Kazakhstan- Notes from a Country I Knew Nothing About
Seven days in Almaty
I. The Choosing
We did not choose Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan was what remained after everything else had been eliminated, which is a different thing entirely, and I say this without embarrassment, because most of the best places I have been to arrived in my life the same way.
What we knew was what we did not want. We did not want another beach. Between the three of us we had done enough beaches to last a decade β the same sand, the same shacks, the same photographs that could have been taken anywhere between Goa and Krabi. We wanted somewhere different. We wanted somewhere that had not yet been discovered by the great migratory herds of Indian tourists, somewhere that had not been flattened into an itinerary. And, being Indians with Indian passports, we wanted somewhere that would let us in without demanding three months of bank statements and a prayer.
That last condition does more work than people realise. The Indian passport is a filter placed over the world map, and what passes through it is a strange, uneven shortlist. Central Asia passed through. So we sat with Georgia, Kazakhstan, and northern Pakistan, and we argued.
Georgia won, at first. Georgia was the romantic choice β the wine, the mountains, the churches on ridgelines. And then the Iran situation closed the sky over that part of the world, the direct flights went away, and Georgia quietly stopped being possible. What was left was Kazakhstan, and once we started looking at it properly, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan fell away too.
Then Almaty over Astana. Astana is the capital, the built-from-nothing capital, the one with the architecture that appears in listicles about the strangest buildings in the world. Almaty is not the capital anymore β it was, until 1997 β but it is still the largest city, and it is where the life is. The nightlife, the cafΓ©s, the mountains at the end of the street. We chose the city that had a life rather than the city that had a plan.
So: eliminated into Kazakhstan, and eliminated into Almaty. This is how a trip is actually made.
II. Reading Yourself Into a Country
I knew nothing. I want to be precise about this, because people say "I knew nothing" as a figure of speech and they mean they knew a little. I mean I knew nothing. I have not even seen "Borat". My entire mental file on Kazakhstan was blank paper.
There is a particular pleasure in that. A country you know nothing about is a country you can prepare for, and preparing for a place is, for me, half the pleasure of going. I read. I always read. I have an article somewhere that lists, country by country, what each ambassador recommends you read before you visit β a wonderful idea, and I have used it before. Kazakhstan was not on the list. Whatever else the ambassador was doing, he was not recommending books.
So I found my own. Two of them. One was the political book, the one about what actually goes on behind the scenes β how the money was made, how the country arrived at the shape it currently holds, who holds it. Rooted in the present. The other was "Apples Are from Kazakhstan", which is older and carries an older country inside it, a country that has since moved on. Both were useful in different ways. The dated one gives you the ghost; the current one gives you the body.
And YouTube β an enormous amount of YouTube. The Kazakh Khanate forming in the fifteenth century. The absorption into the Russian empire. The Soviet century. The famine, which is the thing you cannot read about lightly, when collectivisation emptied the steppe of its herds and then of its people. Independence. Nazarbayev, who ruled for thirty years and then handed over power without quite handing it over. The capital moving from Almaty to Astana, and Astana being renamed Nur-Sultan after him, and then, when the mood of the country turned, being renamed Astana again. A country that has renamed its capital after a man and then unnamed it is a country that is telling you something about itself.
But the most useful preparation was not a fact. It was a frame.
I had a long conversation with an AI about how to approach the place, and the thing that came out of it was this: do not go to Kazakhstan for the beauty. Not because it is not beautiful, but because that is the wrong measuring instrument. I have been to Norway. I have been to Denmark. Once you have stood in a Norwegian fjord, the ranking game is over β you can spend the rest of your travelling life pointing at mountains and lakes and saying yes, but not like Norway, and you will be right, and you will have ruined every trip you take. If you arrive somewhere with a checklist that says mountain, lake, viewpoint, every place becomes a slightly disappointing version of a place you have already been.
The right frame was: this is a post-Soviet country. This is a culture with a past that does not resemble anything I have encountered. Go for that. Go for the thing that cannot be photographed.
