Steppe, city and table: Kazakhstan in 11 days
Kazakh food is nomadic food and it makes sense once you understand what it is for. A cuisine built around animals that walk, milk that has to keep, and a fire you can carry does not produce delicate plates. It produces beshbarmak, kazy, kurt and kumys, and it produces them with a hospitality culture
- Duration
- 11 days
- Pace
- Relaxed
- Hotel changes
- 5
- Best months
- May, Jun, Sep
- From
- $2,200 per person
Layered on top of that is a second cuisine entirely: the Uzbek, Uyghur, Dungan, Korean and Russian cooking that arrived here through trade, empire and deportation, which is why the best laghman in the country is Uyghur, why there is Korean carrot salad in every bazaar, and why Almaty’s modern restaurants have more to draw on than a nomadic pantry alone.
This route goes after both, plus the craft and the horse culture that sit alongside them. It is not a hard trip and it involves a good deal of sitting down.
Who it suits: travellers who plan a trip around what they will eat and who they will eat it with. No demanding walking. One night in a yurt.
Your specialist: a named Kazakhstan specialist here, with our long-standing Almaty partner running the ground.
Day by day
Day 1: Arrive Almaty. Flights land in the small hours. Room held from the night before, nothing scheduled. An evening walk and a first dinner we book at one of the modern Kazakh kitchens, which is the right way round: see what the tradition has become before you meet the tradition.
Day 2: The Green Bazaar and a Uyghur kitchen. A morning at the bazaar with a cook rather than a guide: the kurt, which is dried salted curd and which everyone hates on the first try, the kazy horse sausage, the Korean salad row, the honey, the apples that this city is named for. Then a Uyghur family kitchen for the afternoon, pulling laghman noodles by hand, which is harder than it looks and which you will get wrong for an hour before you get it right. Eat what you made.
Day 3: Almaty, and what modern Kazakh cooking is. Zenkov’s cathedral and the Central State Museum in the morning for the Golden Man and the context. Afternoon at a small producer: a cheese maker, a distillery or an apple orchard in the foothills, depending on the season. Evening at the best modern restaurant in the city, with the chef talking about sourcing steppe meat, wild herbs and Caspian fish, which is a conversation worth having.
Day 4: East, and a night in a yurt. Three hours towards the Assy plateau or the Ili valley, depending on the season and where the families are. An afternoon and evening with a herding family: the milking, the making of kurt and shubat, and beshbarmak cooked properly, which means the meat boiled slowly, the flat noodles laid out, the broth drunk from a bowl, and a specific order in which parts of the animal go to specific people at the table. Night in a yurt. This is a real family and a working camp rather than a set built for visitors, and we will tell you plainly what that means for the plumbing.
Day 5: Eagles, and back towards Almaty. A morning with a berkutchi, an eagle hunter, in the foothills. Golden eagles are flown here in the traditional way and the relationship between bird and handler is the interesting part rather than the flight itself. We use one family we have worked with for years and we will not send you to a roadside operation with a chained bird, which exists and which we will not name but will steer you away from. Afternoon drive back, night in Almaty.
Day 6: Charyn, and on to Saty. East to the canyon in the late afternoon and on to the village below the Kolsai lakes. Dinner in the guesthouse, cooked by the family, which is a different register from anything in the city and is the food most travellers remember.
Day 7: Kolsai, and back west. Kaindy lake in the morning and the first Kolsai lake, with a lakeside lunch. Then the drive back, five hours, arriving Almaty in the evening.
Day 8: Fly to Shymkent. An hour and twenty minutes south into a different country: hotter, more Uzbek, more Silk Road. The Shymkent bazaar in the afternoon is the best market in Kazakhstan and it is where the southern food actually is: samsa from the tandyr wall, plov by the kilo, melons in season, and a tea house that has been there longer than the shop next door. Night in Shymkent.
Day 9: Turkistan. Two and a half hours north to the mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, a fourteenth-century Timurid building left unfinished at Timur’s death, with the largest brick dome in Central Asia. It is the best building in the country and it is also a live pilgrimage site, which is the more interesting half. Lunch with a family in a village nearby. We will say honestly that the new Karavansaray complex beside the monument is a recent themed development and not the reason you came. Night in Turkistan.
Day 10: Sayram-Ugam and the foothills. East into the hills for a day among orchards and apiaries, a walk of two hours in the juniper, and a long lunch at a village table. Back to Shymkent, or a night in a guesthouse in the hills if the season is right.
Day 11: Back to Almaty, and out. A morning flight, a last afternoon in the city, and a day room held for the night departure.
What is included
Ten nights of accommodation with breakfast, including one in a working yurt camp and two in village guesthouses, one internal flight, a private car with an English-speaking driver on every day of travel, licensed English-speaking guides on seven days including two food specialists, the bazaar and Uyghur kitchen sessions, the beshbarmak evening with a herding family, the morning with an eagle hunter, the chef dinner in Almaty, the small producer visit, all entries and park permits, a day-by-day document, and a WhatsApp group with your consultant and our Almaty partner team for the whole trip.
What we would change, and when
- Vegetarian? Difficult and not impossible, and we would rather set expectations now. Kazakh food is meat and dairy, and the vegetarian eating on this route is the southern and Uyghur half: laghman without meat, samsa with pumpkin, the whole salad and pickle tradition, dairy. We brief every kitchen in advance in Russian and Kazakh. Vegan is genuinely hard here.
- Travelling in September? The best month for this route. The apples, melons and grapes are in, the herding families are still up at the summer camps in the first half of the month, and the horse festivals run.
- Want more horses? Add two days for a horse trek in the Assy plateau or the Turgen valley with a herding family. It is the best cultural addition to this route.
- Not interested in the yurt night? We can do the beshbarmak evening as a day visit and sleep in a guesthouse. You lose the morning, which is the good part.
Honest notes
The yurt night is a working camp. A dry toilet, no shower, a stove for heat, mattresses on the floor of a felt tent, and a family who will feed you far more than you want. It is the best night on this route and it is not comfortable in the hotel sense. We describe it in full before you book.
Kumys and shubat divide people. Fermented mare’s milk and fermented camel milk are sour, fizzy and alcoholic in the low single digits, and refusing them politely is possible but noticed. Try both once. Nobody will press you twice.
Almaty’s restaurant scene is genuinely good and its hotel restaurants are not. Every dinner on this route is out. That is deliberate.
Kazakhstan is huge and this route stays in the southeast and the south. That is the food half of the country. Mangystau, Astana and the north are not on it and adding them would mean two more flights and less time at the table.
We choose the eagle hunter carefully. There is a roadside version of this in several places in Central Asia with a tethered bird and a photo fee. We do not use it, and the difference is obvious within five minutes of arriving.
Built by your named Kazakhstan specialist.
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