Day 52, to Almaty, Kazakhstan 102km , 4590km to date,  616m up, 890m end

An easy day riding, mostly riding on the new unopened side of a freeway, the last 30km into Almaty was in what most N. Americans would call chaos conditions - 4 sort of lanes of traffic with cars, people, motorcycles going in every direction - I enjoy this riding, you are part of a bustling city.  You quickly get used to the much closer quarters traffic than what we are normally used that home.

Almaty is a growing city, now over 2million people, some are saying over 3 mil if you include the suburbs.  I am really impressed with Almaty, a very clean modern city. (some pics next post). All the hi-end shops are here (Prada, Ferrari, etc), our hotel is across the street from the Opera house.  It used to be the Capital of Kazakhstan, but the capital was moved to Astana for “land claim” purposes.  I was also told that during the early part of the WWII that the Russians moved some of their heavy manufacturing here in case they were invaded from the West.

Almaty used to called Alma-Ata (father of apples) - we have been seeing many road side vendors selling apples.

***warning***   Those of you that fight to keep weight off may not want to read the rest of this paragraph…  Yesterday was a wonderful day for eating:  started with breakfast at 05:00 at camp (scrambled eggs (about 3), cereal, bread, jam, banana), then a small trail mix snack (1/2 bag) at about 06:30, then first lunch from a small store 08:30 (cheese, sausage, poppy seed rolls, apple, chocolate), then snacks later morning, then a full pizza, two beer and two ice creams for 2nd lunch, then at an early evening reception (for the riders that are leaving at this point), there were some snacks (sausage, cheese, fruit etc.,) along with another beer and some Vodka, then dinner at about 8:30 at a fine Italian restaurant which included 1/2 bottle of Chianti and Chicken Parmigiana.  I didn’t think I needed dessert after dinner - although we considered stopping for an ice cream on the way back to the hotel, but it was raining fairly hard so we didn’t wander.  In case you are wondering, I am about 5 lbs down from when I started in Beijing, so clearly need to up the eating…

I have been asked to show a map with my location.  I’ll add such every few days (on rest days). If you are interested, I have our route in a kmz file that can be loaded into almost any mapping package (e.g. google maps or google earth), let me know I’ll send it to you.

Where I presently am:

I think I might have missed a turn...

The departing riders: