Kazakhstan Joins the Map: Our Seventh Tour

We built six tours across Central Asia and Europe before we built one around Almaty itself, which is a strange thing to admit since Almaty is where Beyond Steppe actually started.

Why It Took This Long

Every tour we run has to earn its place, tested by our own team before we ever bring a guest. Almaty was so familiar to us that we kept assuming it wasn't a "tour," it was just home. It took guests asking, more than once, whether they could actually visit where this all began for us to realize that was exactly the point.

What Almaty Is Actually Like

Most people arrive expecting something Soviet and grey. What they find is a green city, full of tree-lined avenues and parks, with a wall of snow-capped mountains rising right behind it. On a clear day the peaks look close enough to touch, and you can be in them within an hour of the center.

Almaty was the capital of Kazakhstan until 1997 and is still its largest city. It has good coffee, a growing food scene, and the easy, unhurried feeling of a place where people walk a lot and look up at the mountains often.

What's in the Tour

Six days, each one a short drive from the city, so the pace stays relaxed:

• The city: Panfilov Park and its colorful wooden cathedral, the Green Bazaar for dried fruit, cheese and horse-meat sausage, and a cable car up to Kok-Tobe for a view over the city and the Tien Shan behind it.
• The mountains above the city: the Medeu ice rink and Shymbulak, where a cable car keeps climbing into the high valley.
• Charyn Canyon: the red-rock Valley of Castles, about 200 km east. We wrote a full Charyn Canyon guide if you want the details.
• Kolsai and Kaindy lakes: pine-ringed mountain lakes, and Kaindy's sunken forest, where spruce trunks still stand in the water after a 1911 landslide.
• Big Almaty Lake: a turquoise lake about 2,500 meters up in the foothills. It's a protected water source, so no swimming, but the color alone is worth the drive.

It's paced for people who want mountains, a real city, and a canyon that genuinely rivals better-known ones, without a punishing itinerary.

What You'll Eat

Kazakh food is nomad food, built around meat, bread and dairy, and Almaty is the best place to try all of it. Beshbarmak, boiled meat over wide flat noodles, is the national dish and is traditionally eaten together from one large plate. Baursak, small puffs of fried dough, appear at every table, and plov, rice cooked with meat, carrots and spices in a huge pan, is a Central Asian favorite everywhere you go.

Almaty's food scene goes well beyond tradition, too. The city has Uyghur restaurants serving hand-pulled lagman noodles, Korean dishes brought by the Korean community that has lived here for generations, and a growing number of modern cafés and bakeries. Kazakhstan is also known for its apples, and Almaty's name is usually traced to the Kazakh word for apple, so try them in the autumn markets.

For the adventurous, there's kumys, fermented mare's milk, and shubat, fermented camel's milk, both sold at the Green Bazaar. They're sour, slightly fizzy, and an important part of the region's history. A small cup is enough to say you've tried it.

Who It's For

This is our easiest Central Asia trip. There are no yurt nights and no long drives on unpaved roads, so it suits first-time visitors to the region, people traveling with older parents, or anyone combining Kazakhstan with our Kyrgyzstan tour next door.

It's also the tour Dinara is most likely to lead herself, because it's her home ground.

When to Go

Late spring through early autumn is best for the mountain lakes. May and September are our favorites: green, warm and quieter. We wrote more about the seasons in our guide to the best time to visit Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Where to Start

If you've read our journal for a while, this is the closest thing we have to a hometown tour. See the full itinerary →

Common Questions