Route planning

We finally got the ball rolling on our visa applications tonight, sending fof the required info to apply for Letters of Invitation to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In what I think is a hangover from the former Soviet days, many tourists need to be "invited" to visit by someone in the country - no rocking up on the border and milling about aimlessly once inside. In reality, the process has become more of a 'visa support' function - essentially a travel agency within the country will submit your details to the government, and all being well will provide you with a reference to take along to the local consulate. Given the main bit of the admin has been done and dusted, visas apparently only then take a couple of days to get sorted.

It's proved a bit of a bonus for us - much like the vast majority of the rest of our plans we've ended up sitting here in May going "Whuh?" at the realisation that this adventure, which has been in the planning stages since October, is now a mere 60 days away. Throw in an ill-timed (but much looked-forward-to) few days away in Belgium this weekend, and it was starting to look a bit tight to get 5 visas sorted in the time we have left. The LOI process means the bulk of the red tape can be sorted based on scanned documents, so hopefully we'll be ok.

One of the questions we had to answer for each country was our intended entry point, which forced us to properly look at the maps for the first time. Unfortunately, a fat red line indicating a major road in that part of the world can be misleading, and it's only thanks to Google Earth that we didn't take the "better" route (in terms of itinerary and seeing western Uzbekistan) down the west of the Aral Sea - satellite images show a barren and desolate part of Kazakhstan with a road that in places is nothing more than a dirt track. In addition, it seems to be about 100km from the nearest town and the thought of our non-existent car repair skills being pressed into action is just that little bit too terrifying at the moment. We've decided to go for the 'main' border crossing into Uzbekistan instead, near Tashkent. It has the advantage of tarmac, greenery, towns and a couple of very volcano-y looking mountains that got J very excited...... Apparently the time taken to get through this way is hit-and-miss - could be simple, could take 6 hours. But whilst we're out for adventure and remote villages, we'll quite happily go for being stranded at a major border for a few hours than lost in the desert somewhere near Turkmenistan....

Our intended entry point:

The 'other one'