I also stole a question. Lex Fridman had asked on Twitter for a prompt β something along the lines of what one should do, and whom one should meet, to understand a country anthropologically rather than touristically. I fed it into Claude and got back something genuinely sharp. Some of it I managed. Some of it I did not. But one thing it surfaced stayed with me the whole trip: the Kazakhstan of the literature is the Kazakhstan of the steppe and the interior. Almaty is not that. Almaty is a European city that happens to be in Central Asia, and if you go to Almaty expecting the country in the books, you will not find it.
That turned out to be exactly right, and I will come back to it.
III. A Very Empty Aeroplane
Bangalore to Delhi, then Delhi to Almaty at one in the morning.
Before the airport, dinner at Burma Burma with my friend β an enormous, hearty, unnecessary dinner, eaten in the specific heat of a Delhi evening, that heat that gets into your collar and stays. We ate too much and were delighted about it. The mood was already the mood of the trip: a kind of pre-emptive holiday cheer, laughing at nothing.
The flight to Almaty was almost empty. Less than forty percent full, I would guess. You do not often see that on an international route out of Delhi, and it told me something before we had even landed: Almaty has not arrived yet, at least not for Indians.
I read the in-flight magazine cover to cover. All of it. At one in the morning, with every reason to sleep, I read every advertisement, because advertisements in an unfamiliar country are anthropology β you learn what a place thinks is aspirational, which companies exist, what the middle class is being sold. And there was a letter from the Air Astana CEO about route expansion into Turkey, China, and India. The picture it painted was of a two-way street with unequal traffic: Kazakhs fly out, mostly to Turkey and Southeast Asia; Indians and Chinese fly in. Everyone is trying to build the inbound side.
Somewhere over the Hindu Kush I remember thinking that this was the longest trip the three of us had ever done together. Four days, maybe five, had been our ceiling. Seven days is a different animal. Seven days with the same two people, in a country none of us had been to, with no beach to lie on and no obvious default. We had tours booked, we knew roughly what was coming, and still it felt like an experiment. Men in their early thirties are not supposed to do this. They are supposed to go to Thailand.
I was more excited than I had been about a trip in years.
IV. Four Fifteen in the Morning, and Broad Daylight
We landed at 4:15 a.m. and the sun was already up.
It should not have surprised me β I have seen it in Copenhagen, in Paris, in Los Angeles β but there is a difference between knowing a fact about latitude and stepping out of an aircraft into it. It was not dawn. It was morning. And behind the airport, catching that first light, the Trans-Ili Alatau, the mountains that stand over Almaty like a wall someone built to keep the steppe out. Absolutely beautiful. You do not have to go looking for the mountains in Almaty. They are simply there, at the end of every street, at the edge of every photograph, whether you asked for them or not.
The days in Almaty ran from a little after four in the morning to nearly eight at night. Kazakhstan is enormous and stubbornly keeps a single time zone despite spanning enough longitude to justify two, so the clock and the sun have an argument that the sun always wins. In winter this reverses and becomes cruel. In June it is a gift: sixteen hours of usable light, handed to you free.
The airport is small. We took a Yandex Go, which worked immediately and cost almost nothing. Kazakhstan is still cheap β cheap labour, cheap petrol β and the cars were better than the price suggested. Almost all automatic. A lot of Chevrolet and Hyundai, and then, everywhere, the Chinese: Changan, Haval, Jetour, Geely, and an increasing number of Chinese EVs, particularly in the higher tiers of the app. You could read the geopolitics off the road surface. India is being pitched to; China has already arrived.
At the hotel β the Mercure β there was a bidet, which none of the three of us had ever operated, and which we researched with the seriousness of engineers before anyone touched it. This is what travel actually consists of. Not epiphanies. Bidets.
Then, before anything else, my ritual: find an ATM, withdraw cash, confirm the card works. I do this in every country within an hour of landing. It is not about the money. It is about removing one specific anxiety from the next seven days.
So I had my first crisp tenge notes, and I knew their story, and the story is better than the notes.
Kazakhstan was not supposed to have its own currency. The plan, after the Soviet collapse, was to keep the ruble. And then it became clear that the ruble was a leash β that Moscow could tighten monetary policy and squeeze Almaty from a thousand miles away without ever crossing the border. So the tenge was printed abroad, in secret, and flown in overnight, and released into the country before anyone could stop it. A currency smuggled into its own nation in the dark.
