Almaty Archives - Wandering North

Asia Central Asia 2022 Kazakhstan

A Bit of Luxury in Almaty

Crossing back into Kazakhstan from Kyrgyzstan

I had a flight booked from Bishkek back to Almaty. A very short and very inexpensive flight. However, having experienced how quick and easy it is to cross by (shared) taxi and on foot, I decided to skip the airports altogether, ditched the flight and caught a taxi to the Kazakhstan/Kyrgyzstan border.

I walked across, it was quick and almost without hassle. I say “almost” because the immigration guard for Kazakhstan said insistently that I needed a visa. I just responded “No, I don’t. I get an automatic 30 day visa at the border.” He shrugged and wordlessly stamped my passport.

*the path from one border checkpoint to the next*

Back on Kazakh soil, immediately the women who was in the queue behind me started speaking to me in English. She was from Kyrgyzstan but living in Almaty. She wanted to know if I would share a taxi with her. I said “Absolutely.” She found us a car with two other people waiting and did the haggling (getting us a better price than I could have gotten myself. And in moments we were off. It was a nice drive, with pleasant chats and a stop at a roadside stand for fresh horse milk and balls of qurut. The ride was about $4 CDN and I was in Almaty by 11am.

Back in Almaty and into the lobby of luxury

Back in Almaty at the bus station, I caught a taxi to my hotel for my final night of this trip. I usually stay at hostels or budget accommodation, but sometimes I like to have a bit of a splurge on my final night. To have my own room and not share a bathroom with anyone. That is what I was doing that day and…what a splurge.

I stayed one night at the fabulous Rixos Almaty. Definitely, as far as big hotels go, it is the fanciest place I have ever stayed. Like a Grand Budapest Hotel. Gleaming white in the day and illuminated pink at night. The lobby is a huge atrium with trees and intimidatingly posh-looking cafes – oh, and it has a cigar store and lounge, which was the deciding factor that caused me to book it.

Walking in, I felt like Eddie Murphy in Beverley Hills Cop when he walks into the Beverly Palm Hotel, clearly out of place. I always wear black, and I don’t wear athletic wear, sneakers, or sandals, so I didn’t look super casual, but I had a backpack, and I wasn’t that clean. Everyone else looked very clean and classy. But I had the golden ticket. I had a reservation.

My room was…wow. Huge and with a balcony and a giant bed and the biggest bathtub. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I had just been sharing a single toilet with four men and several cockroaches, so this was a welcome change.

*my room (bubble bath pictures not included)*

I had a bubble bath, got cleaned up, and headed out. First stop was the cigar lounge for a Partagas Series D No.4.

From there I just went out walking. It was a glorious day. I had already done all the sightseeing in Almaty that I wanted to do, so I just walked leisurely. The weather was perfect, and people were out strolling and packing the patios at the sidewalk cafés and restaurants.

*just one of many inviting cafes. I went to this one.*

I stopped and had multiple coffees and some pomegranate iced tea.

more coffee at this side street café with outdoor swing seats

I roamed around and snapped pictures of street art murals. Almaty isn’t super street arty, but there are some nice murals if you look for them.

*murals* *(The middle one reminds me of Weird Al. No idea who it actually is)*

I browsed at an outdoor craft market and just watched the world go by. And then I got to the Opera House; a beautiful and grand yellow structure with fountains. To my luck, there was an opera that night.

The show was “Abai”, a newish (2015) Kazakh opera about the life of poet Abai Qunanbaiuly (a Kazakh poet from the late 19^th century), and it was starting at 6:00pm. I bought a single ticket for the centre orchestra, which cost about $10 CDN.

It was a great treat. I was very happy that it was a Kazakh show, and the production was impressive. Of course, I couldn’t understand a word of it, but I enjoyed the music, staging and costumes. That said, I did leave at the second intermission – not because it wasn’t good – I had seen enough and wanted to enjoy a dinner on my last night in town.

I walked back to what had become my favourite eating/smoking restaurant patio in Almaty and had some Armenian flat breads filled with herbs and I smoked shisha until late into the night.

