Going Home Day 12
040108

We’ve got two more days before we leave Kazakhstan.  Since we’ve got an open schedule today, we decide to go to Kok-Tobe, which means blue mountain.  To get up the mountain, one takes a cable car.  From what I understand, it’s a nice scenic ride to to the top.  So we go through our morning routine with Gabriel, head down to breakfast and come back up for his nap.  We prepare his things and wait to meet with the other families.

Gen, Gabriel and I go downstairs and meet up with Julian, Sara and Zoe.  Also with them is Greg, Gretchen and Danyar (sorry if I spelled his name wrong), their son.  Eric, Kami and Lincoln follow shortly.  Everyone squares their gear away and off we go.  For the next half hour or so Julian and Sara take us through a series of back roads and shortcuts in Almaty to where the cable car starts.  It’s not a bad walk, even though there are a lot of hilly sections that we passed through.  Along the way, we pass by what appears to be a university, Hotel Kazakhstan and some memorials.  We saw some graffiti at the university that didn’t take too kindly to President Bush, Americans and NATO.  I’ll post the PG rated pics up here. 

As we arrive at the ride, we notice that there is a van parked up front of the place with a cable car logo on it.  This can’t be a good sign.  We buy our tickets and then we are informed that the cable cars are out of service and we need to take the van up to the mountain.  In the van we go and up to the top of the mountain.

It’s nice and sunny with a nice breeze hitting us when we reach the top of Kok-Tobe.  There’s a billboard with picture of some famous actors, who had visited here.  Also up here is an alpine racer ride, some restaurants, mini zoo, a telecom tower and of all things, a statue of The Beetles.  They’ve never been here so I wonder why their statue was put up.  Weird…

All the while, Gabriel’s eyes were wide open.  He was taking in all the sites, and then, he fell asleep.  He was probably out for a good two hours or so.  He woke up right before we were starting to leave.  As we headed for the van, Eric ran to the cable car to see if it was operating.  It turns out, they started it up and we could take it down the mountain.  We all packed in and off we went.  Afterwards, all of us walked back towards our hotel, exchanged some email addresses and went our separate ways.

Gabriel is really getting comfortable in the baby carrier.  He enjoys looking at things and appears to be content.  We can’t wait to take him home and take him on our hiking trips with Dakota and Milo.

Tomorrow, we head for the US Embassy.  Let’s hope all goes well!!

Paka!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under In Country. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.