I stood at that ATM turning the notes over. There is so much machinery behind an ordinary object. A country does not simply "have" a currency. Someone decided, in a room, at night, under pressure, and now there are notes in my hand.
V. Detour: On Knowing a Country
That Lex Fridman question kept working on me for the whole trip, and it is worth stopping here.
What does it mean to 'know' a country? It is an absurd ambition when you state it plainly. People say they do not know their own wives. People say they do not know their closest friends, after fifteen years of friendship. If knowing a person is that hard, what is knowing a hundred and forty million square kilometres of them?
But I think the honest answer is that knowing is not a state. It is an activity. It is continually unearthing, continually being surprised, continually letting a place revise you rather than confirming what you brought. It is the willingness to have your shackles taken off β and most of us, most of the time, quite like our shackles.
Here is my own indictment. I am thirty years old. I am Indian, thoroughly Indian, and I have never stayed in an Indian village. Not once. I have stayed at my grandmother's place, which is what everybody says when this comes up, and which is not the same thing at all. I do not know how a village works. I have not sat with the problems of a tier-three town. And the reason is not access. India is full of villages. The reason is that some part of me has decided I already know enough about my own country, and so I do not push.
I saw a Madhya Pradesh tourism billboard recently, advertising homestays β actual stays with actual families. My first reaction was: why has this taken so long? My second reaction was less comfortable: it has taken so long partly because people like me do not ask for it.
There is a film, Swades, in which an Indian working at NASA comes home, lives in a village for a few weeks, and is entirely rearranged by it. I have always liked that film. I have never done that.
And I noticed, standing in Almaty, that a foreign country provokes a curiosity in me that my own country does not. I was in a cafΓ© in a city I had never heard of two months earlier, mentally cataloguing the fashion, the traffic behaviour, the coffee, the signage β running at full attention. In Bangalore I run at ten percent. Why? Is it the shared past, the fact that India was handed to me in social studies textbooks at an age when nothing in a textbook is interesting? Is foreignness simply a stimulant? Whatever it is, it is a flaw in the instrument, and it is worth staring at, because it means my attention is not a measure of what deserves attention.
VI. Walking
We slept a couple of hours and went out.
Breakfast in a cafΓ© that was already full at Sunday noon β a proper little alcove of a place, people spilling in. Less vegetarian food on the menu than I had hoped, which was a small worry I filed away for later, but I had a creamy cheese pasta that was excessive and wonderful.
And raf coffee. The first raf of the trip, and the beginning of an obsession.
Raf is a Russian and Central Asian invention: espresso, cream, vanilla sugar, whipped together into something sweet and soft and slightly absurd. It should not work and it works completely. What I could not understand β what I still cannot understand β is why it has not travelled. It is trivially easy. Every cafΓ© in the world already has the ingredients. And yet you cross an invisible line somewhere west of the Caspian and it vanishes. We drank raf for the rest of the trip, everywhere, constantly, and our last coffee in the country was a raf at Almaty airport, drunk deliberately, as a small ceremony.
Then we walked, and walking is when Almaty made its case.
Wide boulevards. Trees everywhere. Dedicated pedestrian paths that are actually pedestrian paths and not parking. Cars that stop β that genuinely stop, five metres short, without drama β when a person steps towards a crossing. Lane discipline. Legible signage. A general sense that someone had sat down and thought about how a person on foot might experience this city.
I do not have this. Bangalore does not have this. Delhi does not have this. Mumbai does not have this. We have decided, collectively and without ever voting on it, that the pedestrian is an obstacle. Almaty has decided otherwise, and the result is that walking there is not an ordeal but a pleasure, and a city that is pleasant to walk in is a city you end up loving.
And it was quiet. Sunday afternoon, and quiet β because the density is low. Fewer people, more space, less noise. A calm that Indian cities simply cannot manufacture at any price.
We went to Panfilov Park. Zenkov Cathedral was closed, so we saw it only from outside β the wooden cathedral, painted, improbable. We should have gone in. I know that we should have gone in. As Hindus we are not always sure what to do with the inside of a cathedral, what we are supposed to feel, and that uncertainty becomes a small excuse. It was a mistake. Behind the park there are war memorials, the enormous Soviet kind, and the inscriptions were all in Russian and Kazakh, and we stood there feeding them into Google Translate line by line, getting back fragments of grief in broken English.
