To cross the Caspian from the port of Baku to the port of Aktau I had the option of either taking a ferry with an unpredictable schedule and a sea passage of up to two days in a cockroach cabin, or a half-hour flight on one of the planes in Azerbaijan’s aging air fleet. It had already taken a week for me to obtain the Kazakhstan visa (which actually specified “tourism by bicycle”), and I was impatient to move on, so I opted for the flight on an old Aeroflot jet packed with oil businessmen. The plane was full of Russian Cyrillic markings, 18th century wallpaper designs, threadbare carpet - and the safety instruction was alarming, with the flotation vest that the stewardess used as a prop having a museum-piece appearance. The most remarkable thing about the flight for me was the fact that there was no air conditioning – the jet quickly turned into an oven even though it was an evening flight. The British oilman behind me remarked, “now I know what it feels like in a Chinese laundry” – which I thought to be a witty remark to describe the sweltering conditions. The stewardess scolded me for taking this photograph, but did not make me delete it. Check it out - there is an actual curtain - that's old school if I ever saw it. (6-1-05) *

After landing I was processed through customs by a surprisingly beautiful (yet stern) Russian woman. After negotiating the taxi fare into the town (with no help from the aforementioned oilman; "I'm always met" was the response to my query regarding local taxi fare), I was riding past the nighttime rainbow of neon into the city center where I crashed at an air-conditioned hotel by the sea shore. The next morning I had oatmeal for breakfast - the first time in nearly a year. It was awesome! Can you imagine how great it will be when I will have the ability to eat oatmeal whenever I want it? I can scarcely contain my excitement. (6-02-05)

Aktau is a city dedicated to resource extraction, surrounded by nothingness so vast that all of the city’s water comes from a nuclear-powered desalinization plant. I could see evidence of Shell, Texaco, and other western oil companies that had set up shop here, and sitting in the downtown Shamrock restaurant did not feel all that different from the Fisherman’s Wharf in Baku. The same expatriate oil workers eating western food, speaking in southern accents, listening to Madonna and Elton John and discussing the business of oil were all here as well. The town itself had a definite Soviet feel to it, with row after row of dormitory-style buildings, WWII memorials, and broad socialist avenues. (6-02-05) *

It took several hours the next day and then another return trip the morning thereafter to OVIR to get my visa registered. As soon as I got the registration slip I packed as much food and water as I could on the bike (yogurt, nuts, dried fruit, bread, butter, cookies), and headed off into the void of the Ustyurt Plateau in the direction of Karakalpakstan. (6-02-05)

Exiting Aktau I entered a post-apocalyptic Mad Max world of tangled networks of oil and gas pipelines and tanks, nodding derricks pumping the earth, and flaming spouts of burnoff shooting into the sky. The ugly circus of oil extraction was making quite a spectacle of itself in the otherwise barren landscape. (6-03-05)

Riding from sea level up to the Ustyurt plateau was scenic, like something from Nevada, with desert scrub, wierd rock formations, and a vast expanse of depopulated dirt. (6-03-05)

But once actually on the plateau, I encountered the best evidence that the Flat Earth Society could ever offer in support of their cause. It was a flat, treeless expanse, with nothing to break the horizon except the occasional wandering camel. Toward evening on my first night out on the plateau a massive thunderstorm let loose – the kind where the thunderbolts hold their arc in the sky for several seconds. There was no place to hide the tent from the view of passers by or to shelter it from lightning bolts, so I just plopped it on the open plateau before the approaching storm clouds arrived. I did set my bike about 20 meters away in the hope that the lightning would be attracted to the metal bike frame rather than my metal tentpoles. I soon discovered that my tent had regrettably lost some of its waterproofing, so I strategically placed the raincovers for my panniers over my sleeping bag to allow a somewhat dryer night of sleep. The thunderstorm was pretty fierce – a real summertime, open-plain storm, with wind nailing the sides of my tent a good deal of the night. (6-03-05)

Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds would be an appropriate soundtrack for the wild and woolly west of Kazakhstan – the place seems like something hallucinated. As I neared Shetpe, the flat scenery again turned into something like Nevada or Utah, if Utah had camels wandering along flaming oil pipelines. It was really beautiful, with an assortment of plateaus, striated cliff faces, mesas, and buttes. I’m not sure as to the difference of the aforementioned geologic formations, but wanted to include all of them for the sake of completeness. (6-04-05) *

I got roasted by the sun, which showed no mercy. Water started to become an issue (not a problem, because I still had 6 liters in reserve in my dromedary bags - but it tasted like dishwater, so I was looking for other sources). I was offered water a couple of times by passing motorists, for which I was extremely thankful.

This was the last bit of paved road before it turned to the gravel track that you'll see in the upcoming frames. The asphalt did not return until the end of the fourth showerless day of riding just before Beyneu. (6-04-05) *