Car accident

I got into a car accident on Saturday while traveling between Karabulak and Taldy Korgan. I'm fine, although I have whiplash and it puts me into a horrible mood. The word "whiplash" is not in my Russian-English dictionary, so it takes me awhile to explain why I move like a robot.

If there is one thing I learned during my internship at State Farm Insurance it was driver safety statistics. The death rate by cars is worse in Kazakhstan than in America because of bad roads, poor drivers, lack of seatbelts and police enforcement. However the Kazakhstan government has taken steps to improve driver safety by receiving a multi billion dollar loan to repair the roads between its major cities such as Almaty to Astana and to create new ones to its major trading partners Russia and China. Not only will the road repairs make driving safer, it will hopefully provide an economic boost to a country which contains practically every natural resource on Earth but has trouble exporting them. I could go on, but this post is starting to read like a research paper. If you want to read more about Kazakhstan's road woes, I'd recommend getting your hands on the November 2008 issue of the Economist.

When I travel in Kazakhstan I always take into account the time of day, weather conditions, type of car, and who I ride with. I don't travel at night. I travel only when the weather is good. I also won't ride with "young guns" who feel like they have something to prove on the streets, nor ride in heavily modded cars (I won't ride if I see anything like an aftermarket turbo boost meter, NOS kit, short shifter, exhaust system, etc). While the city roads are great, between major cities and in the country Kazakhstan's roads are awful and I want to keep my body intact.

Anyway, the accident.

The particular car was one of those modern stationwagon/coupe type cars. The man driving was nice and didn't try to mark up his price (a popular taxi driver method to rip off foreigners), and there was already a young women and an old Kazakh babushka in the car. The roads were reasonably clear and it was daytime so I felt reasonably safe. We pulled off and accelerated to the highway speed. That was when things went wrong.

The car started to sideslip and thinking that it was ice, the driver slowed down a little. In retrospect I think that's what saved us. A couple of minutes later the car started to slide again. At this point, if he had just stopped with his brakes, we would have been fine. I don't know what his problem was, but he started some maneuvers that made the situation worse and almost killed us. The fool shifted out of 5^th gear into 2^nd, cranked on the emergency brake, and cranked the wheel full to the right. The tires locked up, we started to spin, and we heard a weird metal grinding sound.

A lot of languages filled the car as we spun. The babushka began to pray in Kazakh, the young lady shouted in Russian, and I yelled at the driver about the stupidity of using the emergency brake at high speeds in English. We made two revolutions, and two tires left the ground but we didn't roll. We hit the curb and the rail on the side and came to a stop.

We all got out of the car (the babushka was still praying) and looked at the car. I quickly saw what the grinding noise was: the back wheel was folded up underneath the car at almost a 90 degree angle. One of the front tires was in ribbons (we blew it when we spun), and when I walked near the hood of the car I smelled something burning unlike burnt rubber (maybe from his red-lining his engine?). We ended up hitchhiking to Taldy Korgan.

And now I am writing this post, with my back to a heater to keep my neck and back loose enough so I can sleep tonight. So, while I'm miserable in the short term, I'll defiantly take it. It could have been worse.