Two women were outside advertising an Indian restaurant. We never went. We hardly ate Indian food the entire trip, and that was mostly my doing β I was the one pushing for other cuisines, and my friends, left to themselves, would have found the Indian menu much sooner.
VII. The Language Problem
I had been warned. Reddit had told me plainly that English would be a problem in Kazakhstan. I did not believe it. I never believe it. I always think: it will be enough, we will manage.
It was not enough.
Basic transactions are fine. Young people in cafΓ©s can handle basic English, and the warmth is real. But the moment anything becomes complicated β anything requiring a clause, a condition, a change of plan β the whole thing collapses, and you are left doing charades with a man who is trying very hard to help you.
The demonstration came that same afternoon, on the way to KΓΆk TΓΆbe, the hill above the city with the observation deck.
The problem began in the app. Searching "Kok Tobe" in Yandex Go returns four or five pins with nearly identical names, and I confidently selected the wrong one. The driver, who spoke no English at all, drove us faithfully to a hill. Just β a hill. Not the hill. And now I had to explain, from the back seat, that he had taken us exactly where I had asked him to go and that this was nonetheless wrong.
Google Translate should solve this. Google Translate does not solve this. The live conversation mode does not support Kazakh, so the whole exchange became: I speak into the phone, he reads, he taps translate, he speaks, I read β except he did not know he had to switch the direction of the translation back each time, so half his replies arrived in a language neither of us was expecting. We were negotiating a route correction and a fare adjustment through an interface that was actively working against us. Eventually he gave up on the phone entirely. I showed him a photograph. This. This is where we want to go. And he understood immediately, and laughed, and I laughed, and the whole thing dissolved into the kind of shared absurdity that is worth more than the ride.
The practical lesson, for anyone reading this who is going: on Yandex, drop your pin on the exact point. Never type the name of a landmark.
The larger lesson is about Almaty's future. If Kazakhstan wants to be a destination β and every signal from the CEO's letter to the Chinese cars says it does β then English is not optional. Not because English is superior, but because it is the current link language, and conversation is where memory comes from. The best hours of any trip are the unplanned conversations with people who live there. Without a shared language you can see a country, but you cannot be told anything by it.
VIII. Golden Hour on a Hill
We hiked the last stretch up to KΓΆk TΓΆbe. At the time it felt like a real climb. By the end of the week it would look like a warm-up.
The restaurant at the top was unremarkable. The parks around it were lovely. And then we took the alpine coaster, which I had expected to be a tourist gimmick and which turned out to be one of the purest twenty minutes of the trip.
You sit in a small car on a rail that winds around the shoulder of the hill, with nothing between you and the air, and you control only your own speed. It was close to golden hour. The city was laid out below, the mountains stacked behind it, the light going long and orange over everything. The wind was full in my face. A flock of birds went over, low, close enough that I passed almost through them. I remember thinking, with complete clarity and no irony at all: this is the thing. This is what I came for. Not the lake, not the canyon, not the itinerary. This.
We took the cable car down. The views were fine β good, not extraordinary, and slightly overpriced β and it deposited us at the bottom near the Novotel in the city centre.
From there we saw Hotel Kazakhstan, which really does stand out: a tall tower with a crown of lights and a grand entrance, the most legible building in the skyline. We had considered staying there. It was within budget. But the reviews complained of noise and tired rooms, so we passed. I looked up at it that evening with the small regret you feel for the version of the trip you did not take.
IX. The Wrong Order of Baths
Back at the Mercure, we discovered the spa, and proceeded to use it entirely incorrectly.
There was a sauna, a Turkish steam room, a cold room, and a jacuzzi. We went straight to the jacuzzi, because it was the most obviously appealing, then wandered into the steam room, then the sauna, in whatever order occurred to us. The jacuzzi was disappointing β around thirty degrees when it should have been forty-plus β which I suspect was deliberate, since it was unsupervised and a hotel that leaves a hot tub unattended will keep it cool.
