re: 2023 Travel Year in Review

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Curious to get your thoughts on Kazakhstan

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I mostly went because I'd just never seen anything like that part of the world. We largely avoided time in the cities (Almaty and Astana) and spent our time in the mountains, deserts, steppes, etc. Almaty was our first destination and we camped in tents in the desert to the north, spent some time in the wide open semi-desert to the east that borders on China, and went up into the mountains just south of Almaty. There is a lot of absolutely beautiful country. Almaty didn't strike me as anything special, and the traffic can be horrendous in the city. For some reason there are no turn lanes or turn signals and it's just gridlock at peak hours. Food is a mixed bag, excellent salads (tomatoes especially) and fruits like strawberries. Main courses were not so great and our guide had to work hard to keep horsemeat off the menu, though I did try some once (meh). They do have some noodle and cheese dishes that were pretty good but I don't think they were typical Kazakh. If you like very sweet wine you'll be happy, otherwise stick with beer or vodka which is very cheap. Everthing his pretty cheap there. The hotels were fairly crappy. They were Soviet era tourist hotels and pretty run down and poorly managed. Supposedly Russian is the secondary language but it is the language of business and we mostly heard Russian spoken. There are a lot of Russians in Kazakhstan, many of them are avoiding the draft. Soviet bureaucracy is still hanging on in some ways. We had to go through 3 security checks before being able to get up into the mountains. I'm fairly sure our guides paid off the guards a few time to get out of being hassled. We were held up on the train platform for 20 minutes while two guards looked through our papers, 10 minutes of that was after the train was scheduled to leave. But they held the train, or it was just late. We got hassled for a "professional photographer's tax" once since we had some good cameras in the group. And when we left half the group got hassled at the airport and accused of being spies because of the camera gear and binoculars.

Astana was very different from Almaty. It's a very new city and the leader has decided to make it the capital rather than Almaty. Construction is going on at a crazy pace, mostly with Chinese workers. The buildings are impressive until you look at them closely. Construction standards are poor and new buildings are starting to fall apart. The city just feels like an artificial place and our Kazakh guide doesn't like it at all. She also told us that the government of Kazakhstan is a mystery to the people and completely secretive. Around Astana it's wide open steppes (grasslands) that go on forever. I found Almaty to be much more interesting.