Khazakstan (in winter)

ALMATY

Almaty is only a few hours by car from Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. On the advice of Shamil, my guide on the hike to Ala Archa (close to Bishkek), downloaded InDriver, an app which gives you an option to offer how much you want to pay for the car journey. It requires some knowledge of what a reasonable cost is (I ask locals) and gives you more options. (Yandex is the Uber of Central Asia and I have used it extensively. It helps being able to say you have a ride when you get out of an airport or a railway station and all the taxi drivers descend on you like vultures on a carcass.)

The quickest way across the border is on foot. Cars on a busy crossing, such as Korday, 21km from Bishkek, sometimes wait for several hours to be checked. On the Khazak side, shared taxis await. On this occasion, we were three women who decided to share the cost of the fourth person – faster than waiting for the fourth, and more comfortable.

Almaty was the capital of Khazakstan until December 1997. It is the largest city in Khazakstan (over 3 million inhabitants, to Astana’s 1,5), built in the foothills of the mountains and it has a cosmopolitan feel. Cafes and European shops are everywhere and the city has a very young vibe – lots of students.

Walking is an option, but the town is large and buses plentiful and cheap. (For the time being, one can still use cash on Almaty buses, though most people have an electronic ticket on their phone – the Kaspi app is their way of paying .) Plenty of monuments and parks and lots of cafes to rest weary feet. And, of course, the opportunity to ski right above the town.

The one trip I took outside Almaty was definitely worth getting up for early – to the Charyn river canyons. A crisp, beautiful day, a good hike down through a lovely, easily accessed canyon to where, as one tourist said, “rechka bezhaet” (the river runs). On the way back from the river, I took a shortcut up the steep hillside to get to the panorama viewpoint, and the ranger, who thought I was over ambitious in attempting the climb, sent a drone up to see I was ok. The canyon that is walkable is the oldest – some 27 million years to carve it, but the same river is still working at it and there are 2 “younger” canyons (c. 23-25 million years) we saw from above.

KARAGANDA

Why Karaganda? people ask. Because I wanted to see a place that has figured much in Stalinist USSR, the place where thousands of people had been sent to work (and perish) in the coal and copper mines, from the 1930s to 1960. Karaganda was the distribution centre for the Karlag – the Karaganda Gulags. The museum in Dolinka is housed in the former Karlag administration building and though the display is sanitised and “presented”, the horror of the concentration camp seeps through. The bleakness of the area around the building, the emptiness and the cold, the occasional heap of the open-cast mine and a chimney here and there, make it clear even today that this was not, as the Soviet rule claimed, a re-education centre.

I did manage to hear a concert in the Miners’ Culture Centre hall and had a comfortable stay in the hotel Chaika (The Seagull – as the Bradt guide puts it, it must be the furthest seagull from any sea) before heading to Astana. Chaika was the place where the astronauts would come to rest after their space flights – on the walls there are signed photos of Gagarin, Tereshkova… (I would like to have gone to Baikanur, the space port in Khazakstan, but the tours were all booked – there is a planned launch in March. Also, the area is under the dual Russian-Khazak ownership, meaning I would have needed a Russian visa.)

ASTANA

The train journey from Karaganda to Astana took some 4 hours and I had a 3rd class coupe to myself. The train tickets are cheap and the train journeys popular – certainly more comfortable (and less hair-raising) than a bus. Astana started life as a Russian fort in the 19th ct and later a Soviet administrative post in the ill-thought through Virgin Lands Campaign instigated by Khrushchev – trying to make the steppe into grain-producing fields. One of the reasons mentioned for the move (1994 – 1997) was that Almaty was very close to the Chinese border… There have been several changes of the name – Akmolinsk, Tselinograd, Akmola, Nur-Sultan… Astana means the Capital in Khazak. It has developed rapidly, with oil money being spent freely and the centre is a display of bold modern architecture. I can’t help thinking that it feels like an upstart, a nouveau riche to Almaty’s old money, all bright, angular, shiny, showing its wealth in the planned design (by the Japanese architect/planner Kurosawa Kisho) and in hiring the best architects the money could buy (including 2 major buildings by Sir Norman Foster). The Ishil river is central, with the right bank being the old part of town and the left, new.

The Khazaks are very keen to attract tourists and there is much to see and do – especially if you come in spring or summer. I just wish tourist information was more readily available – no tourist office as such, though I found one inside the Beitarek, the symbol of Khazakstan (the tree of life with the egg of renewal on top); very few places to top up your bus card – a passenger on a bus took me to purchase the card at a counter inside the circus building… And unless you have the Kaspi app, finding a machine to top up is a needle-in-a-haystack exercise.

But I really enjoyed several trips to the opera – a Khazak opera Kyz Zhybek; a traditional singing celebration of Nowruz, the Spring festival based on the Persian solar calendar and a ballet, Sherezade.

The trip to Borovoe – or Burabay resort: the Kahazakstan’s reply to a Lake district. The high season lasts for some 5 months – and March is not in it. But it was fun walking on the frozen lake and through the pine and birch woods. And I met Nazgul’ , an English teacher, as she was helping prepare iftar (an evening meal to break the Ramadan fast). Khazakstan is vast, and I have barely scratched its (icy) surface.