Dream vacation turns into vacation hell Passports stolen - Swiss couple stuck in Kazakhstan

blue News editor Sven Ziegler and his partner have their passports stolen in Kazakhstan. This is the beginning of an endless odyssey.

Friday lunchtime, shortly before 3 pm local time. We have been standing at the border crossing between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan for almost three hours. It is the arduous end to a fantastic two-week journey that has taken us through mountain landscapes, valleys and even rivers (yes, some of the roads in Kazakhstan run through rivers) that are largely unknown in Europe. But now we are at the Ak Tol border crossing, on the last leg of our journey. At this point, we had no idea that an odyssey was about to begin.

It's hot at the customs crossing. We queue for around 1.5 hours before we are finally allowed to drive our rental car into the control area. The scenes on the Kyrgyz side are unpleasant. An icy wind blows in the hall, grim customs officers frisk every car and look at every passport several times. It is eerily quiet. A sheepdog barks somewhere. A scene from a Spiegel TV documentary about the GDR border crossing at Helmstedt/Marienborn spontaneously comes to mind. I don't know if it was really like that, but we are glad when we are finally allowed to continue.

The game is repeated on the Kazakh side. Endless waiting in front of a counter to get the entry stamp. 40 cars per customs officer. People push their way through, there is shouting, the mood is bad. After an hour's wait, the customs officer looks at our passports with interest, examining each stamp for several minutes. "Life must be good in Switzerland," he says. We smile painedly.

A three-hour drive through nowhere

Then disaster takes its course. As we want to drive on, a man in trainers shouts "Stop! Car check!" A customs officer rushes up and tells us to get out. He wants to check the car, even looks into the hood. In a careless moment, I put the passports under my rucksack on the back seat. When we are finally allowed to drive on after several minutes, the man in tracksuit bottoms has disappeared. When I turn around with relief after customs to put the rucksack back in the trunk, there is nothing underneath: Nothing. The passports: gone.

We search everything, ask at customs. But nobody there wants to know anything about our passports. We are instructed to drive to the Kazakh city of Almaty, a journey of around three hours. On the way, we try to contact our embassies. While my friend is successful at the German embassy and immediately receives a 24-hour WhatsApp number for the on-call service, I run out of time: The Swiss embassy: Closed. Office hours. I also get nowhere with the FDFA helpline in Bern. They tell me to "contact the embassy directly on Monday".

The connection keeps dropping out, the cell phone network in the country is poor. Then, in the middle of a phone call with the insurance company in Switzerland, my phone gives up the ghost. A little later, I can no longer make any calls at all: "You have used up your roaming limit of 50 francs," reads a message on my screen.

We arrive in the big city at 6 p.m. in the evening. We are advised to go to the migration police immediately. But finding them is not so easy. Google Maps and the navigation service Yandex, which is widely used in Kazakhstan, have no idea what we are looking for. The first police station points us in the wrong direction, the second doesn't understand us. We wander through the dark streets.

Eventually we find the migration police after all, with the help of the German embassy. But when we get there, everything is dark. A single officer sits behind the window. It's closed and they can't help us without a passport. We would have to apply for emergency passports first, and that would require a police report. Not here, of course, but at another post. Where exactly? He didn't know. My thoughts turn to pass A38, a scene from "Asterix and Obelix". There, too, the protagonists are sent from door to door until they go crazy.

We do find the police station where we have to report the crime. After a lot of back and forth, we receive a report, but nobody wants to believe that the passports have been stolen. "There's no theft here", an official tells us. We are hungry and tired, we haven't eaten anything for almost 10 hours except a little watermelon. And now we know that we can't go any further before Monday. We're not going home.