Chaos Theory
14th September, 2007
by Dan Murdoch

Chaos Theory: A water vole farts in the Thames, and tsunamis strike the coast of Fiji. Or something like that.

Our instigator was the Baku-Turkmenbashi ferry. If that had taken the 12 hours it was meant to, rather than three days, we would have had got to Turkmenistan earlier, and had time to repair Gunther without overstaying our visas. That would have meant we could have got out of the country five days earlier and a few hundred dollars better off. The delay impacted on our Uzebek visas, meaning we had just six days in the country. You could spend six days in Samarkand alone. In the end we probably stayed a night too long in Buckara, maybe even Khiva- we should have pushed on to the wonders of Samarkand earlier. Tashkent, central Asia’s most important city, got missed out all together.

Small details have consequences that reach far into our trek . Perhaps if we’d not bargained so hard at the Baku port we would have got onto the earlier ferry. It left 12 hours earlier and may have got in days earlier for all we know. But I guess there is no planning for these circumstances.

Without a doubt this has been the hardest part of the trek. We arrived in Turkmenistan on the 31st August. It is now September 15th. In a fortnight we have covered just a couple of thousand miles. Constantly, whenever we have hit the road. Something has gone wrong. A car has broken down, mostly Gunther, but Fez has had touble too. It seems like we drive for an hour before a major stoppage. I don’t remember the last time we did a decent ten-hour journey in the right direction (We run out of gas, we run out of water, we take a wrong turn, we break down, we find a spot for a swim.)
We are now tied to our Russian visa – our visas run from September 18th to October 9th. We aren’t planning on seeing much in the way of sites there. The great barren emptiness of Siberia is a supposedly stunning wilderness, and the scenery is our site.
But we have a few thousand kilometres to travel on roads of unknown quality. Even if we arrive in Russia on schedule, we will have nine days to do it- which may be tough.
Making up for lost time over the next few weeks will be crucial.

ends