Kazakhstan in a Flash
Almaty in 24 hours
Almaty immediately strikes you with how clean, organized, and quiet it is. So when your checked bag arrives unscathed after 30+ hours of travel, four airports, five airport lounges (life tip: get Priority Pass), and a questionable yet friendly look from immigration, you know you deserve a short break from the previous pandemonium.
We negotiated our way to our hostel, planned our run (10km) route for the morning and settled in for the night. The next day was an early start to try to beat the 36°C heat, and give ourselves a quick orientation of our surroundings. We successfully ran through quaint little parks, along streams, through squares, and past statues – it was beautiful and startling change of scenery from the start.
Our first task was to find the cable car lift to “Kok-Tobe”, which had a lovely lookout onto the entire city.
We meandered around for a short time, seeing all of the families out for a morning stroll and took the same cable car back down. A coffee and mocha set us back about $5 total, while we spent some time processing our trip to date.
This was followed by a brisk walk through some lovely city parks (replete with statues, monuments, flower gardens, and many informational plaques in Kazakh), and a visit to the wonderfully coloured Orthodox Church. Next we headed to check out the famous Bazaar of the city – a short walk to the north. With its hundreds of stalls selling the freshest of fruits and vegetables (both local and imported), dried goods, meats, cheeses, and some free samples, we were in our element. I’d highly recommend checking it out.
With our dried apricots and fresh raspberries in tow, we couldn’t help but notice the ever growing scent of sugar and chocolate in the air. After a quick recheck on our downloaded map, we zoomed in to notice a “Candy Factory” mere yards from the Bazaar. Obviously we went to investigate and after an hilarious exchange with the ladies working in the public shop, we came out with 100g (and not the original 1kg she thought we meant) of the finest wrapped candies.
Next up was a walk in the now sweltering heat to a well-known pedestrian only street, Zhibek Zholy. Here there were many oddly familiar high street retailers, coffee shops, bars, restaurants, and amenities. A quick ice cream stop (the vanilla was not as good as Madagascar!) and a water break later, we continued our saunter towards Independence Square, and the fabulous Tsar-style buildings located near the main government buildings. Beautiful, different, and certainly Soviet influenced; I was impressed.
50,000 (!) steps later, our adventure around the city came to an all-too-quick finish. Almaty is a wonderful, wealthy, chill, reasonably priced, well laid-out, lower density, quirky, clean, real city. It may have a Western (a flat Seattle as comparison) feel at times, but it certainly holds its own identity very much in its history, its monuments, its buildings and its beautiful inhabitants. The people themselves generally look somewhere between east-Asian, Western, Persian, and Russian in varying degrees, which makes sense given the geography.
There is definitely oil and natural gas money (unleaded fuel was $0.36c per litre) and very little homelessness from what we could see. There were countless families, young and old, walking around, and a plentiful amount of adult and child outdoor gyms.
There was something wholesome and real about this town that I don’t seem to quite get in North America.
More lessons to be learned perhaps.
Next: Dushanbe!
