Kazakhstan rarely tops anyone's vacation list, yet it rewards the trip.Paris has romance, Thailand has beaches, Italy has pizza. Kazakhstan gets a squint instead, plus the question of whether it sits near Russia. It does. The country covers about the same ground as Western Europe, and chances are you don't know a single person who has gone. The scenery shifts so often that you'd swear it can't decide what it wants to be. Snow-capped mountains rise right behind Almaty, with ski runs in winter and café terraces in summer. Then the steppe opens up, grass running flat to every horizon, and a drive across it feels like entering a video game before the environment has loaded. At sunset the whole plain turns gold and pink. It's quiet out there. It's vast, enormous even, and strangely harmonious once your eyes adjust. Our first afternoon on the steppe we stopped the car twice in ten minutes just to listen, and heard nothing but wind in the grass. Kazakhstan's cities tell a different story. Astana, the capital, looks like a place that couldn't decide when to stop being futuristic and when to start being playful, so it did both at once: a glass pyramid, a tree-shaped tower crowned with a golden egg, shopping malls shaped like alien spacecraft. Almaty plays the cooler older cousin, with green streets, hip cafes and a steady stream of people who look bound for a tech startup meeting. The food runs heavy on meat, which stands to reason for a nomadic cuisine. You'll likely meet beshbarmak, boiled meat with noodles, and kazy, a horse sausage that tends to arrive with a side of curiosity. Try everything once. Save the questions about which animal it came from for afterward. The beshbarmak at a family table outside Almaty came on a platter the width of an arm, and our host tore the meat by hand before anyone got a fork. What stays with you is the people. They'll pull you into their homes, feed you until you can't move, then insist on tea for another two hours. The warmth is sincere, nothing like politeness dressed up as small talk. A little guilt about how little you knew before arriving tends to settle in your back pocket. Getting around has its own rhythm. Public transport won't win prizes, and road trips mean potholes big enough to hold small lakes. A driver named Ruslan once got us to Charyn Canyon on a spare tire and a shrug, steering around the worst of the ruts with one hand and telling us about his cousin's wedding the whole way. We tipped him the equivalent of about eight dollars, and he acted as though we'd handed him a car. Somewhere past the canyon turnoff we passed a herd of camels, maybe fifteen of them, and nobody in the car said anything for a mile. |
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