Later that night I read about how these things are actually meant to be done, and felt slightly foolish. Sauna first: dry heat, ten to fifteen minutes, sweat properly, open the pores. Then the hammam: gentler, wetter, warm rather than hot. Then the jacuzzi, where the muscles finally let go. Then the cold β plunge or ice room β to close everything down again. There is a logic to it, a sequence, and we had shuffled it like a deck of cards.
We got it right every subsequent night. There is something specifically good about three men sitting in a hot tub at eleven at night, talking rubbish, in a country where none of them speak the language.
Dinner was Korean, at Masiso. I had bibimbap, which I knew how to order because of a recent trip to Singapore, and the kimchi went down more easily than it once did. This was, in a small way, the point. I have been deliberately working on acquiring tastes β pushing myself, and pushing my friends, into cuisines we would not naturally choose. A palate is trainable. Most people stop training theirs at twenty-five.
That night, the plan changed. Ashutosh checked the forecast and found rain predicted for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. He had his heart set on Big Almaty Lake, and doing Big Almaty Lake in the rain is doing nothing at all. So Shymbulak, which had been Monday, moved to Friday, and Big Almaty Lake moved to the next morning. I did not believe it would rain. I said so. But when someone wants something that much, you give them the day.
It rained on Thursday night, exactly as predicted, and continued into Friday. He was right and I was wrong and I am glad I was outvoted.
X. Twelve Kilometres to a Lake
We started late.
The plan had been e-bikes to the top. There were no e-bikes at the visitor centre, and nobody at the visitor centre spoke any English β which struck me as genuinely odd, because this is not an obscure trailhead, this is the lake, and the visitor centre is precisely where a tourist arrives with questions.
So we made a decision that I would describe as ambitious and that a doctor would describe as stupid: twelve kilometres, on foot, one way.
The first three or four kilometres were glorious. We were fast, we were talking, we were smug. We passed some foreigners going the same way, which is dangerous, because nothing motivates three Indian men in their thirties like the sight of somebody else doing it. If they can, we can.
Then came the checkpoint where the real trek begins, and another offer of a car, and another refusal.
And then it became serious. The climb is steep β steeper than anything I have done. At points it runs alongside a pipeline up a gradient where a firm push would send you rolling down and out of the story permanently. We had seen that pipe from a distance an hour earlier and had all silently concluded it could not possibly be the route. It was the route.
The lake, when we reached it, was worth it: enormous, cold, turquoise, ringed by mountains, with families camped along its edges and people filling bottles directly from the spring. We lay down. I slept, briefly, on the ground. I was in genuinely poor condition β under-fed, having skipped a proper breakfast, running on adrenaline and stubbornness. I could barely move.
And then we had to go down, and going down is where my body files its complaint.
I have an old problem with my knees on descent. It appeared in Norway and it appeared here, right on schedule. My friends were extraordinary about it. We had the option of a shortcut and they chose the road instead β longer, gentler, and with the additional advantage that a road might produce a vehicle.
That descent was the best conversation of the trip. Hours of it. Marriage. Work. What we actually want. Life in India versus what we had been looking at all day. What it would take for an Indian city to have parks like this. What it would take for an Indian city to be this clean. Whether it is money, or governance, or population, or something in us. We did not solve any of it. That is not what the walk was for.
Eventually a driver stopped, with four or five kilometres left, and took us down for two thousand tenge. Around four hundred rupees. A hundred and thirty-odd each. To him it was worth stopping for; to us it was nothing; both parties came away pleased, which is the rarest outcome of any transaction.
Somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand steps that day.
That night: the bath sequence, correctly this time. Then Shakespeare Pub, because we wanted to see what a British pub in Kazakhstan looks like and because it had a live match. Brazil versus Japan on the screen, decent Indian food, a thin crowd. Not a great atmosphere. A perfectly good evening. We were asleep by half past twelve with a seven o'clock alarm.
XI. The Steppe, and a Canyon That Is Not the Grand Canyon
The Charyn tour bus was not the empty vehicle I had imagined. It was full. Kazakhstan has more tourists than I had assumed; they are simply not Indian yet.
