Day 52: Almaty, Kazkhstan

September 1, 2009

After a good night sleep in our expensive hotel, we needed to try and get a Ukraine Visa for Petar (who needs one). This necessitated a trip to the Ukraine Embassy, which was closed when we got there, so we sat on the street and waited till it opened, then found out he needed an invitation letter before they could proceed.


So off we went to our next stop, which was the Immigration Police, to have our Visa's registered.

This turned in to the most ridiculous 2 hours we have yet spent.

The amount of bureaucracy and corruption was laughable. There were about 100 people there, all trying to get the attention of 1 guy, who all he had to do was stamp and initial an immigration slip in our passports. But to do that you had to fill out another piece of paper requesting this. The stamp and the initial were free, but the piece of paper, well that cost you 804 Tenge (about $6 dollars), but it's written in Kazak, so they shuffled us off to a "helper" who needed $20 each to "process" our passports, a bit more for the photocopy fee. So we paid. Then the line standing started. About every 5 or 10 minutes, he would get up, change windows, so the mass of people would move with him, all the while people are elbowing each other (and us) to get closer in line. We'd be next, and about 5 people would just jam their papers in front of us. We tried not to get frustrated, but this was ridiculous. Each time we would get to the window, he would say "15-20 more minutes" then ignore us. This went on and on. We couldn't get mad, since he had our passports. It was now getting close to closing time, and we were sure he was going to go home, leaving us without our passports (and any way to go on). But right at closing, we were about the last 3 people left in the building, we finally got our passports back, stamped and initialed.

We checked out of the expensive hotel, and into a cheaper one down the road a block. It was a dive, but at least had hot showers. Cory and I went out that night with Fred, a friend we had met from France, who had just spent 7 months working in China, and the last 2 months riding home on a 250 cc Japanese motorcycle he had smuggled in part by part to China.