Bids and offers in no-man’s-land

Have fund, will travel: On the trail of investment opportunities in the Wild East

It’s eight o’clock on the Thursday evening, and the sun has by now very definitely set. We have been sitting in the no-man’s-land on the border between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan for the past couple of hours, doing battle with the local bureaucracy. Despite our having been assured by the Kyrgyz embassies in London and Moscow that tourist visas can be obtained at border crossings as well as at Bishkek’s Manas airport, the reality here on the border seems very different.