We eased our way into the first day of proper riding: Paul tweaked the luggage arrangements (considerably reducing the weight in the sidecar), I went for another round of Tom Peto’s exercises (highly recommended: Tom Peto Training) and grabbed breakfast (nasty energy drinks, decent lepyoshka bread and fairly nice oranges). Around noon we said our goodbyes to the lovely staff at the Empire Hotel, filled up the tanks (more than 50l of petrol for less than 15,000 Tenge – approx 30 USD) and headed west, finding the main four-lane toll highway (A-2) before long.

+: So nice to finally get going – with both motorcycles running well and looking forward to great days of adventure ahead.

– : Paul said I jinxed it (I admit I’d not expected rain in Kazakhstan, but I did not say it would rain until we reached the Black Sea – mute point:) after the first half, as we moved closer to the mountains, where we had seen dark clouds gather from afar, it started to rain. Very lightly at first, but soon we pulled out our rain gear and made sure we minimised any options for the rain to get through. The main problems were very limited visibility and questionable traction – but we made it to Shymkent before dark, with one last adventure before we reached the Pero Hotel: I lost Paul as I was stressed by dense and intense traffic – our coms system was down and I didn’t have a working phone connection… but we worked it out.