A bunch of completely corrupt ****s.
It's alliteration. Fill it in as you wish.
I'm sorry for the language but I think most people would feel the same. We are just leaving Kyrgyzstan and I have to say I'm very glad about it. We only got here two days ago but I've been thoroughly unimpressed. We arrived from Tajikistan early in the morning and drove on from there to Osh, the second largest city. Getting there early in the afternoon we had plenty of time to relax before heading out to find somewhere to eat. With Rub a Dub Dub having to hotfoot it to Astana, for Alf to fly home for a few days to attend a family wedding, this was our last day convoying with them until we potentially meet up on the other side of Kazakhstan.
Although the hostel we found was ideal, walking into the centre of Osh we weren't particularly thrilled by its beauty. The bazaar is supposed to be its biggest attraction but all this resembled was a cross between a car boot sale and Sports Direct, and the city never even threatened to break out into anything remotely picturesque. The quality of construction of both buildings and pathways left a lot to be desired, as Will found out by booting a short length of metal rod that had been left sticking out of the concrete pavement. Safe to say flip flops aren't great protection, and the sight of Will's big toenail hanging half off slightly ruined all our appetites; at least until we got it bandaged up at a conveniently placed pharmacy.
'Unfortunately the scissors weren't to cut it off'
Some beers helped though and we all slept well in a proper bed after a week of roughing it through the Pamirs. In the morning Rub a Dub Dub got off fairly early, but we hung around for a while sorting out a few things, whilst we were in a city, such as money and spare parts. So by the time we had finally got away it was early afternoon already. This is when the problems began.
Not long out of the city and Guy and Hockey got pulled over for doing 71km/h in a 50 zone. This was probably fair we thought as the speed limits in Kyrgyzstan are extremely hard to follow, and always very low. In towns it seems to be usually 50, but sometimes 40, and this isn't indicated by a speed sign but by a sign saying you're in a village. The end of these speed limits is then indicated by the end of the village, and it is usually extremely hard to tell where this as the houses just slowly get less and less regular. Anyway, the official fine for doing more than 20km/h over the speed limit is 1000 Kyrgyz Som (about 20-25 dollars) but it was proving extremely difficult to get them to write us a ticket even though they had these in front of them. It was obvious fairly quickly that the reason for this is that they would much rather we just gave them the money in cash without any record of it. Expecting something like this we weren't about to be stupid enough to give them 1000 Som so the waiting game began. After at least 45 minutes of acting stupid and pretending to have no cash we eventually decided that we didn't have time for this anymore. Unfortunately they still had Hockey's driving license, but 100 Som between us later we had this back and were on our way again.
'The only photo I took of Kyrgyzstan'
Annoyed partly our own stupidity for getting pulled over, and also how corrupt this was, we agreed not to go giving them proper documents again. This theory got put to the test pretty quickly as the next morning, after camping in the middle of nowhere, it was my turn to get pulled over. Interestingly, I was also doing exactly 71km/h in a 50 zone apparently; which would have been suspect enough on its own even if I hadn't known I was being careful and definitely not going at all this fast. Possibly seeing my extremely doubtful expression the officer also tried to tell me that the law was that I had to have my headlights on at all times of day. This though was something we knew to be untrue having looked it up beforehand, and also proved by the many cars driving past without them on. After all this I definitely wasn't giving him any proper documents and so I gave him my IDP (International Driving Permit) instead of my drivers license which he wanted. Being valid for only a year, and having cost me about £10, I was not at all bothered if he wrote me a ticket from this and kept it because we would be well out of the country before his ticket got anywhere, and the IDP wouldn't be missed. Obviously though he wasn't going to write a ticket because all they want out of it is a bit of cash; in this case the figure he wrote down was 50 dollars. Offering him just less than 3 dollars instead because we couldn't be bothered to wait and 200 Som was the smallest note I had he laughed and started filling out a ticket. Unconcerned I waited patiently until he eventually decided that he wasn't getting anywhere and accepted 200 Som and let us leave.
Even more annoyed than before we headed off again vowing to make sure we were going so slowly through every other village they simply couldn't stop us. This worked for most of the day until we reached the end of the mountain road we had been driving along since we had left Osh. At this point there was an initial stop, to hand in a toll ticket we had paid to drive down this road, and then straight after this another stop sign. Having driven through endless checkpoints with stop signs, we may have been getting slightly lax with actually stopping since they usually just looked at you put out if you actually stop and wave you through. Not here though and following a local car's lead Guy and Hockey slowed right down to as close to a stop as you could get before driving on. Not good enough. A small angry looking man was already charging out of an office waving a baton at us to pull over. Demanding documents he took those two into his booth and showed them video footage of them not fully stopping. Seemingly blind to the fact that the camera showed the car in front, and plenty of others, doing exactly the same he was as per usual demanding money. More playing stupid and 200 Som each later and they were out of there.
This was to be the last time though and sat at the border now we realise it's only about 7 dollars between two cars of people. But it's the fact this is going straight into their pockets that really winds me up. Anyway, hopefully Kazakhstan will be far better and my next blog post can be a lot less moany.
