As I write, knowing what is coming next, I’m convinced that the rule of threes is alive and well and following us on our first 24 hours in Central Asia.

I’m not normally a superstitious kind of girl, however when I started to write about the passport, while thinking about the aborted landing, while remembering the need for a winching, there can be no other explanation but the proverbial rule of threes.

The Passport Problem

Our flight to Almaty was due to take off at 0920 and our friends had said they would meet us somewhere around 0830ish after they had checked in and got to the gate. Also coming along were another family of 5 and another friend of F&I’s who had flown out from the UK earlier in the week. At about 0800 I had a text saying they were in the check-in queue and would see us shortly.

Half an hour later, one of the children came through to the gate with the other family, but without F&I. It seems that when they joined the queue they realised that they had left one of the children’s passports at home! Oh no! They live about 20 minutes from the airport, and F immediately jumped into a taxi and did a super-fast round trip to get the missing passport and with 10 minutes to spare before the take-off time was due, they all came through to the gate. F made it back just in time and was able to check in… and then the flight was delayed.

We all wondered if this was a bad omen; although it could have gone either way – it was always going to play out one of two ways – averting a near complete disaster would mean that nothing else could possibly go wrong, or that ‘things going wrong’ usually come in three’s so there were at least another two to go.

Mind you, aside from anything really drastic, a 5 year old having to be left behind would be a pretty bad start to a holiday. I’ve often wondered since what we would all have done if F hadn’t made it back on time?

The Aborted Landing

The trip is fast turning out to hold a series of ‘firsts’ for me; first Visas, first Central Asia trip, first Russian speaking experience, first Plov (more of that later), first Kökbörü (more of that later too), and yes, first aborted landing.

The flight from Astana to Almaty was already over an hour late when we boarded. We all managed to be sitting roughly together, despite N and I having checked in on another continent. It was a 1hr 40min hop and a skip from the new capital to the old, and I was looking forward to gazing out of the window across endless steppe. What I got out of the window, was endless rain, snow, cloud and fog. No view of this amazing wasteland. Nada.

We were making our descent towards Almaty before we knew it; time flies when you have some catching up to do with your fellow passengers, and in N’s case, when you have sleep to be grabbed every time you are sitting down. As we neared the runway, the snow flurries all but obliterated the view out of the tiny windows, and then, just seconds before the wheels must have been ready to touch the tarmac, the pilot pulled hard up and we were once again heading up into the skies above Almaty.

A collective audible intake of breath sounded in the cabin, along with one or two ‘Shiiiiit!’s and a couple of words in Russian that I can only imagine must have been ‘Shit’ or similar in that language. Children started to cry, and F behind me started chuckling, leaned forward in his seat and said to me ‘First aborted landing eh?’ As a regular Air Astana flier, maybe it’s a regular occurrence?

The second time in, and N said he thought we were a lot further back on the runway. How he could see this through the window I don’t know. Maybe he thought it was more reassuring to put the aborted landing down to pilot error rather than technical malfunction (even as I type, I cannot work out which is the lesser of those two evils).

The Winching

This part of the story really and truly belongs in another post, but I plan to put it here, and then I won’t put it there.

The journey had been long. Longer than any of us thought possible. Longer than The Book suggested it would take (but then, Lonely Planet probably calculated the time based on a coach in the summer, rather than an ancient minibus in the winter).

There are three ingredients needed for a winching. A minibus, a steep hill, and a shed load of snow. Lucky us! We had all three!

It was 0300 (ish) when we arrived at the bottom of the hill – roughly 1.5km from the ski lodge. I promise eventually I’ll stop making body clock comparisons, but right then, it was 22hours since we took off from Frankfurt and I can’t even remember the last time I slept. We were tired, our friends were tired, the drivers were tired (eek!), the minibus was tired. It took one look at the hill and said ‘I’m just not gonna make it up there folks!’ We piled out.

The 4×4 had gone up ahead and deposited its load of sleepy passengers at the lodge, who checked in and got the kids lucky enough to be in the 4×4 in to bed.

We tried going up again. No luck. We tried getting out and pushing. No luck. The girls amongst us were all for trekking up the road to our beds – it was so close! We could hear the warm comfy cosy beds calling! No. All hands were needed on deck, and at the time, we didn’t know the ‘600m or so’ was actually about 1.5km.

A taxi whizzed by us on the way up. 15 minutes later it whizzed by us on the way down. How kind of the driver to stop and help.

Somewhere around now, it started to snow again. Heavily.

Eventually the headlights of the 4×4 could be seen winding its way carefully down the slippery hill. Now, how best to get us both back up again? First, they tried the ‘drag us up method’. Even I could see there was no way this was going to work. We were attached to a tow rope, the 4×4 attempted to tow us up the hill. It worked! Until we hit the place we couldn’t get past before and the 4×4 did not have enough power or traction to heave the might of the minibus up and over the tricky bit. We gradually slipped and slid back to where we started.

The sound track to all this was the bleep of DS’s being merrily played in the back of the van, and the women-folk muttering to ourselves vowing that we would ‘just bloody walk up the bloody mountain’.

The next plan – get to where we were getting stuck on the hill, and then receive a right good winching from the 4×4. The 4×4 headed up backwards. Parked up beyond the tricky spot, and waited for the van. As we watched from the roadside, snow falling, the winch was attached to the front of the minibus and the pulling started.

It was working!! Even in our dead-on-our-feet tiredness we could jump up and down with delight at the sight before us! We were going to make it without having to wait for the big thaw! Hurrah!

At 0430hrs on Sunday 21st March, 23 and a half hours after stepping onto the plane at 1730 CET, we had made it! I slept like a baby.