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My dear readers,<br /><br />Today, I am going to my trip from Tunisia to Russia. These who read my story from previous trip: Silk Road may remember that I was motivated on it by a childhood dream about Takla-Makan Desert. On trip before that to Himalayas I was motivated by my mountaineering youth. This coming trip is also not without motivation. I want to go through the most luxurious places in Europe, such as French and Italian Riviera, the backpacker way (bosiatskim sposobom). Why the backpacker way? Because these places are very expensive and also because I do not like to travel the civilized way. I am motivated to this trip by two great Russian Travelers Romanych http://romanycz.travel.ru/ and Yuri Mossokovsky http://mosspower.w-city.net.ua Last one took a bold task to prove that the ordinary Russian citizen can afford to travel to Western Europe on a bike. He proved it, but lost 20 lb. on the way. I am going to prove that the ordinary American Social Seniority recipient can travel through Rivieras too. And I do not mind to lose weight ever.

From Tunisia to Russia (part II)

Alex Mumzhiu
2006-03-22 13:32:47

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be transferred to a waiting team of boarder guards and other officials. These new countries are so crazy about their border control that they almost stop any border crossings.

The city to which I came, Aktau, according to LP should be one of these newest socialistic towns. I visited many cities like this in my business trips as an instrumentation engineer while in the USSR. Any normal person tries to avoid these conglomerates of dilapidated cement apartment buildings and not passable roads, at any cost. By contrast, I have some sort of sick interest to them. I wanted to see if life still exists there. And if yes, in what form. Aktau sits on the waterless shore of the Caspian sea and the only water it has, is from the desalination plant powered by a nuclear reactor. The city turned out to be much better then those endless Novo-Ufimsk, Novo-Kyibishevsk, Novo-Kyznetsk, which I visited in my business trips. It was built as a show-case socialistic town for the developers of Mangushlak gas deposit. So I was pleasantly surprised, before I read the local newspaper.

Newspaper said that the city is located in the area where the black plague exists in nature and there are a couple of cases of plague per year in the area. However, the plague is curable now, with antibiotics. In addition the newspaper provided a long list of drug trafficker who were arrested and one uranium trafficker. He carried 1.5 kg of uranium. That is not all. Not in Actau, but in Alma Ata, also Kazakhstan, three men were arrested for killing and eating 7 prostitutes. The newspaper also described dishes, which they prepare from their victims. They definitely prefer Eastern cuisine: shish-kebaps, lulia-kebaps, stuff like this.

The most questionable part of my trip was the part from Aktau to Khiva. As I wrote to you before, the only way to get to Khiva was by railroad, "Tashkent- Moscow", through Urgench, Nukus, Beiney and Samara ...