Tick tick, my heart was thumping in my ears. My palms were sweaty, my throat was dry and I had a desperate need to pee!
18 long and lonely minutes of solitude waiting in a slate coloured cell under the watchful emotionless eye of the CCTV camera. 18 minutes in no mans land. It felt way longer it could have been 18 hours. It was 18minutes since I last saw my passport... I was between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. A very serious looking soldier carrying an AK47 had spoken to me in harsh Russian before looking me up and down and taking my passport. (Be honest with yourself, would you have challenged him)
The road border crossing was everything as terrifying as you would imagine. I looked like a scene from a war movie with refugees pushing and shoving to squeeze through. Bribery was rife as more taller guards with even bigger hats took money left, right and centre in exchange for quick passage.
After an eternity my passport returned and I followed my long twisting snakelike line into Kazakhstan. BAM I'm thrown face first into a corrugated steal fence narrowly missing the barbed wire. An impossibly small old women scurries past me without a thought having just annihilated me with her life's possessions and a chicken carried behind her!
I approach the entry point and passport control, I once again file through the hamster run and slide my passport to a very officious looking women.
She hungrily scans my battered passport. In broken English .... Where is your visa?
My heart fell through the floor.