How many days do you need in Kazakhstan?

Kazakhstan is about 1,050,000 square miles (2,725,000 km2), larger than all of Western Europe put together, with a population smaller than that of the Netherlands. Almaty to Astana is roughly 750 miles (1,200 km). Almaty to Aktau, for the Caspian desert, is further still. This is not a country where you add a region by driving two extra hours. You add a region by adding a flight, an airport transfer at each end, a new ground team and, in practice, most of a day.

So the useful question is not how many days you have. It is how many regions those days can hold without the trip turning into a tour of terminals.

The rule we plan to

Two regions properly in ten days. Three at a push in fourteen. Anyone offering you five regions in a fortnight is selling you airports.

We also build to two pace rules that decide most of the day count:

• No more than one long transfer in any three days.
• No scenery reached by a round trip of more than about six hours in a single day.

Those two lines are why our Charyn and Kolsai section is always an overnight and never a day trip, and why an Astana add-on is two nights rather than one.

What each length actually buys

Costs are land only, per person, two sharing, at our comfortable tier of $200 per person per day. The other tiers are $125 careful, $330 boutique and $560 luxury, and the full arithmetic including internal flights is in what a trip to Kazakhstan costs.

Seven days

Seven days is a real trip and it has one honest shape: the southeast, and nothing else.

Almaty for three nights, which is enough for the Green Bazaar, Panfilov Park and Zenkov’s wooden cathedral, the Golden Man at the Central State Museum, the Arasan baths, Medeu and Shymbulak, Big Almaty Lake and two good dinners. Then east, with an afternoon at Charyn canyon in the good light, a night at Saty below the Kolsai lakes, Kaindy and its drowned spruce forest by 4×4 in the morning, and the walk up to the second Kolsai lake with the whole day in front of you. Then back.

That is a satisfying week and we build it often. What it is not is a trip to Kazakhstan. It is a trip to one corner of Kazakhstan, and the corner that looks least like the rest of it.

Seven days does not fit Astana. Adding the capital to a week means two flights, two airport days and two nights in a city that is either fascinating to you or hollow, with no time to recover if it is the second one.

Ten days

This is the length we recommend to most first visitors and it is our classic route.

Ten days holds Almaty and the Tian Shan, Charyn and the Kolsai lakes with two nights at Saty, a short flight to Astana for the architecture and the Palace of Peace, and a flight south to Shymkent for Turkistan and the mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, which is the finest single building in the country.

It also holds an alternative shape for people who did not come for cities: Almaty, Charyn, Kolsai, then Altyn Emel with the Singing Dune and the striped Aktau hills, which needs two nights, a 4×4 and a permit we arrange.

What ten days will not do is both. If you want Astana and Altyn Emel and Turkistan, you need fourteen, and we will say so rather than compress it.

Fourteen days

Fourteen is where the country opens up, and there are three good versions.

Fourteen with Mangystau. The ten-day southeastern shape plus four days on the Caspian: the chalk escarpments, the Bozjyra tract, the isolated massif of Sherkala, the field of stone spheres at Torysh and the underground mosques cut into rock at Beket-Ata and Shopan-Ata, which are live pilgrimage sites. This is the most remarkable landscape in Kazakhstan and the least visited. It is also the least comfortable: 4x4s with experienced crews, simple guesthouses or tents, and a long way from help. If you asked us to pick one place in the country, this is it.

Fourteen across two countries. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan share the same mountain range and a land border four hours from Almaty. The 14-day route is the natural choice if what you want is mountains, yurts and high pasture rather than cities and monuments.

Fourteen done slowly. The ten-day route with the days put back where they belong: three nights at Saty instead of two, a proper Almaty week, a night at Aksu-Zhabagly walking with rangers. Fewer places, more of each. We build this more often than people expect and nobody has ever asked us to speed it up.

The case for one particular fourteen-day shape, argued properly, is in the best two-week route through Kazakhstan.

Twenty-one days

At three weeks the trip stops being a Kazakhstan trip and becomes a Central Asia one, and that is a good thing rather than a compromise.

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in 21 days is the route we build most at this length. Almaty, the mountains and the lakes, Turkistan, then over the border to Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. Kazakhstan gives you landscape and space. Uzbekistan gives you the Silk Road cities and the architecture. Neither country alone gives you both, and the pairing is the reason three weeks is easier to fill here than in most of Asia.

Where the cut-off is

If there is one number in this article, it is this: under eight days, Kazakhstan is a regional trip rather than a national one, and you should plan it that way and enjoy it.

Under eight days, do the southeast, do it slowly, and do not fly anywhere internally. A week in Almaty and the Tian Shan with the canyon and the lakes is a better holiday than eight days chasing Astana and Turkistan with a suitcase.

The second cut-off is at fourteen. Below fourteen, Mangystau does not fit. There is no clever way to compress it: it is a flight of about three and a half hours from Almaty each way, and the desert itself is four days minimum with no reasonable shorter version. We would rather build you a good ten days without it than a bad twelve with it.

Related

• Kazakhstan: the complete guide to planning your trip
• What a trip to Kazakhstan really costs
• The best two-week route through Kazakhstan
• Classic Kazakhstan in 10 days
• All our Kazakhstan trips

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