We left Actobe with the sun shining and the road stretching ahead, smooth and new. It didn't last long. The road quickly fell apart to the worst we have seen so far. Potholes 6 feet across and 3 feet deep in the middle of the road.
Then disaster struck.
Before we go any further, everyone is OK. No one hurt.
But Petar had a very bad fall, and destroyed the front end of his bike. I was in the lead, and Cory and Petar were following. They both came over the hill behind me, and my bike kicked up some dust, which caused Petar to miss a series of potholes. He barely made it through the first two while slowing down, but got bounced into the ditch on his head by the huge third one. After insuring he was not hurt after sliding at 60km on his head, we assessed the damage to his bike, and it was not good. The front wheel was destroyed, and the front forks were bent beyond repair.
This was major damage that was not repairable without many new parts. We were now stuck in a very remote section of Kazakhstan with the light fading fast on the horizon.
But like most of the trip, we only had to wait a short time, till the friendly locals came by, helped us lift the bike from the ditch, and loaded the broken bike into the back of a passing truck, where they took us to the next town.
When we got there, they said, "Money", and as we were diggining into our pockets to gratefully pay them for the ride, we realized they were offering us money, to buy water or supplies, since they were not going any further on this road.
We gratefully declined their touching offer, and unloaded the bike onto the side of the road, and settled down for a long night.
We couldn't set up camp and go to sleep, as the bike was right on the side of the road, and we didn't want to leave it (or ours) unattended during the night, so we sat down under our bikes to wait. At about 3:30 am, a truck came by and stopped in the darkness. It sat there for about 20 minutes before we realized they hadn't seen us, but had just stopped to have a bite to eat in the night. So we turned on our lights, and the driver and his helper came over. After a short conversation, with much gesturing, we were able to communicate that we were stuck, so they offered to load the bike into their truck, and take us all the way to the next large town, which was our destination.
The only issue was that they had a full load of box after box of Vodka. They opened the door of the trailer and started moving boxes around to find room for the bike. We jury rigged a ramp, and lifted the dead bike into the truck, then set out with Cory and Tim following on the bikes, behind the truck, broken Yamaha and boxes of Vodka, into the dead of the Kazakhstan night.
We made about 10 km when the truck driver indicated he was tired and wanted to sleep. We didn't want to leave the bikes unsupervised, so instead of setting up the tents, we (all 3) slept in back of the Kamaz truck on 100's of bottles of Vodka. It was a mostly miserable sleep.
When we woke in the morning, we were faced with the reality that the Kamaz, with the load of Vodka, could travel at approximately 10-15 km per hour on these roads, so barring any kind of problem, the 300 km we had left to the next town, would be from dawn till dusk at this rate.
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