Ticket to Ride

Rosa was really poorly when we woke up the next day. She had the symptoms of a heavy cold and a slightly tight chest…We dosed her up with paracetamol and honey and lemon, and then opened the door so Bailey’s could come in.

Bailey’s was the cat that had spent so much time with us when we had Covid back in September, and sure enough by mid-morning she was back lying on Rosa’s tummy and doing a fabulous job of being a purring hot water bottle.

Theo and I went to the local market and bought lots of fresh fruit and vegetables… and some cat biscuits.

Back at the hotel we put the kettle on.

The time had come, this was it, ‘the last big planning session’, by this evening we would know our route home.

Planning on this scale is a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle…all the pieces have got to fit and until they do the picture looks a bit rubbish!

We are all pretty good at planning now, if we reached a dead end on one part of the route, we switched track and tried something else. We were much less ‘OMG why isn’t this working?!’ and a bit more ‘OMG, there has to be a solution?!’ (…definite progress : )

We already had all our travel booked through to Tbilisi in Georgia. A two day train across Kazakhstan from Almaty to Atyrau, a ten hour wait at Atyrau train station and then a twelve hour overnight train to Astrakhan in Russia. We weren’t sure what time we’d cross the Russian border but there was a fair chance we’d get some sleep.

We’d used Olga’s credit card to book that train, and because of the credit limit on her card we’d ended up booking a third class sleeper. We had no idea what to expect, but we’d booked bottom bunks so at least we knew we’d be lying down!

With only three days to get across Russia there was no option but to keep moving quickly with two long bus rides.

That last bus journey to Tbilisi was one of the worst in the entire trip for us on the way to Australia …I shuddered a little as I thought about it… must add Valium to the list of medical supplies if we ever do this again.

Back doing the jigsaw, there were lots of factors to consider. We were weighing up cost, safety, comfort and speed – just how quickly did we want to get home?

The thing I knew for certain was that we were not going from Tbilisi to Batumi on a minibus… Everything else was negotiable, even the scary bus journey from Hopa to Erzurum was not a flat no.

So Theo checked out trains from Tbilisi, Rosa (in the paracetamol window when she felt a bit more normal) looked up ways to get to Istanbul and I took on our route through Europe.

It took all day, with lots of rest breaks for Rosa, and allowing ourselves time to let the options sink in. We needed that time to see if we were making any big mistakes…or taking on more than we could handle.

Priority number 1 – getting that train from Tbilisi to Batumi must be possible surely? I knew there were trains when we came through in August we just hadn’t expected them to be so popular, we’d thought we’d  be able to walk into the station and buy a ticket…well this time we were ahead of the curve.

If we could avoid doing that journey in a minibus you could have all our ‘lost things’, Theo’s hat, the charging cable, my lucky border pants (when had they gone missing?!) and I’d throw in a jar of marmite as well.

…the bus journey from Hopa to Erzurum was pretty low down on the list of experiences I wanted to repeat as well. The memories of our seventy seater taking blind bends at speed on mountain roads may never leave me, and no, I didn’t need to do it again to remember, thank you for that helpful suggestion Theo.

Incredible to me that the three worst journeys of the whole trip had all been back to back and pretty early on in our trip, no surprise that they were all bus journeys – but I had expected a ferry or two to figure in that list somewhere.

Theo let us know that when (IF) the minibus made it down off the mountain pass between Russia and Georgia there was a train we could catch at 17.30. The bus was scheduled in at 16.30…what did we think?

‘Tempting fate’ was the majority verdict. Our last crossing out of Russia had taken much longer than expected, we needed to leave time for Theo to be interrogated.

‘When’s the next train Theo?’

After a few moments we heard muttering coming from the other side of the room…

‘What’s that Theo?’

‘I said, maybe they won’t interrogate me this time…’

Rosa and I smirked at each other…fat chance.

The next train was at 00.30 and took five hours, not a great time to see the stunning views described by that Tory MP who did loads of train journeys, and also not a great way to spend the night – not much chance of sleep.

