ST. PETERSBURG, October 13 (Itar-Tass) - Travelers from Kazakhstan plan to make the world’s first-ever round-the-globe camel journey, Baktiyar Kozhakhmetov, the initiator of the journey and director of the Ulytau national history and nature reserve, told an international tourism forum in St. Petersburg on Saturday.
Organizers have started to agree the route and prepare animals for the long yomp. They hope for assistance from partners in Russia, the Czech Republic and Germany.
The expedition will start from Russia’s Altai mountains and will be bound for Europe. After crossing the Czech Republic, Germany and France, the traveler will take a plane to cross the Atlantic. In North America, they will traverse the United States’ Texas and California on camels and again will take a plane, this time for China. From China, they will return to its starting point in the Altai, Kozhakhmetov told Itar-Tass.
According to Kozhakhmetov, a camel journey is much harder to get prepared to that any other expedition, including bicycle and horseback ones. “Maybe, an elephant expedition would be more difficult to organize,” he noted. To set off for their camel expedition, the organizers must choose roads with the right surface, ensure veterinary backing and settle border and other formalities.
Because of veterinary restriction in European countries, the travelers will have to change their Kazakhstan’s camels for the ones rented in Russia, the United State and China.
According to Kozhakhmetov, it will take about three years to get prepared for the five-camel expedition, which last four years.
He said that there had been attempts to organize camel round-the-globe expeditions in other countries but they all had failed. Kozhakhmetov is an experiences camel traveler - in 1999-2005 his caravan reached the Austrian border.