Flight to Kokshetau

Now that you have seen the prize at the end, you should know a little about what it took to get here... My many years of travel under the tutalage of famed Tour Director, Dan Callahan, could not have prepared us for this journey. The 18 hours that it took to get to Almaty were not very eventful, so we won't bore you with that. We begin on the morning of the 19th. We got to the the airport in Almaty and quickly learned what "no receipt" means. Basically, if you don't need a receipt, the fee can be negotiated down, so the many extra pounds of luggage that was packed were discounted because we were "flexible". Once we finally got to the plane, the YAK 40, is where it all started. We assume that 40 means the number of seats on the plane, never mind that there were about 45 people on the flight! Standing room only for 3 hours!!! We'll have to trust that YAK means something in Russian that is different then what we believe it means now. We entered the plane through the rear (picture a group of soldiers entering for duty). Once up the steps we crawled over top the excess luggage to what could have been a Steven King storyline for scary flight travel. Not only could we not sit together, the seats were close enough that your seat mate became your VERY best friend for 3 hours. Language barriers do not mean much at this time. For 3 hours there was no inflight movie, no bathroom and no comfort. There was however inflight service. First a passed bowl of candies, followed by juice boxes of tomato or apple juice, a Kazakhstan version of the Twinkie, followed up by a nice fresh, orange tinted cup of water! Nice! At one point in the flight my friend, Chris and I looked at each other wondering if we were smelling the same thing? Yep, it was smoke. Not to be alarmed, it was just the Captain enjoying a nice smoke from the cockpit. It didn't really bother me, whatever it took to keep the bird in the air was ok with me. For 3 hours we stared, white knuckled, directly ahead sharing private moments with our maker. The one time I longed for a book to read it happened to be in the part of the plane I could no longer access... 5 rows behind me. Why? the isle was cluttered with luggage from the 45 people inflight with us. Long story short, we made it safely to Kokshetau. More later, but we thought this picture of the rear of the plane should help to tell some of the story. More later.....