We put it in the ‘maybe pile’ and Theo moved on to playing ‘Ticket to Ride Europe’ with me, our favourite board game, building train routes (…it’s a lot more fun than it sounds!)

Meanwhile Rosa had found a bus from Hopa to Istanbul and I was stuck in Vienna.

The bus journey she had found was twenty sweet hours long…boy, we hadn’t done an overnighter on a bus since ‘Stralia. We’d loved them then and I’m sure we’d love them still!

It was cheaper than the overnight train and it meant we didn’t have to take the horrible bus to Erzurum, plus it would save us a day – it went into the probable pile filed under ‘to be endured’.

I had the train from Bucharest to Budapest ready to book but it wasn’t possible to book a train from Istanbul to Bucharest until we arrived in Istanbul…we couldn’t base the rest of our European travel on a ‘hopefully there will be a train available.’

Rosa looked up buses.

Trains through the rest of Europe were all too expensive – we tried splitting the route in five or six different ways and it came back down to the same thing every time, we would have to go by bus.

It was decision time. Theo booked the train through Georgia and Rosa booked the bus from Hopa to Istanbul and another overnighter from Istanbul to Bucharest. I booked the train to Budapest, nearly home…

Rosa was feeling rough again and we all needed a break.

Theo and I put out some cat food and went for a walk. Rosa would have cat company before too long and we needed to think about how many nights in buses we could actually handle.

It’s strange realising that there’s a part of Almaty I know my way around now. I could show you where the little pancake shop was and tell you which days it was closed. I could show you how to use the buses and which lines went where…I even knew how much a loaf of bread should be without the ‘tourist tax’.

Are these useful skills for the rest of my life? Maybe not, but that ability to settle into any place you find yourself and figure out the basics feels great.

Finding ‘home’ quickly.

It was cool in Almaty, not cold exactly but we’d left t-shirt weather behind – we would be arriving home almost as pale and pink as we left…apart from Theo who tans at the drop of a hat : )

Time to stop wandering around looking at the beautiful mountains – we had work to do.

Back at it we tried with renewed vigour to find a train through Europe, a train that didn’t require a second mortgage. After another hour of routes through Prague, Brussels, Lille, Frankfurt and Aachen hadn’t worked out…we booked a bus.

Our last journey back into England would be the longest bus journey we’d done, an idea that would have had me in a tail spin before we left, and now? It was now simply the most sensible way to get home.

I booked the train from Budapest to Vienna and Rosa booked the bus to Victoria…

We’d done it.

England was in our sights – just little old Kazakhstan, Russia, Georgia, Turkey and the rest of Europe to get through and we’d be home : )

Rosa was still feeling rough on that last day in Kazakhstan – all she wanted to do was stay home with Bailey’s for company so Theo and I went back to the mountains and let her rest.

She wasn’t so ill that she needed us – and by this point in the journey I can tell you, we all liked our space!!

We knew the route, or thought we did. We ended up on a bus going a really random way through the city but we’d bought our tickets so we sat tight and watched where it went.

Exactly where we needed to go, thank you very much.

We got off the bus and after two minutes walk we saw our next bus turn the corner ahead of us. We could see where the bus was going to stop so we ran for it.

I was amazed at how strong my legs were – I could run way further than I had been able to do back home, mountain walking?!

We got on, and then my chest started to hurt. It was tight and I had slight pins and needles feelings in both arms…obviously I thought I was having a heart attack.

I gave myself a bit of a talking too… I had just run for the bus and Rosa maybe had Covid. This could be the result of one of those, or both even.

I sat quietly breathing gently and ate mints to calm the part of me saying goodbye to everyone I loved and thinking how bizarre it was to die on a bus in Kazakhstan…

My breathing got easier as the bus left the city and headed for the mountains, maybe I had a few more days left in me.

I told Theo what was going on when we arrived and he asked me if we should go back? Maybe, and the truth was I struggled from the second we got off the bus, any vertical was too much for me, what was going on?

