We've arrived in Kazakhstan

After 36 hours travelling (including sitting around air ports and waiting for transport connections) we are finally in Shymkent.

Our trip:

We left Hong Kong at 5pm Sunday afternoon and caught a flight to Beijing, arriving at 8.30pm. The kids did pretty well on the flight and it was almost enjoyable this time. After arriving in Beijing we had to make our way through Customs, to the next International Terminal and sat around until 12:30am. By this time both kids were asleep and things were going smoothly. I had feared that neither child would sleep but we were fortunate enough to be able to take our pram as far as the gate at the airport and Sammy found it pretty easy to sleep in the pram. One of the biggest frustrations was going through Customs in Beijing where they made us take our sleeping little girl out of the pram so they could put it through the xray machine. I wasn't very happy about this (knowing that there was no guarantee that she'd go to sleep again) and frustrated when they also tried to get me to take the wheels off the pram to fit it into the machine.

Our flight from Beijing to Almaty (Kazakhstan) went pretty well also. I found it pretty humourous when at 2am they asked me whether I wanted the chicken or the fish. At that time of the morning I'm not really used to eating at all so decided to decline her kind offer. Both kids had a sleep during that flight and probably ended up getting 4 hours sleep that night. Considering how little sleep they got on the way from Sydney to Hong Kong I was happy with that effort.

We spent our first day in Kazakhstan at the airport hotel and wandering around Almaty. We all headed off to catch the bus but Sammy hated the freezing cold (maybe -10?) and refused to wear her gloves and screamed all the way to the bus stop. Allison took her home and Jack and I headed into town with our friends. We had such an awesome time. The scenes in the park reminded me of something out of 'The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe'. I took a stack of photos but none of them really do justice to how beautiful it was. Jack got to play in a park on play equipment covered in snow. He thought this was pretty special.

After hanging around Almaty for 12 hours we headed off to catch the overnight train to Shymkent.  This was a pretty strange but pretty cool experience.  We were in a sleeping cabin which had 4 bunk beds with a small walking space between.  We had to fit all of our luggage and us in the cabin for a 14 hour journey.  We made the most of it and had a good night eating snacks and sleeping.  Jack said this was his best night ever.  Al slept with Sammy and I slept with Jack to make sure neither of them fell off their bunks during the night.  We hit the sack pretty early and with the motion of the train managed to sleep quite well.  

At 7.30am we arrived at the train station in Shymkent.  The biggest shock was that it was still pitch black at this time of the day.  It could have been 3am for all we knew.  From there we took a couple of cabs and dumped our stuff at our new place.  After a massive journey we had finally arrived.