Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova by Neil Skywalker
Authors: Neil Skywalker
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took about 150 dollars worth of Kazakh Tenge out of the ATM. I got on the train and after a while the railway police at some station checked me out. Finding out my visa had expired that day, they started to make problems. I started to negotiate a bribe by writing numbers on my translation book since they didn’t speak any English. At one point they agreed on twenty dollars but told me, as far I could understand, that I couldn’t leave the country. I said I was going to the border anyway, and suddenly they didn’t want the bribe anymore and let me go.
I was happy not to pay a dime to those hicks, not knowing what a surprise was waiting for me at the border.
Once again, the train was filled with all kinds of characters. No good-looking single women, though, that was for sure. Things started to get really interesting a few hundred kilometers before the border, when the whole train wagon came alive. I had already noticed that a few people had enormous bags with them. They started to unpack those bags and out came the t-shirts, jeans and dresses. Others had massive amounts of alcohol with them. You’d think this was all done out of sight of the officials, but no: the train conductor was the great leader in all this. He even tried to stash four bottles of whiskey in my bag. I told him “No way!” Let him do his own smuggling. All the mattresses were lifted and got a pile of jeans under them. All the pillowcases were filled with t-shirts and dresses. This whole process took about an hour, and by the end the whole wagon was one gigantic contraband-stuffed carriage.
When we finally reached the Kazakh/Russian border, the train was raided by customs soldiers. They started checking all the passports. I remembered that the officers before wanted dollars instead of their own currency, so I reached into my bag and looked for my hidden pocket. Normally I would wear the money belt/pocket under my clothes but in Almaty it was so hot that I left it in my bag a few times. I found my money belt but the money was gone. I suspect that the grandson of the old Russian lady I stayed with took it. He was a scumbag, always asking me for small change and cigarettes. I often heard him yell at the old lady. Like I said, just before I got on the train I bought some groceries for the long train ride, and didn’t pay attention to my bag. This was probably the moment the bastard stole my money. 165 USD gone.
Luckily for him I didn’t check before I left, because I’m not the forgiving type or the average schoolboy backpacker. I would have beaten the living daylights out of him right there in his own house. I’ve been my own judge a couple of times before and I’ve never regretted it, even though I ended up with a criminal record because of it. Anyway, the money was gone, I was hundreds of kilometers away from Almaty, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
When a customs officer looked at my passport and saw my visa was expired, he told me to get off the train. From the moment I stepped off the train there were a few mean-looking soldiers surrounding me. One had a big German Shepherd dog on a leash that was nearly biting me and another soldier stuck his AK-47 in my back. He pushed me in front of him towards a small office while yelling commands I couldn’t understand at me in Russian. I had to walk past the train and absolutely everyone was watching me. The train nearly fell on its side because everyone was pressing against the windows to see me.
Inside the office I was questioned as to why I had overstayed my visa. They wanted to know everything about why I was in Kazakhstan, what I’d done there, where I’d been. Then they told me they had to send me back to Almaty to get another visa. It sounds ridiculous, to make me take a thirty-five hour train ride back to Almaty jus to get a hundred-dollar visa for a single day. But they were dead serious about it. This carried on for half an hour; four different officers were constantly asking
I was happy not to pay a dime to those hicks, not knowing what a surprise was waiting for me at the border.
Once again, the train was filled with all kinds of characters. No good-looking single women, though, that was for sure. Things started to get really interesting a few hundred kilometers before the border, when the whole train wagon came alive. I had already noticed that a few people had enormous bags with them. They started to unpack those bags and out came the t-shirts, jeans and dresses. Others had massive amounts of alcohol with them. You’d think this was all done out of sight of the officials, but no: the train conductor was the great leader in all this. He even tried to stash four bottles of whiskey in my bag. I told him “No way!” Let him do his own smuggling. All the mattresses were lifted and got a pile of jeans under them. All the pillowcases were filled with t-shirts and dresses. This whole process took about an hour, and by the end the whole wagon was one gigantic contraband-stuffed carriage.
When we finally reached the Kazakh/Russian border, the train was raided by customs soldiers. They started checking all the passports. I remembered that the officers before wanted dollars instead of their own currency, so I reached into my bag and looked for my hidden pocket. Normally I would wear the money belt/pocket under my clothes but in Almaty it was so hot that I left it in my bag a few times. I found my money belt but the money was gone. I suspect that the grandson of the old Russian lady I stayed with took it. He was a scumbag, always asking me for small change and cigarettes. I often heard him yell at the old lady. Like I said, just before I got on the train I bought some groceries for the long train ride, and didn’t pay attention to my bag. This was probably the moment the bastard stole my money. 165 USD gone.
Luckily for him I didn’t check before I left, because I’m not the forgiving type or the average schoolboy backpacker. I would have beaten the living daylights out of him right there in his own house. I’ve been my own judge a couple of times before and I’ve never regretted it, even though I ended up with a criminal record because of it. Anyway, the money was gone, I was hundreds of kilometers away from Almaty, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
When a customs officer looked at my passport and saw my visa was expired, he told me to get off the train. From the moment I stepped off the train there were a few mean-looking soldiers surrounding me. One had a big German Shepherd dog on a leash that was nearly biting me and another soldier stuck his AK-47 in my back. He pushed me in front of him towards a small office while yelling commands I couldn’t understand at me in Russian. I had to walk past the train and absolutely everyone was watching me. The train nearly fell on its side because everyone was pressing against the windows to see me.
Inside the office I was questioned as to why I had overstayed my visa. They wanted to know everything about why I was in Kazakhstan, what I’d done there, where I’d been. Then they told me they had to send me back to Almaty to get another visa. It sounds ridiculous, to make me take a thirty-five hour train ride back to Almaty jus to get a hundred-dollar visa for a single day. But they were dead serious about it. This carried on for half an hour; four different officers were constantly asking
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