I arrived in Almaty rather early on Sunday morning... 0455 to be exact! The friendly lady at the tourist information told me I could get bus 106 to within 200m of where I was staying... An 80 Tenge ride as opposed to a 2000 Tenge taxi ride... Even at 300T to the pound that's a saving not to be missed!
I was lucky and able to check in at 7am... So after breakfast, a few hours sleep and a shower I headed into town for the afternoon. Almaty is a nice town but there aren't many stand out places to visit... the highlights are Zenkov's Cathedral, possibly the only wooden cathedral in the world and built without nails (no less!), some good, stark, concrete architecture from the Soviet era and Republic Square with the Presidential Palace (mostly empty now the capital has moved to Astana)..
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| Zenkov's Cathedral, Almaty |
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| Presidential Palace, Almaty |
The next morning, I headed to the main train station (Almaty 1 not to be confused with Almaty 2!) to get my afternoon and overnight train to Turkestan. I'd got hotel reception to buy me a ticket as it's a lot cheaper than going via agencies and often difficult locally with only a couple of days notice... And so I landed in first class for a 1/4 of the price it would have cost me via an agency... Happy days!
As usually happens on train journeys you bump into a few people who can speak English and keen to chat. The order of the day was corruption in Kazakhstan and Chinese imperialism, a highly entertaining few hours.
I arrived in Turkestan early in the morning for a 24 hour stopover before heading onto Bishkek. Those clued up on Central Asian geography will question why I travelled 900km due west of Almaty into southern Kazakhstan only to then be heading back east 650km to Bishkek (essentially only 250km west of Almaty)... and the reason was the Mausoleum of Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi.
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| Mausoleum of Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi, Turkestan |
It was a long way to come but well worth it. We're not talking the impressive structures and tile work of Uzbekistan or Iran here but the colours and detail are still impressive. And there was no one else about other than a few locals genuinely surprised to see a western tourist bothering to come here.
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| Intricate tile work |
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| Dome tile work |
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| Turning golden in the sunset |
There's nothing else to do in Turkestan, but I was quite happy to find a few decent eateries during the day and had a fantastic plov for lunch and shashlyk and piva in the evening!
The next morning, after a quick early trip back to the mausoleum for a few dawn pictures (when the sun shines on the main entrance), I checked out and headed to the station to join the Mockba - Bishkek train at 0930. I was now Kyrgyzstan bound.
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| Gengis Khan statue at Turkestan station |
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| Hello mr train driver! |
The top bunks in 3rd class are not, as I found out, the best daytime seats... They're too short to lie down and there's not enough head room to sit up. So I snoozed as we slowly made our way towards the border... and at delicious melon that was forced my way by 2 lovely women I was sharing the carriage with.
At the border, the guards came on the train and totally ignored me despite me waving my foreigner passport at them... Minutes passed and I started to wonder if they'd come back or call me to an office for my exit and entry stamps. Seeing the look of distress on the provodnitsa's face when I showed her my unstamped passport I hurried over to the office on the platform to find them packing everything up and about to call it a night! Ensued a long discussion about how I was missed and was I hiding (the captain spoke good english) after which they got the stamps back out and put them to good use... phew!
I met up with Martin the next morning and we headed off to Kochkor. We were hoping for a trip up to Song-Kul but left too late and sadly had to miss out. The next day we headed off to Karakol on the banks of lake Issyk-Kul, the worlds second largest saline lake after the Caspian Sea. This would be our base for nearly a week as we would be there for Independence Day the following day, my helicopter ride and use it as a base for our trek in the Tian Shan mountains.
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| Valley we came up to lake Ala-Kul |
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| Final effort up the scree |
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| Lake Ala-Kul from the pass at 3900m |
We left Karakol and headed back to Bishkek, via the north road round the lake and the resort town of Cholpon Ata. A chilled evening out in Bishkek eating good food sitting on a veranda was a nice way to end my week in Kyrgyzstan.
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| Lenin statues in the park, Bishkek |
The next day, after a morning walk and some lunch I left Bishkek and headed back to Almaty for a day before flying back to the UK early Sunday morning (yep, that's 2 weeks gone!).
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| Almaty sunset |
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