"The Invincible" and the SIM Card

by Holger Hoffmann (Switzerland)

I didn't expect to find Kazakhstan

Perhaps you remember the IT specialist Boris Grishenko in James Bond’s Golden Eye who repeatedly said "Yes, I am invincible!". We may have met his little brother in Kegen, a Kazakh border town to Kyrgyzstan. On our six-month journey with our Land Cruiser we have visited a total of 25 countries, and as long as Elon Musk's Starlink is not implemented, we continue to buy a SIM card in every country to have internet access. Since each country has at least two providers, you better ask several people, which company offers the best coverage, before buying a SIM card. In Tajikistan Megaphone was better than Beeline, but we still had lots of dead zones in the Pamir. They are all cheap, however, in some countries buying a SIM card can be extremely time-consuming. For example in Iran, the provider had to make a request to Tehran by faxing my passport and visa with the result that it was rejected after 24 hours due to the current conflict with the USA, or in Poland, where we had to visit three shops until everything worked. Sometimes everything goes straightforward, as with Lifecell in the Ukraine, where we got the SIM card without even showing our passports. To our surprise also the Russian MTS provider was also easygoing. But hoping that in all countries we visited SIM cards might be installed the same way, turned out to be a pious wish. Irancell, Megafon, Beeline, Megacom, Lifecell, MTS, Orange, Vodafone, or Plus, all have to be set differently: WLAN password: none or 123456789?, PIN yes or no?, APN?, personal hotspot switched on?, allow access for others?, etc. Sometimes you receive an SMS with instructions, but only in the local language, or even worse written in Cyrillic or Arabic. Thus, you almost always need help. Mostly the people are very helpful and more or less competent, and assure you that the activation will take place automatically within minutes. However, this does not always happen. So I have learned not to leave the shop before the new SIM card proves to be functional. Once everything is set, then come the daily promotional texts and ccasionally a text that informs you, your credit has been used up. Since all text messages were written in their language, I never got the slightest clue of their meaning. In Kegen I first headed to the bank to exchange our remaining Kyrgyz Som to Kazakh Tenge, but the problem was – they only accept dollars. Nobody wanted to exchange our Som in the bazaar either. Luckily, I met a Swedish couple, who were traveling to Kyrgyzstan on two motorcycles, just about to eat a bowl of Lagman – a typical dish of Central Asia. They were overjoyed to get rid of the rest of their Tenge. Now there is nothing standing in the way of buying a SIM card. The Swedish couple told me that they had no problems with the Beeline network. I asked around in the bazaar and was referred to a small mobile phone shop. The two employees were very helpful with the installation, but something just was not working. They compared the settings on their phones with those on my iPhone after changing its language settings to Kazakh. But they did not find any differences and were at a loss. After half an hour, they called a colleague who arrived a few minutes later. After a few tries, he could not help either. Then all of a sudden, a 16-year-old guy entered the shop, the “Invincible”’s little brother. He took my iPhone and as a digital native tapped through the settings unerringly, typed in a few digits, and suddenly everything worked! To our amazement, he only showed us a tired smile. When we arrived in Almaty two days later, the internet did not work again. Our “Invincible” would also be powerless against the Kazakh secret service. The secret service had blocked access to Google, Facebook, and Twitter in order to prevent the organization of student protests that had been going on for days in the streets of Almaty. This time we didn’t get help from James Bond, but by using a VPN app.