Here we are at the border of Kazakhstan trying to exit. It’s quite funny…their building says “good luck” as you can see (photo at the bottom). I say it’s funny for a few reasons..

First, exiting the country is usually the super easy part where they check your passport and stamp it saying, “you’re the next country’s problem now.” This was not the case for Kazakhstan. The border control wanted to search all of our bags as we were leaving…what?! I had heard of this happening to others but it hasn’t happened to us so maybe it was a matter of time until it was our turn, haha. Typically this happens when you enter a country rather than exit. It really wasn’t too big of a deal to be honest but was rather a little annoying to unpack and repack the bike.

Second, we did not have a Russian customs form that we needed to ask for when transiting through Russia. That fell between the cracks in our research… The main chief of the border police, who reminded me of a bulldog, talked with us (over Google translate) for 10-15 minutes and said that it was our responsibility to get and asked us to “take responsibility”. We apologized and asked what we should do now to exit Kazakhstan and he asked us to wait. We waited maybe 10 more minutes and he came back and said “if this happens again, you will get punished”. Once we got his stamp of approval, we scurried off.

And finally, the road from the Kazakhstan border to Nukus, Uzbekistan was unreal. It was so horrible there were dirt roads on each side of the road that people had made since off-roading and creating a new road was more comfortable to drive than the actual roads. So I think Kazakhstan knew about the road and wished us good luck as we exited, ha!