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Coverage / Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan

Central Asia

The world's largest landlocked country, a vast sweep of Central Asian steppe, desert and high mountain. The snow peaks of the Tian Shan rise south of Almaty, the eroded chalk badlands of Mangystau meet the Caspian in the west, and a deep nomadic culture of horses, yurts and eagle hunting runs through it all.

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What you can do in Kazakhstan

Mountaineering / Summits

Khan TengriJul AugKhan Tengri is the northernmost seven-thousander on Earth and one of the most beautiful high peaks anywhere, a near-perfect marble pyramid that glows red at sunset above the Inylchek glaciers. At 7,010 metres it is a serious high-altitude objective, not a trek, but for climbers building toward the great ranges it is the classic Central Tian Shan expedition. Almaty is the closest city, about five hours by road to the Karkara base camp and then a short helicopter hop to the glacier camps at the foot of the mountain. The standard season is a tight window in high summer when the weather on the Inylchek is workable and the base-camp infrastructure is running.

Museums & Galleries

Almatyyear-roundFor a first read on Kazakh art and identity, the A. Kasteyev State Museum of Arts in Almaty is the place to start. It is the largest art museum in the country, holding more than 25,000 works that run from Kazakh applied and decorative art and the national school of painting through to Russian, European and wider Asian pieces. The collection traces back to a state gallery founded in 1935, and the purpose-built museum opened in 1976, later named for Abylkhan Kasteyev, regarded as the founder of Kazakh professional painting. It is a calm, well-labelled couple of hours that puts the felt carpets, jewellery and steppe landscapes you glimpse elsewhere in the country into one clear story.

Overlanding / Expedition Driving

MangystauApr May Sep OctMangystau is one of the strangest landscapes in Central Asia, a desert region on the Caspian coast where tens of millions of years of erosion on the old Tethys sea floor have carved chalk cliffs, tabletop plateaus and whole valleys of odd forms. The headline sights are Boszhira, a valley of white peaks and fangs rising from the plain, the Torysh field of giant spherical stone balls, the Tuzbair salt flat, and underground mosques cut into limestone at pilgrimage sites like Beket-Ata. There are almost no roads and no phone signal across much of it, so this is expedition driving: long days in a four-wheel-drive convoy on unmarked tracks, camping out under very dark skies. Aktau on the coast is the staging city.

Skiing & Snowsports

ShymbulakJan Feb Mar DecShymbulak is the biggest and best-known ski resort in Central Asia, set in the Zailiysky Alatau mountains right above Almaty. A cable car climbs from the Medeu valley past the high-altitude skating rink to the resort base, and lifts carry on toward 3,200 metres, which in 2023 gave Shymbulak a Guinness World Record for the highest night skiing slope on the planet. The pull is the combination of a full lift-served resort, with around ten lifts and roughly 25 kilometres of pisted runs, sitting less than an hour from a major city, plus serious freeride and ski-touring terrain in the surrounding Ile Alatau national park for those who want to leave the pistes.

Trekking / Hiking

Kolsai LakesMay Jun Jul Aug Sep OctThe Kolsai Lakes are the classic hiking circuit of the Northern Tian Shan, three glacial lakes strung up a spruce-lined valley at between 1,800 and roughly 2,850 metres. The walk from the first to the second lake is the signature day, and strong parties can push on to the third lake near the Kyrgyz border. Most trips pair Kolsai with two neighbours that make the region special: Kaindy Lake, where a line of drowned spruce trunks still stands upright in water dammed by the 1911 Kebin earthquake, and Charyn Canyon's Valley of Castles, a red sandstone gorge often compared to a smaller Grand Canyon. It is a two to three day loop from Almaty, at its best when the larches turn and the light is clean.

Witness / Attend

AlmatyJan Feb Nov DecHunting with golden eagles, berkutshy in Kazakh, is one of the oldest living traditions of the Central Asian steppe, and the mountains around Almaty are the easiest place to see it done by people who still practise it. The falconry that underpins it is inscribed on UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, a listing Kazakhstan is part of. In the Big Almaty gorge the Sunkar raptor centre, a breeding and rehabilitation project for saker falcons and eagles, runs a daily flight demonstration, while berkutshy families in villages east of the city show the older winter craft of riding out with a trained eagle on the arm. Seeing the bird launch, stoop and return is the point, a close look at a skill passed down through generations rather than a staged show alone.

Best months at a glance

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Mountaineering
Museums
Overlanding
Skiing
Trekking
Witness / Attend