Our second night in Almaty saw us checking into the local university campus dormitory accommodation - relatively cheap for Almaty which is a pricey city compared to China and the rest of central asia. Our mate we met at the China/Kazakh border pulled into Almaty today and we managed to confuse him drastically trying to give directions to our accommodation to share the dorm. On meeting up we decided to grab some food and a beer. The night turned pear shaped upon arriving at bar/restaurant. we had had a couple of beers already before the Kazakh's at the next table started getting friendly. Suddenly one of them (evidently the bar owner) started laying into one of the customers at the bar with his walking stick. He wouldn't stop hitting this poor soul until the customer had run bloodied out of the bar and the owner had amazingly broken his walking stick with one last swipe across the guy's back. the response from the other table was that "this is Almaty, and its normal". A while longer the Kazakh's asked us to join them at which point we got stuck into the Vodka with them. Funniest part of the night came when one of the folk, making a speech at the time, described Kazakhstan as "very niiiice" in an almost uncanny Borat accent (i'm sure it wasn't on purpose as any mention of the film Borat will get you a stern look as well as a beating and perhaps even 'death...'). We managed to hide our delight and stifle our laughs. an hour later, they were getting ready to leave for they had work the next day, we departed for our dorm. They surprizingly asked us to go camping with them the next day for the weekend - hunting and fishing. Something we were keen for, as, except for the beating up of one of their patrons, they were a friendly bunch.

The next day, with slight hangovers, was a messy affair. we all departed for our respective embassies, to get visas, as well as to the police station to register. This ended up taking too long and we missed the opportunity to go hunting and fishing. Nevertheless we went out again that night and got properly inebriated. I apparently passed out on the roadside and was rather lucky not to be robbed blind. I arrived back at the dorm at 4am and got 1 hour sleep before Matty woke me up stating his bus was leaving soon and that we needed to head to the bus station. In my drunk state was up in a flash to accompany Matt being more a hindrance than anything else. At least i got to say goodbye to the kid who did exceedingly well to make it on the adventure in the first place. He is missed already.