Meet Dinara
Our Story
Where It Started
The Joke I Grew Up Answering
I grew up watching the world reduce my country to a punchline. A movie character with a mankini and a mispronounced name. That was the version of Kazakhstan most outsiders carried in their heads. None of it was mine.
Mine was the steppe at dawn, silver with frost. My grandmother's hands shaping bread for the earth oven. Eagle hunters who still ride the ridgelines above Almaty. Neighbors on the other side of a mountain pass who somehow felt like family the moment you sat down with them.
"The steppe does not perform. It does not try to impress you. I wanted to build something that didn't either."
How We Grew
From Almaty to Seven Countries
Beyond Steppe started small: a handful of trips I planned myself for friends and friends of friends who wanted to see the Tien Shan the way I saw it, not the way a tour brochure describes it. What guests kept telling us they valued wasn't any single activity. It was being somewhere real, in a small group, with someone who knew the place from the inside.
So we built more of exactly that. Today Beyond Steppe runs small-group journeys across Central Asia and Europe: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, and Austria. Same honesty, same small groups, just a much bigger map.
The Team
Small By Design
There's no big operation behind Beyond Steppe. It's me and a small team who actually run everything: plan the routes, work with local guides in each country, and keep the whole thing honest. Nobody here is outsourced or seasonal.
I'm on most trips myself, and every tour is led by someone from the team who's traveled that route before, more than once. It's the only way I know to keep this real as it grows across seven countries instead of one.
Ready to See the Map?
Take a look at the tours, or go straight to applying. I read every application myself.