We started the day by piling into the car at our usual time, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready for action. The first order of business was retracing that kilometre of hellish, potholed track we came in on yesterday, which served to wake me up completely with all the rattling and jolting. Upon reaching the village, Daddy Edu got all nostalgic and wanted to take another look at the giant Soviet grain silos. This time he went a step further: he got the drone out (that noisy bird that bugs me so much) and filmed an aerial video circling the structures. If they were imposing from ground level, from the sky they must have looked like rusty spaceships parked in the middle of nowhere.

With the video in the bag, we headed north. We made a quick stop at a supermarket (where I stayed on guard to make sure they didn’t forget my things) and arrived in Kostanay. We parked the camper near the river and set off on a walking exploration that lasted a whopping three hours. What a slog! Thank goodness the city is quite pleasant; it has a huge pedestrianised area and some super quiet parks that were perfect for me to sniff out new worlds.

Daddy Edu took me to see the Maral Ishan Mosque, a historic temple that he found beautiful, although I was more interested in the pigeons nearby. Then we headed down Al-Farabi Avenue to see the Russian Regional Drama Theatre, an imposing building that looked like the set of an old film, and we finished at Central Park, which was pristine and very well kept. The whole centre is quite compact, but we were disappointed after a very long walk to see the Cathedral of Saints Constantine and Helen. Daddy Edu imagined it would be colossal, but it turned out to be a tiny and underwhelming temple. It wasn't worth all that fuss... or all those steps!

Back at the car, we refilled the water tank at a street fountain, topped up the camper's diesel at a petrol station, and headed over a hundred kilometres east. And that’s when the drama started! The road here is awful, a festival of treacherous potholes and craters that had us doing the conga inside the cabin.

At the end of the afternoon, we found a beautiful spot to sleep by a river, very close to a bridge, just in time to catch one of those sunsets that makes you fall in love. The problem was that the area turned out to be extremely marshy. As soon as the sun went down, an army of millions of hungry mosquitoes appeared, eager to sink their teeth into my soft fur. There was no negotiating: we had to make a run for it, take refuge inside the camper and bolt the hatches tight if we didn't want to end up as an all-you-can-eat buffet in Kazakhstan. More tomorrow, if these winged vampires let us get any sleep!