Leaving town, it was already starting to rain. We made our way through the outskirts of Ust quite skeptically. The major roads were strangely small and of poorer quality than some of the minor roads we’d seen, and though the center of the city is beautiful, industrial Ust Kamenogorsk is horrible. We were warned of the numerous factories and horrible pollution, but it was literally 10km of hellish roads behind huge trucks spewing soot with rust-coloured water (I hope?) spilling out the back. I felt bad for my lungs the whole time.
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| From 20090718 -Ust to Ridder |
Sure enough, after about 10k we turned off and the remaining 130k between the turnoff and Ridder were all absolutely amazing. Beautiful, lush forests with all colours of wildflowers on either side, rolling hills, later mountains on either side, and the air that earlier stunk with smoke now smelled of flowers - all of it was just lovely.
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| From 20090718 -Ust to Ridder |
It’s still very dramatic the change from urban to rural, just 30km outside of Ust we went from $70 hotel rooms to a full lunch of coffees, borscht and “piroshky” (big oval doughnuts filled with various things – this time meat and buckwheat), all for about C$3 for both of us at a roadside cafe run by a very friendly mother and daughter, in the pic below...
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| From 20090718 -Ust to Ridder |
The village we stopped in next with this shashlik (meat kabab) stand and cafe had a very pretty rural Alpine feel to it, complete with sheep, cows, pigs and horses all grazing in the front yards we passed by.
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| From 20090718 -Ust to Ridder |
After a hilly hundred kilometers, we found a quite pretty and nicely hidden campsite, close to a river, far from any roads or noticeably settled (or dog-guarded) properties. The weather had been great, with rain in the morning and temperatures no higher than +29C in the afternoon, and our good fortunes continued into the evening. We woke up the next morning fairly early and set off for what would be an even more uphill 40km day around 7:30am. We had planned to chill out longer at the campsite in the morning, but our campstove fuel can somehow sprung a leak, and dried apricots and cookies just didn’t make as leisurely of a campside breakfast as hot oatmeal or pancakes would have….
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| From 20090718 -Ust to Ridder |
The second day was even more beautiful than the first, though the several kilometers of steep climbs in succession were definitely a challenge (for at least one of us! :).
We went up...
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| From 20090718 -Ust to Ridder |
... and up...
... and up...
Due to some really deceptive signage (saying “Welcome to Ridder,” TWICE) and admittedly some wishful thinking, we actually thought we had reached our destination about 15km ahead of time.
Luckily we realized our mistake after asking for directions to a street that didn’t exist and marveling at the lack of cafes or hotels, so we took a break (and had a long chat with the friendly fellow below) and eventually made our way back to the road, which only continued uphill for a short while before a glorious 10km or so on picturesque, flat roads that lead to a town we were actually much happier to be staying in.
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| From 20090718 -Ust to Ridder |
From here we’re contemplating changing our plan a bit. It’s a great town with lots of fun-looking hikes and bikes in the surrounding mountains, and we’ve realized that there’s a much more direct route from here to the part of Russia we actually want to visit that will allow us to avoid some of the less interesting parts our original plan would have taken us through. If that route does in fact turn out to be possible, then we’ll likely spend the rest of our time in Kazakhstan here in the mountains, but either way it’ll be a couple of days here at least before we either go back to Ust and then head out to Russia, or leave here for Russia directly. We'll see soon, I guess!
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