Here I am at the entrance to what we believed was the pass into Kyrgyzstan. Many hours of wandering later, we discovered that this pass was not the correct one; we had lost the trail, as well as our friendly Kazakh hiking partners; we were stuck in a thunderstorm and, most importantly, we were horribly lost, a very loong days hike out from either trailhead with Will's flight back to the US in just over 24 hours time. Luckily, this story has a happy ending, as we found our Kazakh friends while retracing our steps in the wee hours of the next morning. Our Kazakh friends had searched most of the night and morning for us, fearing that their directions had led us astray. We were able to continue on with them into Kyrgzystan, rather than heading all the way back to the trailhead where we had begun days ago.