Some worries woke me up at 5:30 and they had been confirmed in the next 2 hours.
Yesterday, I received an email from Kazakhstan Railways stating that my ticket number 58739575 was invalid due to late payment. I could exchange it for another ticket, etc. So I checked and saw that it was for the Almaty–Arys–Tashkent–Bukhara route. This made all my other bookings useless!
I tried to find alternatives, but every option (Shymkent, Bishkek, etc.) was somehow blocked. For example, there is a bus from Almaty (14 hours to Tashkent), but it was only available at a too late date, so only a flight Tashekent to Bukhara would maybe get me there in time. I could risk taking the train to Arys and try to find a taxi or private car to Tashkent (160 km), but what if it wasn’t? I would have been stuck there!
If there is no reliable way to get to Tashkent, flying wouldn’t be very convenient either (a layover and a self-transfer), but it adds up to my “never travel again” decision.
The driver took me to the ferry port. With my passport, I was able to pick up my ticket (prepared by Jing, China agency), buy some nuts, etc., with my last NT$, and drop the remaining money into a donation box.
The ferry was just as fast as last time, but the sea was calm, and my stomach wasn’t burdened by overeating or rough sea, so I was even able to write something.
In Fuzhou, the immigration card was the first challenge, but a friendly official helped me. Fortunately, Han had already gotten me the ticket to Almaty, as you need proof that you’re leaving China within the 30-day visa-free period. I needed my laptop to get the address of the Chinese hotel, as my phone didn’t have internet access, and the official couldn’t connect my phone to the ferry port’s Wi-Fi. However, I had saved a PDF of the booking on my laptop.
The final part of the travel agency’s planning involved taking me to the Vienna Hotel. I followed the route on maps, but after a while, I felt like the driver was going somewhere else. I tried to explain and showed him the hotel’s location on the map, but he didn’t change the route. So, I sent Jing the hotel’s English address (the only one I had on my phone) and asked her to send him the correct one. Meanwhile, we had arrived at a “hotel Vienna”, and I asked the driver to wait before dropping me off. At that moment, he got the correct address and took me there. There are not just two, but several hotels in Vienna in the area.
So it’s good to mark the address on a map, have an offline map (it was only when I was already on the road that I was able to convince the e-SIM to do its job again in China), and generally save, print, write down, etc., everything.
I know this anyway and try to stay up to date, but it’s tedious, especially with many rebookings.
I took an afternoon stroll to the cultural theme park, but I was too late to enter a museum, so I just went for a long walk.
In the end I located the bus stop where I might get a direct ride to the train sation tomorrow (1:20 hours), At the hotel they “told” me (tranlation app) that I would need 2 Yuan in coins to pay, so I went to a shop to get some coins.
And then I struggled with my bookings, trains, and the internet…
