Two minutes until my train leaves, no time for long drawn-out goodbyes. I grab my bags, hug my friends and run for the train; Kungrad to Beyneu, Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan.

After settling in my assigned seat, I decide to wander up and down the train, look for foreigners that I can travel with. Big mistake. A guard in the adjacent carriage stops me and asks me where I’m going. I tell him that I’m trying to find my friends. This excuse works, so I move on, eventually bumping into three police officers checking people’s documents on the train.

"Show your documents,” one of them demands. I pull out my Russian passport, and all of the receipts I have. Uzbek bureaucracy can be a hassle for travellers; you need to keep receipts from every hotel you've stayed at, should border guards ask you for them. Roughly one-third of my time in Uzbekistan is unaccounted for, as I stayed with locals I met along the way, instead of lodging in “authorized hotels.”

"Your registration?" another officer asks. Turns out the rules for Russians travelling in this area of the world are different than those for western foreigners — so now the guards are talking about forcing me to pay a huge fine.

Here it comes, the same shtick I’ve had with every other border I've crossed in this region. An immigration officer takes me aside while his superior looks through my passport. "I have the forms and can help you out," he says. For a fee, all problems can disappear.

It must be my lucky day — the superior officer notices my Australian residence, then my accent, and he becomes friendlier. He exchanges a few words with the officer demanding the bribe and they have a change of heart. "It seems your registration is all in order."

We cross the Uzbek border without a hitch. While standing on the outside platform beside the Uzbek customs office, the guards call me over for a chat. I tell them about my travels of the past few months — in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, China, Tibet, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and now Kazakhstan — and they're so enthralled they invite me to their compartment to eat with them and share more stories.

As a guard leaves the compartment, his friend comes in. "Have you ever tried heroin?" the man asks, intently watching my reaction. My nonchalant reply, "No," seems to encourage him. "Why not?" I sense that this situation can turn sour. "It can do scary things to you." I shoot a glance at the guard, who's just returned, but he appears to be ignoring us. The friend, seemingly satisfied with my response, walks away.

A minute passes, the guard excuses himself and the friend returns with a blank expression, ignoring me. There’s a syringe sticking out of his shirt pocket. After a few moments, he produces a small bag containing a couple of grams of powder.

"Man, you want to try some of this heroin? It's unreal," he says, apparently unphased about how stupid, even wrong, it is to be high while entering a country.

"No thanks, but you might want to put away that syringe before we reach the Kazakh border," I reply nonchalantly, as if heroin is no big deal. "Oh fuck man, I can't believe I forgot about it," he replies, stuffing the syringe into his jean’s pocket.

He thanks me, offering the heroin as a free gift. I decline. He insists, reaching his arm out to put the bag in my pocket. I firmly grab his hand, shake it and give him a stern reply: "I don't want any now... maybe later." I don't want to get him upset.

I get up, excuse myself, leave the carriage and return to my assigned seat. A few minutes later, the so-called friend walks past flashing a wink, then proceeds to the next carriage.

An hour later, after clearing border formalities in Kazakh, a group of soldiers file on the train and immediately head towards me, ignoring the other passengers. They check that my passport is in order, then ask me to present my bags for inspection. While two soldiers thoroughly search my bag, another orders me to empty my pockets, patting them down to ensure that I've taken everything out of them.

I notice at the other end of the carriage the train’s guard is talking with the head soldier. They tell me to close my bag, turn to nearby passengers and in less meticulous fashion have a quick look through their bags.

After repacking my things, and while the train is chugging along, I come up with a theory for what just happened. The train guard purposely left the compartment every time his friend started discussing heroin, knowing that he'd offer it to me, hence the discussion with the head of the soldiers, most probably a conversation of how they’d split the bribe they’d force me to cough up when I got caught with the heroin.