The best two-week route through Kazakhstan

The route: Almaty and the southeast for nine days, then the Mangystau desert on the Caspian for five.

The thing it leaves out: Astana. That is deliberate, and it is the argument the whole article rests on.

The reasoning, before the days

Kazakhstan is about 1,050,000 square miles (2,725,000 km2), and every region you add costs a flight, two airport transfers, a new ground team and most of a day. So the design question for fourteen days is not what to include. It is how few region changes you can get away with while still seeing two genuinely different countries’ worth of landscape.

This route has exactly one region change, at the halfway point, with one flight each way. Everything else is ground movement inside a region. That is why it fits, and why the same fourteen days spread across Almaty, Kolsai, Astana, Turkistan and Borovoe does not.

The second part of the argument is what the two halves give you. The southeast is green, forested and mountainous: peaks over 13,000 feet (4,000 m) above a modern city, alpine lakes, a red sandstone canyon. Mangystau is chalk desert, escarpments, stone spheres and rock-cut mosques, with almost nobody in it. Neither looks anything like the flat steppe most people picture when they think of Kazakhstan.

Astana is a purpose-built capital thirty years old, genuinely interesting to some travellers and hollow to others. On fourteen days it costs you two days plus two flights, and those are the same days that make Mangystau possible. On ten days, when the desert does not fit anyway, the case for Astana is much stronger.

The route, day by day

Days 1 to 3: Almaty

Three nights, not two. Almaty is the biggest positive surprise of most Kazakhstan trips, and two nights turns it into a transit stop. Day one is the city on foot: the Green Bazaar, Panfilov Park and Zenkov’s wooden cathedral, the Golden Man of Issyk, the Arasan baths. Day two goes up: Medeu, the Shymbulak cable car, then Big Almaty Lake at 8,200 feet (2,500 m). Day three is deliberately unstructured, with an evening booked at one of the modern restaurants. The full reasoning is in Almaty in three days.

Day 4: Charyn, in the afternoon

Leave Almaty after breakfast, about 125 miles (200 km) and three and a half hours east. Walk the Valley of Castles end to end, ninety minutes, arriving late enough that the light is on the west faces of the sandstone rather than straight down on top of it. Then two more hours to Saty, the village below the Kolsai lakes, and dinner in a guesthouse.

This is the most important design decision in any southeastern route. The day-trip version sold in Almaty is twelve to fourteen hours in a vehicle and puts you at the canyon at noon and the lake at three. One night in a simple village house fixes it entirely.

Days 5 and 6: Kaindy and the Kolsai lakes

Day five starts early with a 4×4 up a rough track to Kaindy, a lake formed by a landslide in 1911 with the bleached trunks of a drowned spruce forest still standing out of the water. Go first thing: the water is stillest and the light best before mid-morning. In the afternoon, the first Kolsai lake, reachable by vehicle, and an easy hour along the shore.

Day six is the walk from the first lake to the second, about four hours return with real height gain from 5,900 feet (1,800 m) to about 7,500 feet (2,300 m). It is a good day’s walking rather than a trek, and the honest version, including the third lake and the border zone beyond it, is in walking the Kolsai lakes and Kaindy.

Days 7 and 8: Altyn Emel

Four hours northwest, crossing the Ili river into a national park that needs a permit we arrange in advance.

The Singing Dune is a 500-foot (150 m) sand ridge on gravel plain, unconnected to any other dune field, that produces a low audible hum when dry sand slides down its face. It is not a trick and it is not subtle. Walk up it in the last hour of light. The following day is the Aktau hills, banded white, red, ochre and green from mineral layers laid down when this was seabed, and Katutau, which is volcanic and black. No shade, no water, a full day in a 4×4.

Altyn Emel is where the trip stops feeling like a mountain holiday and starts feeling like Central Asia.

Day 9: the region change

Four hours back to Almaty, then a flight of about three and a half hours west to Aktau on the Caspian. It is a travel day and there is no disguising it. We use it as a repack day and put you in an airport hotel or a good Almaty room depending on the flight time.

Days 10 to 12: Mangystau

The reason for the whole route.

Mangystau is chalk and limestone desert on the Caspian shore, the most remarkable landscape in Kazakhstan and the least visited. Bozjyra is a valley of white escarpments and freestanding towers that was seabed forty million years ago. Sherkala is an isolated massif that looks like a pitched tent from one side and a lion from another. Torysh is a valley of stone spheres, some ten feet across, on open ground. Beket-Ata and Shopan-Ata are mosques cut into rock, live pilgrimage sites where Kazakhs come in numbers, which makes them the most affecting thing on the route.

Now the honest part. This section runs on 4x4s with crews who work the desert for a living, carrying spare fuel and satellite communication, because fuel stations and mobile coverage out there are a very long way apart. You sleep in a simple guesthouse or a tented camp, with no premium option at any price. Days are long, hot and dusty. It is not a soft trip, and it is also the one place in Kazakhstan we would choose if you asked us to pick one.

Days 13 and 14

Back to Aktau, an hour on the Caspian shore, then the flight to Almaty, a last evening in a city that by now feels like somewhere you know, and out.

What this costs

Land only, per person, two sharing, excluding international flights.

Two notes on this route. The desert vehicles and crews cost two to three times a normal ground day, so a Mangystau fortnight prices at the top of whichever band you choose. And the gap between boutique and luxury largely disappears from day ten onwards, because at Bozjyra there is no better room to buy. The line-by-line arithmetic is in what a trip to Kazakhstan costs.

The three alternatives that beat it

If you want two countries rather than two deserts. Kyrgyzstan is four hours by road from Almaty over a land border and shares the same mountain range. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in 14 days gives you high summer pasture and yurt nights with families who live in them, and is the better trip if mountains rather than desert are the point.

If you came for the Silk Road. Fourteen days is the wrong length and you want twenty-one. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in 21 days adds Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, and is the pairing that most repays the extra week.

If two weeks is your maximum and comfort matters. Take the classic ten-day route and stretch it to fourteen rather than adding anything: three nights at Saty, four in Almaty, two at Aksu-Zhabagly walking with rangers, and Turkistan for the mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi. Fewer places, a bathroom every night, and nobody has ever asked us to speed that version up.

What we would not build at this length

Five regions. Fourteen days with Almaty, Kolsai, Astana, Turkistan, Borovoe and Mangystau in it exists as a product and we will not sell it. It is nine flights and four hotel changes in a fortnight, and the thing people remember is the departure boards. If that list is what you want, the answer is three weeks, not a faster fourteen days.

Related

• Kazakhstan: the complete guide to planning your trip
• How many days do you need in Kazakhstan?
• Walking the Kolsai lakes and Kaindy
• Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in 14 days
• All our Kazakhstan trips

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