An overnight train has taken us back to Almaty for the final two nights - we were supposed to be going up into another set of mountains but the snow has started to melt and the roads are all closed. I always know when it’s time to go home, when I start fantasising how to inflict painful murder on a member of the group. You always get one odd ball on these trips but I’ve been slightly more tolerant of this one as they are obviously mentally ill. God knows why ...

Nine days spent at a guesthouse at the foot of the Tien Shan mountains without WiFi has been fantastic. Some days have involved driving quite long distances with the only excitement being a lost tomato loose on the bus. Days have been in amazing scenery with me walking miles while the others look at the ground. I have nearly trodden on a pit viper which I only saw when it hissed and lunged at me. The trouble is the b*****s are apparently everywhere and so well c...

I have been here for two weeks now. The first two days were lovely pottering about mostly by myself. My cunning plan of avoiding twitchers and going with botanists as they would look at a flower and move on has spectacularly failed. Trips involve driving sometimes as far as half a mile, piling out and looking at the ground for an hour and a half. I decided this had to change so have been walking a couple of miles and meeting the group later or getting off the min...

My initial plan to get by here with only knowing that an E in Russian is the same as English but backwards isn’t really working. I had to ask for the toilet this morning and nearly had to act it out. We drove for miles today and ended up in a windswept rubbish dump . There were a few quietish whoops of joy at the first tulip spotting ( yellow) but as the group had gone straight from the airport to the minibus, most were just staggering about like Sean of the d...

My main aim today was to find a fountain with a snail statue in it. I did find it eventually after walking an hour in the wrong direction as these bloody grid systems all look the same. The fountain was empty but have twelve Kazakh signs of the zodiac like a chicken, snail, little mouse and pig. I’ve had to put the photos in the photo section as can’t get used to this new blog. After the fountain I wondered around a park full of Russian war memorials and Rus...