Kazakhstan Destinations

The place most visitors to Kazakhstan head for is Almaty. It’s a lively city with excellent nightlife and mountains within 30 minutes’ drive. The city is built on a grid pattern and so is fairly easy to get around. In the city there are art galleries and museums to help fill your time and a cable car up to the Kok Tobe viewpoint with great views over the smoggy landscape of Almaty. Panfilov Park is home to a beautiful Russian orthodox church and some striking Soviet war memorials. Another unmissable place is the Arasan bathhouse, the largest in the former Soviet Union, a sprawling collection of Turkish, Russian and Finnish saunas and baths.

The green bazaar is the place to head for if you want to try local delicacies such as kumis, kazy, dried yogurt balls and sheep’s heads. Kazakh souvenirs are readily available here – good buys include felt slippers, whips and phallic kumis containers.

The traffic in Almaty can be appalling and the pollution is bad so it’s great to have the mountains close by. The outdoor skating rink at Medeu is a 30-minute bus ride from the city centre and further up the mountain is the ski resort of Shymbulak, with facilities for both downhill skiing and snowboarding.

Further out of town you can try your hand at hunting with golden eagles in the village of Nura; go hiking in Sharyn canyon; or visit the singing sand dunes in the Altyn-Yemel national park. In the summer you can escape the heat by heading up to Lake Kapshagai for a cooling dip. Plans are afoot to turn the area into the new Las Vegas by moving all the casinos and mafiosi out of Almaty.

The capital Astana is smaller and less vibrant than Almaty but is worth a visit. The new city emerging from the steppe is reminiscent of Dubai, all skyscrapers and flashy new buildings. Bayterek, a tower in the centre of the new city, nicknamed ‘Chupa Chups’ because of its resemblance to the lollipop, gives good views over the city. In winter, temperatures are very cold and an ice city is built complete with replicas of the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China and Big Ben. North of the city is a region of lakes called Burabay; this is where people come to chill out in the summer.

The bleak region around the towns of Semey and Oskemen in the north-east of the country, known as the Polygon, was used for nuclear tests in the Soviet times. The area is a gateway to the rarely visited Altai mountains. These mountain are where Kazakhstan meets Russia, China and Mongolia.

For more bleak post-Soviet tourism try the Aral sea, or what’s left of it. The depressed towns and villages used to rely on the sea until it disappeared. The situation has stabilized, but the area remains underdeveloped. The rotting hulks of the former fishing ships can be found in a ship cemetery in a nearby village.

If you can’t be bothered to get an Uzbek visa or have been refused one, then Turkistan is a good place to visit and get a taste of what you’re missing. It is home to the Kozha Akhmed Yasuai mausoleum, a spectacular building to rival those in Samarkand and Bukhara, commissioned by Amir Timur, or Tamerlane, in the fourteenth century.

Finally, if you have a lot of money to burn then head for the Baykonur cosmodrome, the launch site for space flights where Yuri Gagarin took off from in 1961. if you want to watch a launch then be prepared to pay around $20,000.00 for the privilege.

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