It was a perfect end to my time in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. In the morning I flew home. This trip made me even more curious to visit Turkmenistan and Tajikistan and Afghanistan (the three (of seven) ‘stans I have left to visit. Something to look forward to.

Asia Central Asia 2022 Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan

Almaty to Bishkek

Almaty and Bishkek are close together, making visiting both of them (and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan together on one trip) temptingly easy. Driving is probably the easiest way, but if you don’t have a car or the ability to drive, you can fly (super short flight; you’d spend more time at the airport than you would in the air) or bus/taxi/walking.

In the past, and maybe even now, you could/can take a bus from Almaty to Bishkek right through. From what I hear, it is convenient and comfortable. When I went though they had temporarily stopped that service, so the option was to take a bus to the border, walk across, and then take another bus. That sounded fine. I took a taxi to the huge bus station (Sayran Station) where I discovered that I had just missed the bus and the next was not for about 4 hours. I wasn’t about to spend my time sitting around, so I walked outside to where a ground of men were gathered around cars and hoped that they were taxi drivers and that one of them spoke English. They were, and they didn’t. Through a few words of Russian and a series of pointing, smiling, and nodding gestures, and writing numbers on paper, we set on a price for one of them to drive me to the border at the town of Kordai.

These are shared taxis; you can wait for others to fill up the car and pay for your seat, which is a bargain, but if you’re impatient, you can pay for all of the seats and go. Still not that expensive. That’s what I did. It cost 20,000 Tenge and took about 2.5 hours.

*mural spotted on the way out of Almaty*

The ride was pleasant and took about 2.5 hours. There wasn’t much to see. A few herds of cows and the odd monument to mark the turnoff to some other place.

*No idea what this is for, but doesn’t it look cool?*

Finally we got to the border crossing. A long line of cars and buses waited to cross, but I was walking, so I left my taxi behind, took my backpack and walked across the border, passing the cars and finding myself at the border without having to queue.

The border crossing was a wordless affair as the guard looked at me, looked at my passport, stamped it, and let me go.

*me, walking across the border to Kyrgyzstan with my backpack, a bit bedraggled but happy*

On the other side, I was descended on my predatory taxi drivers, charging too much for their services, but knowing they had me. I did overpay for the ride to my hostel, but it was still a bargain and I was not in the mood to stubbornly wait in the heat.

About 20 minutes later, my driver dropped me off at my hostel: USSR Hostel. In an old Soviet apartment block, now with a row of highly commercial shops at the bottom. USSR Hostel is really more of a shared apartment. The woman who owns it lives upstairs and the 2 bedrooms in this unit are rented out, with guests to share the washroom and kitchen facilities. My room was a cute little pink room with twin beds and a picture of Lenin on the wall. The other room had four guys from Pakistan. They didn’t speak a word of English but seemed nice and invited me to share in their dinner.

I liked this hostel. It was cheap, had a good location, and gave me a look inside one of the style of buildings I am always curious about. It was like staying in a museum or play acting what it was like to live in the USSR. It suited me just fine.

I’ll save my thoughts about Bishkek for the next post, but I’ll just say, if I’m ranking cities (I’m not and no one asked me to), Bishkek came out ahead of Almaty. More for later.

Asia Central Asia 2022 Kazakhstan

Almaty: Green Market / Red Meat

The Green Bazaar

Almaty’s central market is the Green Bazaar, technically Kök Bazaar. I walked there from my hotel. A nice walk. Sights and sounds of Almaty.

It opened in 1875 but was rebuilt after an earthquake later that century and then rebuilt multiple times over the decades. The market does not look interesting from the outside. It’s just a big green building. Nondescript. Inside though, it is bustling with everything you could want from a Central Asian market. Piles of colorful fruits and vegetables. Bins of spices. Jars of pickled … everything. Nuts and dried fruits. Locally made honey. Horse meat. And unidentifiable food items.

I took a lot of photos of everything; the familiar and the new. Smiling at vendors and sampling items as they were offered.

The butchery section of any market is always one of my favourites. I just find it fascinating and gruesome. We never see this stuff at home (unless you’re actively involved with the killing and processing of animals for food). And I do love gross stuff, so seeing piles of hearts and stomachs, intestines strung up like morbid party streamers, severed heads staring back…I love it.