I am not one to turn back from a challenge (clearly!) and so slowly and painfully we inched our way up the mountain path. We went the road way because we’d seen a red squirrel there last September, and amazingly she (or someone who looked a lot like her) was there again – only this time her coat was a sandy colour, just her ears and face the normal reddy brown.

Theo was worried, which was lovely actually, and showed me this wasn’t nothing. Neither of us knew what to do for the best though so we just kept going, stopping when my chest got too tight.

My best guess was a virus – hadn’t I been jogging up and down mountains just a few days ago? Most likely I had what Rosa did but it had gone to my chest.

The views at the top were spectacular and we were so pleased to have gone back to what had felt like our first walk in nature when we’d left the UK – only this time the mountains were covered in snow.

We stayed up there a while chatting about home, making plans for the summer and for our first few days back… and resting. Giving my body a chance to recover.

Going down was easier and as we reached the bottom another squirrel ran across our path…much closer and super cute, out came our ever present peanuts in their shells and Squirrel had a feast.

We met a lovely couple from Kazakhstan on the way back on the bus, she was a tailor and he was a translator – he had some interesting things to say about the Kazakh language but I was distracted, I was still feeling rough. The bus journey back took an hour and in the last twenty minutes the pins and needles came back.

My secret fear, am I the only one who has those by the way!? The slightly crazy ones? Anyway, my ‘don’t tell anyone’ panic was that after my ‘high cholesterol’ diagnosis in Thailand, maybe a bit of peanut butter fat had broken off of one of my artery walls and was partially blocking one of my arteries …not a completely implausible theory if you know absolutely nothing about how cholesterol works – and I didn’t!

Tomorrow we would be spending two days on a train to the Kazakh/Russian border – ten hours on a station platform and then twelve hours on a train into Russia, where our health insurance didn’t work.

I thought about how much anxiety I’d feel if these pains carried on, what would I be putting us all through if there actually was something wrong? …so I texted the guest house and asked for help. I explained my symptoms and asking what was the best thing to do, should I go to hospital, was there a doctor I could see?

It was incredible how well I was looked after.

We got back to the hotel and within ten minutes a paramedic was there with all the kit he needed to do a full ECG – the equipment he had was old fashioned but it worked perfectly well and he charged me nothing for the care and reassurance.

There was nothing wrong with my heart.

The relief was worth the fuss and hastle factor, we could get on that train tomorrow with a fair degree of certainty I wasn’t going to keel over somewhere in the deserts of Kazakhstan.

A teeny tiny voice asked the meanest question of all…’is this why they don’t let 55 year olds on the deadliest plank walk?’ Was this my ‘everything happens for a reason’ moment?! When they’d first opened the plank walk had it been littered with dead 55 year olds?!

It’s funny where we draw the line around what’s fair. There will have been a reason for selecting ‘55’ as the age limit but the fact was they charged me full price to get in, well that wasn’t okay – if I’m young enough to work in whatever stressful bloody job I’m having to do to pay for this, then let me at it!

(‘Still haven’t quite let that one go’ I thought…)

It wasn’t  an early start the next day but we wanted to be at the station by eleven …mercifully Rosa was feeling a little better and I hadn’t died in the night, so we stroked every cat we could get our hands on and set off for the station.

Our plan was to get a taxi but there weren’t any so when the 126 bus came along we got on, it would get us half way there.

We were in the heart of the city now surely we could get a taxi the rest of the way…

No.

We trudged the fifteen minutes to the next bus stop, Rosa not feeling great and me a bit tight in my chest. By this point we could see 11.00 was not going to be our arrival time. Buses through cities stop a lot and our train left at midday. By 11.09 we were fidgety so I got the train ticket out to check – maybe it left at 12.11 and we had a bit more time than we thought.

It left at 16.38.

None of us had thought to check the ticket again since we’d booked it three weeks ago. My memory had twelve o’clock? …but that’s when it arrived.

Interestingly we all felt relieved – we could go slowly and relax, ‘stop again and pick a few more people up Mr Bus Driver why don’t you!’

Theo used the time to write an excellent little song called the ‘Seven ‘Stans’, and I used my time filming him singing it near Rosa as often as possible.

