

No one in the family had anything to say on the matter, except yes, and so our very first anchor point fell away in a swift cancellation click.

Luckily we hadn’t been able to book any trains through Kazakhstan before we left England because we didn’t know where we would arrive into the country …would Russia actually let us in?! …and also because we couldn’t ever quite get the train booking website to work…even in Russia, when we finally knew where we were going to arrive in Kazakhstan we couldn’t fathom it. It turns out train booking is an art form AND a science!

After our first 42 train journey our charming  backwater turned out to be home to 2.1 million people and to be a bit of a thriving metropolis, another excellent misconception (…do I need to look at photos of these ‘towns’ before I arrive and discover they are in fact wide streeted, tree lined, highly functional cities?)

We had arrived in the home of the apple – Almaty.

We were pretty pleased that there wasn’t another long train journey lurking and after a slight hiccup with our first hostel (!!!) we began to settle into the wonderful Dostyk Assem Hostel.

By this point we were learning the valuable lesson that part of the planning process has to be ‘unplanning’ – that fabulously flexible ability to change your mind, go back to the mission statement, ‘why are we doing this?’ …’what matters the most here?’ …’whose idea was this anyway?!’ …and sometimes this needs to happen on a day by day basis.

My flexibility was tested to the limits in the 72 hours before we finally left for China… I booked, then amended and finally cancelled four different hotels, rearranged our first overnight train in China (I had to ring China for that one in the end) and I had to go to the bus station twice to try and change our tickets, because, Rosa and I got Covid!

By the evening of the first day we arrived in Almaty I was pretty ill. It seemed to infect every part of me and I was sick and had diarrhoea in addition to the headache, fevers and chills…not funny! Especially as we needed to be tip top ready for our attempt on the Chinese border…

One of the lateral flow tests we had brought with us in readiness for our ‘Chinese Health Passport’ (all travellers entering China have to complete one of these bits of beaurocratic joy) confirmed I had Covid and we went into as strict a quarantine as all living in a one roomed apartment would allow, to try and stop Theo and Rosa getting it…although Rosa was clearly getting a cold and felt a bit dizzy so it was probably too late for her.

I spent two days in bed …on the second day I attempted the hour long walk to the bus station to see if the mythical China bus tickets did exist after all, but I couldn’t make it. I was too ill too read or watch the rugby on the first day but I managed to watch the second half of England Argentina on the second day (Rugby World Cup for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about…)

We tried again the next day and with the help of a lovely Russian man, Timor, we made it to the bus station. We walked out clutching our precious prize, unbelievably the bus to China was running, every day at 8.00 as it turns out…our tickets were booked and we were going to China on Saturday. This bus that had stopped all through Covid, that no traveller could confirm would be starting again…and for sure China wasn’t accepting ‘we are hoping to catch the bus from Almaty’ on visa applications…had quietly and with minimal fuss – started up again.

Saturday was definitely long enough for me to get better and to no longer be infectious, and was exactly a month after we had left home. Tidy!

0n Thursday I was well enough, and Rosa not ill enough, for us to attempt to go to the Tien Shan mountains for a day out – the bus journey through the city was long but efficient, and the nature was worth it…the views of the mountains were spectacular. We took it slowly and meandered our way to somewhere beautiful and high enough to eat our picnic in peace and wonder…

By the time we came down we were tired but cheerful, we didn’t see a snow leopard but we did see a red squirrel up close which was almost the same!

We made it home around six and then Rosa fell hard. She was as ill as I had been when we first arrived – throwing up and in so much pain…the joy of her period arriving on the same day as Covid finally struck her down was so tough on her.

We looked after her and loved her up…researching food stuffs for vitamins and minerals (cashews for zinc was the most useful one after fruit for vitamin C), we got her honey and lemon for the streaming cold and I did her shiatsu points for period pain, and to our relief she fell asleep…

There was no way she was going to be well enough to go to China on Saturday. Travelling takes quite a toll on the body, even when you are feeling tip top,  and we did not want to give this to anyone else!

…there was nothing for it we were going to have to go to the bus station and see if it was possible to change the tickets.