As far as markets go, the Green Bazaar was not gruesome. Pretty tidy actually, but still vastly unlike the markets we have in Canada. There was the section for horse meat (of course, of course). Horse meat is a staple of Central Asia. It doesn’t bother me at all. Meat is meat and I don’t eat any of it.

My favourite thing about the Green Bazaar though was the dairy section. They had very local and specific products that I would eat: fresh and fermented camel, cow, and horse milk. I didn’t care for the fermented milks, but the fresh camel milk was excellent. (I think this is more due to the freshness and quality more than the animal of origin.)

Also, they had qurt, which is a fermented and dried milk ball. It was created many years ago as a portable source for calcium and protein that nomads could carry without risk of spoiling. It comes in many different varieties. I can’t summarize all of the differences, except that some are from different animals, and some have different amounts of salt. The consistency is like really hard chalk, and it tastes…strong. Salty and pungent. I really liked it, a fact that seemed to delight the woman at the stall who let me sample everything.

The Metro

I went to some different areas of Almaty that day. Partly just to check out some different neighbourhoods; partly to look for a specific cigar lounge that I never did find. I walked a lot but also used it as an opportunity to take the metro.

The Almaty metro is not super comprehensive, nor is it very old, but it is nice. Each stop is a little different in its design and decoration. One had a stained-glass window of an apple tree (Almaty means ‘city of apples’); another has this 1960s modern style décor. (Lousy photos, but you get the idea). They feel quite Soviet but opened in 2011.

My favourite thing about the metro though was that when you buy your fare (super cheap: 80 Tenge, which is about 25 cents Canadian) you get a bright yellow, thick plastic token. It is oddly satisfying – and ended up being my only souvenir.

I spent my evening with cigars and shisha at what became my favourite evening patio. The next day I would cross the border to Kyrgyzstan by a car and foot combo.

Asia Central Asia 2022 Kazakhstan

Glorious Kazakhstan

I had decided to go to Kazakhstan. There wasn’t a particular thing that drew me. I just felt like it was time to go back to Central Asia. I hadn’t been to any of the ‘stans since my 2011 trip to Uzbekistan. (I had been to Pakistan in 2020, but that seems different.) Plus, in all honesty, there was something appealing about being able to color in such a big landmass on my travel map. Most of the pictures I had seen of Kazakhstan were of its natural beauty. Spectacular vistas of snow-capped mountains, bright blue lakes, and thick, evergreen forests. It all looks lovely…but it also looks a lot like Canada, so I decided to just visit Almaty. The former capital and largest city. I was light on expectations but brimming with curiosity. It surprised me but did not disappoint.

Facts

Kazakhstan has spent much of its modern history dominated by Russia. First the empire, then the Soviet Union. Prior to all that it was a country populated by nomadic peoples. Today it is a massive independent country sitting next door to Mongolia and just under Russia. The world’s ninth largest and the largest country with no connection to an ocean. Its capital is named Astana…or Nur-Sultan. It switches back and forth. Kazakhstan is considered one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world with a mixtures of cultures languages from the region. Kazakh and Russian are the national languages. It is a Muslim country but doesn’t feel particularly religious. It is well off (oil) and its cities are modern, but it still has a close connection to its nomadic and rural heritage. They grow tulips and apples, ride and eat horses, produce formidable boxers and mixed martial art fighters, and men who hunt with massive eagles while wearing large fur hats. (The men; not the birds.)

Kazakhstan is an easy place for Canadians to visit. No visa needed. No bureaucratic cash grab. Just show up, change your Dollars to Tenge and you’re set.

Arrival

I knew right away where I wanted to stay. I eschewed my budget accommodation preferences for a room at the Hotel Kazakhstan; an iconic, Soviet era high-rise with an imposing design. It’s even on some of the currency. (Also, while there are cheap hostels, none of them looked like anything special.) I arrived around midnight and when I awoke, I had a view over the city and to the mountains beyond.

Like all visits to a new city, I spent my first day walking. The streets of Almaty were pleasant. Lots of trees and inviting cafes. The architecture of the city has some definite highlights, but for the most part is unremarkable. Much of the old buildings were destroyed in an earthquake, but some Soviet apartment blocks and a few pretty buildings remain.