After that got boring we wandered around inside and outside the train station, watched the people working on the train lines, admired the snow capped mountains and the cool outfits of the luggage scanning women.

We watched a sweet police dog come round, sniffing away and sadly (…and luckily) it wasn’t interested in us at all, and then we played a game of slow tag on the escalator, which none of us won (or got arrested for).

Our train arrived early because Almaty was where it was leaving from, so we headed over to our platform and got settled in. We were the first to arrive and we had the compartment all to ourselves…for 12 whole hours. A quarter of the journey : )

The sun slipped away as we said goodbye to the mountains and Rosa and I said a thank you to the Assem Dostyk Guesthouse, that wonderful place had looked after us through our worst illnesses in both directions.

(Please ring Assem directly if you are ever in Almaty and need somewhere to stay – she’s on what’s app! +77077476507)

It was fun being on our own in a compartment for the first time…we spread out and made the most of the space. My chest felt less tight and Rosa was slowly coming back to herself.

We saw loads of camels. Whichever of us was staring out the window would shout ‘camel’ and we’d all leap to the window …camel spotting is catching and Rosa and Theo were infected now.

We played cards and rested a lot, glad for the space to recover, although we did get off at every platform and while the smokers made their way through as many cigarettes as time allowed, we got to walk up and down the platform.

Our final compartment member arrived at 4.30 in the morning – not an easy time to get on a train and this was a fifteen year old boy who’d clearly drawn the short straw and ended up in a compartment without his mates. Three times he left and tried to persuade someone to swap, and three times he came back, eventually settling down with his book ‘Өлім киелілері’ (‘The Deathly Hallows’), only waking up when it slipped out of his hand and hit me in the head : )

We got on well with Ainar in the end – he was part of a Taekwando team going to compete in Atyrau – there were twenty or so fifteen and sixteen year old girls and boys excited about their trip. They were sweet and curious and Rosa came in for a little extra attention : )

The journey passed easily even without the buffet car to distract us and at just after midday we arrived into Atyrau.

The place where the water runs brown and the dogs own the town, well, they don’t own it …but we had met Kaz and Stan here last time, our favourite dogs. (…after Wilbur, Martha, Molly, Cheddar and Sooty).

We found a place to settle in for our ten hour wait and we took it in turns to explore.

Up and down the stairs, back and forth along the platform, Theo going outside to find a toilet (the one in the station was shut).

We remembered arriving here from Russia in the dark after ‘the interrogation’ – and going to buy train tickets from that counter, that one there…nostalgia after eight months, who knew it was possible?

The most fun we had in the ten hours was going shopping for supplies and finding Kazakhstan’s version of B&Q – it was swanky!

Rosa and I wondered around the bathroom section choosing our favourites wondering who bought all this fancy stuff? Most of the homes we’d seen didn’t look big enough, and certainly not rich enough, to have one of these bathrooms, maybe there was another part of the city Kaz and Stan hadn’t taken us to.

I had some fun late in the evening trying to communicate with the ‘announcer’, she was in charge of telling everyone when it was time to get on the train and with there only being five trains in the ten hours we were there she was bored and well up for a distraction.

I’d figured out it would be easier for us to walk across the train track to get to the train with Suitcase, who was putting on weight by the way, and not easy to carry up and down stairs!

Anna, that’s her name, wasn’t keen – she wanted us to use the underpass. Trying to explain to her that Theo’s knee was still hurting and carrying Suitcase was hard, was quite funny.

We went up and down the stairs together, through the tunnel and back – then out along the platform, before we eventually agreed that a) we didn’t need a wheelchair and b) she would find someone to help us. She was a lovely woman with a soft warmth about her and an easy laugh.

Someone strong was recruited to carry Suitcase (‘not by that handle’) and then all seven of us; Anna, a woman from the luggage scanning machine who’d gotten involved, me, Rosa, Theo, Suitcase and Suitcase’s helper went down through the tunnel and out onto the platform. Anna and I hugged and we got on our train.

A train bound for Russia