The Sayran Bus Station is an hour across town and although we knew the bus routes now we didn’t want to leave Rosa for too long so I went by myself. We had decided we would buy new tickets if we had too but we would leave that decision for the next day if it wasn’t possible to change them. This would give us a chance to see how quickly Rosa was recovering and we didn’t want to buy new tickets more than once at £63 a time.

I was feeling a certain amount of anxiety when I reached the bus station, I knew we’d agreed to just let the tickets go, but £63 felt like a lot of money…and the deeper anxiety was that there wasn’t a bus on a Sunday!

The booth I needed was closed and one of the ticket officer women directed me there to wait…’she will be back soon’ was implied and I waited for fifteen minutes before going back to her with a hand gesture and a question on my face. Human beings are so good at communicating incredibly subtle things with no common language 🙂

She indicated she would come and help me and read my prepared iTranslate piece in Russian about us needing to change the tickets because my daughter was having bad menstral cramps …clearly iTranslate wasn’t up to the challenge of translating something that happens to half the population monthly, but she got the gist of ‘the next day’ and she nodded!

A simple nod and my mood lifted completely…it was going to cost us 10,000 Tenge but the original tickets had been 37,000 so that was bearable!

I went home via our little pancake place in the hope that Rosa could face food and went to tell the family the good news…

Rosa was in less pain and could eat, she wasn’t in great shape but she’d stop throwing up, and it was a relief for us all to know that we had the whole of the next day before we had to leave…but the ticking time bomb was Theo. So far he’d not shown any signs of getting ill but he was living in our little apartment with us and he could go down at any moment.

I tried not to be anxious, I tried not to ‘what if’ the hell out if everything but it wasn’t easy…at least we were able to keep our little apartment for two more days. We would make the decision about whether Rosa needed another day in the morning.

I tried to sleep but my dreams were full of admin problems at a school that was ‘doing things differently now!’ Moving on isn’t always smooth, or easy…

I knew as soon as Rosa woke up that she was not much better …and Theo looked a little misty in the eyes as well!

We agreed she would come to the shops with me and have a shower and we would see then but I was starting to panic…we had one possible day left before things got very (very!) complicated.

We had already realised we would have to cancel the hotel in Yining, the first town we arrived at in China, and go straight from the eight hour bus journey onto the sleeper train to Urumqi that night. If we needed to spend another day in Almaty we would have to try and delay that sleeper train by a day, cancel the hotel in Urumqi, spend the day wandering around the city with all our bags and then get on the sleeper train for two nights to Chengdu…in simple terms a day on a bus with three nights in a row on trains!

Rosa was making an effort when we went to buy pancakes but her eyes were streaming and when I did the little mama test on our way back to the hostel ‘shall we go back to the shop and get cat food for the kitten?’ I was greeted with a groan, only a really ill Rosa would say no to buying cat food!

My ‘what iffing’ was slightly useful at this point – I knew the order of what I needed to do. First email the lovely Vivi who had booked all our train tickets in China – was it possible to change the date this close to travelling? We had booked a hard sleeper for that first train because again we had no idea if we would actually make it across the Chinese border, and it was the cheaper option. I had a vague hope that that would make it easier to change as hard sleepers were probably less popular…?!

(Note: Chinese trains have four booking options – soft sleeper, four to a compartment with the bottom bunks being way better – hard sleeper, six bunks to an open area with bottom bunks being the only ones you can sit up in. Recliner seats, and finally standing only (utter grimness apparently!!)

We waited for an hour and when there was no return email we drew out the big guns. Time to ring China…normally that would be a simple move but Kazakhstan is one of the countries where any attempt to do anything outside Wi-Fi is either very expensive or not possible. I also felt bad ringing Vivi on a Saturday, maybe she wouldn’t answer if it wasn’t a working day.

She answered straight away, I have emailed her so often over the last few months, asking question after question and in some of our email exchanges we got quite chatty, so it was lovely to hear her voice. She understood what we needed straight away and had emailed me the changes within twenty minutes – our bottom bunks had gone we were up top, but we were on the train and no extra charge!

