My 2500 km trip to the East Kazakhstan.
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My 2500 km trip to the East Kazakhstan.
Hi everyone! Today I will make a post about my trip to the East Kazakhstan.
It will be long post with 50 photos and one video in the end of the post.
Participants:
Y60 - 2 units (both RD28t), Y61 - 2 units (both RD28ti), Prado - 1 unit (1KZ).
Goal: Old Austrian road in national reserves area. Length - 60 km
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PS. Google is so sweetie, it thinks that a highway there - 60 km 3 hour. We spent 1.5 days.
Duration - 1 week, 12-19 of June
Please excuse me one more time for my bad English. It is the result of my self-education.
The trip supposed to be held as car tourism but it became rally, so most of the photos were taken from a car on the ride and the quality is not so good how it should be.
If you believe in omens - if the trip started hard, it will continue to be this way.
The first day.
Our journey began not so nice.
First of all, we got late to start for about 3 hours.
Secondly, brand new Super Swamper makes a bang on 125th kilometer of the way. The road was in the middle of the flat steppe so it was a long and tedious. The outside temperature was +40. For a night we stopped later at an abandoned gas station.
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Looking forward to this Alexander, and your English is fine.
The Second day.
After 230 kilometers we started the first off-road part of the way.
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The old and already abandoned road, there was no asphalt, and nobody use it for many years, because new road has been already built that goes near the cities. But this road is shorter to our destination point. The road goes throw the steppe so it was boring, bumpy and long – 300 kilometers.
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There my first failure occurred -knocked out of the rear brake pad, extruded brake piston and emptied brake fluid tank. We totally removed the caliper and blocked the hose and continued our way.
Later, during our ride the Prado’s caravan is unplugging from towing ball and tries to rollover. The experiences of the driver save it. Late evening we arrived to the lake Zaisan for a camp.
There we had one more surprise – the migration season of the moth. There were a millions of them. Slightly rise up the cover of cap with noodles, 5 of them are already there. Move the fork from cap to the mouth, took a few more of them, so, we ate quickly and went to sleep as fast as we could.
Before sleeping we took a few shots of cocktail made by our cook to relieve the stress and sleep well. The recipe: pure alcohol + pure water in proportional 50/50 + one sugar cube. Shake it well and the cocktail - “Red square” is ready. Why the “Red square”? Because if you try to drink it too much, at morning you will have the red eye and the square head.
Day Three.
After 5 kilometers from the camp we went back again to the asphalt road and had a new breakdown.
The big GQ’s lost the breaks. The pipe from master cylinder to the front breaks was frayed with 2 holes. We stopped again 1100 km from home in the middle of the nothing and nearest service station. Then I remembered that many years ago in one TV show I heard that in emergency situation for steel acid etching can be used an Aspirin tablet. We put some Aspirin powder on the pipe around holes and melted it with burner and then put the soldering flux on it. The soldering flux melted quite well and plumbing both holes. Then we brought pipe back to the brake system, pumped it and go further.
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The road again went across the steppe; it was long and not very interesting. Three times during this day we had breakdown of the caravan Suspension. We spent lots of time for it.
By the way, this road goes along the Chinese border just a few meters from it.
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Yellow dunes it is the Chinese territory. The high of this photo point is 1 137 meters.
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By the evening of the third day we drove up to the mountains and at night we arrived at the village Urunhayka on the mountain lake Markakol.
We drove to it in the totally dark so it is no pictures again.
We spent the night, in the camp near village and left half a day next to relax, explore the area and have some bbq. The Old Austrian road starts right after the border of this village.
Note: Old Austrian road - the road in East Kazakhstan which was built in 1914-1916 by Austrian war prisoners captured on the Eastern Front during the WW I. Length – 60 km.
Day four.
In this village, I found the most brutal track which I ever seen.
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This is Hurricane.
It is a heavy military towing truck or launcher platform for ballistic missiles or multiple rocket systems.
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Locals use it for firewood prepares for the winter and as transporter during winter period.
In these places the snow can be up to 3 meters in height.
The village
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The lake Marcakol
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This is one of the highest lake I've ever swimming
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When we were preparing for this trip, people told us that this road was already abandoned for a 40 years and no one drives there except crazy offroad expeditions like us.
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Useless photo but it so dynamic
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One guy from the local off-road club said that two years ago it took a whole week to drive down this road (60 kilometer). After rainy spring the ground was slippery like soap and there is one broken bridge from 4 on the way.
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The first bridge we passed without any problems, but 3 another bridges were gone.
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Have you got a picture of all the cars and caravan?
Alexander, these photographs and your documentation are really interesting - keep them happening please.