*Hotel Kazakhstan & and an impressive statue*

Wanderings and Impressions

Almaty surprised me. I guess I was expecting it to be more like Tashkent; a little more ‘exotic’ feeling. Really, it is more European, but with a central Asian twist. People are, for the most part, not dressed in any traditional style and the city operates like an orderly city. I didn’t find it exciting, but it was pleasant and I think it would be a decent place to live for a time.

One of the highlights was The Park of 28 Panfilov Guardsmen (aka Panifilov Park), a short walk from my hotel, it is a green park with the excellent Zenkov Cathedral (aka Ascension Cathedral) in the centre. The Zenkov Cathedral was built in 1904 and survived the earthquake. Candy colored and ornate. The most remarkable thing is that it is built entirely of wood – and without a single nail. Like Legos or a 3D jigsaw puzzle.

Just off to the side of it is the fantastic WWII war memorial. I’ve seen countless war memorials, but this one is one of the most impressive. A huge metal sculpture of soldiers bursting forth, roughly in the shape of the USSR. It has this aggressive power about it. I loved it.

Fun fact about the 28 Panfilov Guardsmen, it was a story about 28 Red Army soldiers who were killed in battle after destroying 18 German tanks and stopping the advance. It was famous. The were declared heroes. This park was named after them. The thing is…it was just a propaganda story. the Germans did advance, six of the soldiers survived; one of them joined up with the Germans maybe and another surrendered. Still, it is a lovely park.

*Soviet insignia are everywhere if you look for them*

*Kazakh Museum of Folk Musical Instruments*

*Another park. Flowers were everywhere.*

I did pay a visit to the Green Market, which was one of my favourite things in Almaty, but I’ll put that in a separate post.

Museums & Galleries

Between my days in Almaty (I’m condensing a bit here) I visited a few museums. The Museum of Arts of the Republic of Kazakhstan and The Central State Museum of Kazakhstan.

I really liked the history museum. Lots of artifacts and clothing and weapons from the nomadic tribes that inhabited Kazakhstan.

The art museum was very interesting and worth visiting, though I can’t say that I loved the art. That said, I liked it for the purpose of seeing the culture and people represented. Nomadic peoples with huge furry hats and embroidered coats, eagles, and camels. The 20^th C paintings had a lot of depictions of workers and industry.

Kok Tobe

On my second day I took the cable car to Kók Tóbe Park, a small amusement park perched on a hill with excellent views of the city. It has more games than rides, but it is fun to ride the cable car and look around. There are great views of the city and a Beatles statute, and if you want to you can get your picture taken dressed as a Kazakh nomad with a real and massive eagle on your arm. I was tempted to do the latter, but ultimately did not or you would be seeing that picture now.

The only ride I went on was the Fast Coaster, which was a small cart on a metal track that races down the side of a mountain at up to 45km. I let go of the speed control and zoomed along. It didn’t feel entirely safe, but that’s what made it fun.

Evenings

Because I was staying at a proper hotel and not a hostel, I didn’t really meet anyone. While the local people were friendly, I didn’t have any of those great experiences of meeting and hanging out with anyone. The language barrier was probably also an issue. The national languages are Russian and Kazakh.

I spent my evenings in Almaty walking, smoking shisha at patios, drinking pots of local tea, and eating some excellent food. I am not a foodie, but Almaty had a great selection of restaurants we don’t see a lot of in Vancouver: Georgian, Armenian, Central Asian, Syrian, and Yemeni. I didn’t eat much Kazakh food because there just aren’t a lot of vegetarian options. I spent two full days in Almaty on the front end of my trip and a third on the back end, where I splurged and went to the opera. I’ll write about that later. I was a little sad that I wasn’t seeing more of the country, but I was onward to Kyrgyzstan.

Tag: Almaty

Crossing back into Kazakhstan from Kyrgyzstan

Back in Almaty and into the lobby of luxury

The Green Bazaar

The Metro

Facts

Arrival

Wanderings and Impressions

Museums & Galleries

Kok Tobe

Evenings