Time to go to the bus station. I walked the hour there, enjoying the gentle sunshine and saving the bus fare (only 40p but the equivalent of 4 pancakes 🙂 …I loved the walk, watching parents and grandparents playing with their children, wandering through the fruit and veg market, and noticing both the differences and sameness of everything! I even saw someone driving an exact copy of our 27 year old car (in much better condition than ours 🙂

As I got close to the bus station my previous days anxiety came back, maybe changing bus tickets twice wasn’t allowed, perhaps she’d done it as a favour yesterday, but not again…and this time I noticed I was feeling a bit embarrassed…’hello, me again!’

It was the same woman and she made a hand gesture that fitted perfectly with my slightly sheepish grin. I showed her my simplified Russian iTranslate ‘my daughter is still too ill to travel, can we change the tickets to tomorrow please.’ She didn’t sigh, but she nearly did, but 10,000 Tenge and a bit of a negotiation about one of the tickets later, we were done. She had wanted to give me someone else’s returned ticket, and I expect it would have been fine but I didn’t fancy going back to Rosa and saying ‘don’t worry love, you are Mr Zhang Li tomorrow and I know that’s not your passport number but the lady at the ticket office said it would be fine.’

My lovely ticket lady was glad to see the back of me, and I had already resolved that if Theo came down with it, or Rosa wasn’t better the next day we could buy new tickets…

The walk back was equally as lovely as the walk there…and every minute out of our room was a minute when I wasn’t secretly watching for signs of illness in both members of my family.

We fed the cats (we had five visiting us every day by this point) cooked our dinner, rice with veg and canned beans (we ate the same delicious meal every night for 9 days…bring on the noodles 🙂 …we watched a couple of episodes of Brooklyn 99 with ‘Baileys’ the cat who made us well, she had moved on from lying on me to lying on Rosa, and we went to bed.

Tomorrow we would know.

I woke early and listened for signs of illness…no-one was coughing or groaning in their sleep…a good sign.

Rosa looked a little better in the morning, but Theo had a certain rheumyness to his eyes…the same as the previous day, I felt his forehead and he confessed to feeling slightly warm (…noooooo!!)

Rosa and I went to get breakfast for us all and our cat family …and when we got back Theo was whistling, normal service had resumed after that cure all, tea!

I tried not to spend all day watching them, I tried to stay calm but when Theo and I went for a little walk we managed to have a row, I can’t quite remember the exact details but I do remember remaining very calm whilst Theo was totally unreasonable 🙂

…otherwise the day passed gently, we packed, we showered, we ate rice and beans and we went to bed. We would be waking up at 5.30 and finally, leaving for China.

On the Saturday morning I had woken up at six and gone to the bus stop to see how regularly the bus we needed to catch came and at what times (call me anal, call me a Virgo, both are true 🙂

My investigation revealed that they went every twenty minutes on a Saturday morning so they were bound to go the same time, or more regularly on a Monday…

Nope!

We didn’t see a single 126 the whole journey to the bus station, which involved quite a long walk, a revisit to the previous days row, two different buses, a bit of frosty silence, and then we were at the bus station looking for our little bus to China.

It turned out to be a big red bus which we all loved, I made friends with a man called Xiao Jun whose mum and dad were getting on our bus and going to Yining like us…was this really happening?! Were we actually going to China?

I remembered the stressful evening sat on our sofa at home with Alice (French Alice) trying to figure out how to book our flights from Almaty to Urumchi, flights we had to book in order to be able to apply for a Chinese visa at all. Swallowing hard at the £1,134 cost.

I remembered the family meeting where we decided we would definitely cancel the plane tickets when (if) we got our visas. We were up for trying somehow to get across the border – ‘maybe once we got to Almaty we’d find there was a bus after all’…I felt proud of our courage (…lead by Rosa as we so often are in the really tough decisions because I have to know she is on board!) …and a bit shocked that we were all up for something so bonkers…

I also remember how right it felt cancelling those plane tickets – the cancellation cost was annoying (£279 we will never see again) but we were giving it a go, heading off in the hope we’d make it somehow…and finally here we were, about to get on our big red bus to China!

Sometimes a bit of blind faith and naive courage is what’s needed.