Our guide was called Zhan, and he was twenty-two, and I would not have guessed within five years of that. Completely composed, completely clear, precise about what to do and what not to do. Two months into the job. He had spent years in Australia studying botany, which explained the English, and he was from a village near Almaty. He told us, cheerfully, that guides who do this for years get hollowed out by it, and that he had no intention of staying long β he would keep going as long as it interested him and then move to something else. There was no anxiety in it at all. Twenty-two and entirely unbothered about the shape of his life. I thought about that for a while.
The drive is across the steppe, and the steppe is the thing I had not been prepared for. Flat grassland to every horizon. Nothing. No feature, no shelter, nowhere to hide. It is not beautiful in the way a mountain is beautiful; it is beautiful in the way a very large number is beautiful. You look at it and you understand, without anyone explaining, why the people of this land became nomads and horsemen, and why an empire that wanted to control them had to first take away the horses.
Charyn Canyon is, honestly, a miniature Grand Canyon. Anyone who has seen the Grand Canyon will be underwhelmed, and there is no point pretending otherwise.
But this is precisely where the frame I had arrived with earned its keep. Comparing beauty is a useless activity. It produces nothing except a ranked list and a mild sourness. What is actually interesting about a canyon is not whether it beats another canyon. It is: what happened here geologically, over what timescale, to produce this? How do people use this place now? Who maintains it, and how, and with what money? Why does it look the way it does today rather than the way it looked fifty years ago? There is a form of beauty that is not visual at all, and it only becomes available once you stop ranking.
XII. Kolsai, and the Hour We Chose to Spend Badly
Kolsai was the day that justified the whole tour.
It is stunning β a lake held in a bowl of forested hills on all four sides, so much like Switzerland that it feels almost like a quotation. The day was breezy and grey and the rain held off, and the greyness suited it.
There is a cafΓ© brand called Tary that appears at every significant tourist site in the country and in the big cities too β part of the Sandyq group, which also caters for Air Astana. You see the same logo at a canyon and at an airport and you realise you are looking at a small national monopoly on hot drinks with a view. I did not mind. The hot chocolate was excellent.
What I am proud of is what we did with our time there.
We had a limited window. The sensible option, the option almost everyone took, was to walk down to the lake, do the boating, and walk back to the bus. Instead we walked down, did the boating, then hiked up to Tary, drank hot chocolate, and hiked back down β all of it on foot, none of it in the Soviet truck that ferries people around, and all of it inside a couple of hours. I am fairly sure we were the only group that did.
That was possible for exactly one reason: we were three fit men who all wanted to push. Nobody was held back by anybody. Nobody had to be persuaded. The only person who slowed the group all week was me, on the descent from Big Almaty Lake, and even then they simply absorbed it.
And by Kolsai I had learned to manage my knees. Two techniques, discovered under duress, and they changed everything. First: zigzag. Do not walk straight down a slope β cut across it, switchback style. Second: keep your weight back rather than letting it fall forward onto the joint. I also worked out the surfaces. Stairs are the worst. Rock is nearly as bad. Gravel is fine, because it gives a little and absorbs the impact instead of transmitting it into me. The zigzag was the real discovery. It is the only reason I hiked at Kolsai the day after Big Almaty Lake instead of sitting in the bus. It also tells me something about which part of my knee is actually the problem, and it is probably worth another doctor and some serious strengthening work when I get home.
XIII. A Night in a Yurt
We stayed at the Green Valley yurts, and it was the best night of the trip.
A bonfire. A group with a guitar who played and sang, and we sang along, in English, because English was the only overlap any of us had. Two British girls who had been trying to make this trip happen for three years and had finally managed it, and who were startlingly well travelled β Jordan, and now Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, all the places that do not appear in the standard rotation. They told us about food cooked buried under snow in Jordan, and about plov, and about the logistics of moving through this part of the world. They also gave us the restaurant recommendation that saved our week, but I will get to that.
The food was Kazakh and it was not the best food of the trip and that is fine. The soups did not land on the first night; the rice dish landed better on the second. The chak-chak β fried dough in honey, piled into a mound β was excellent. You take what the place gives you. That is the whole arrangement.
And then the morning. I woke up and stepped outside and the view was arranged as though somebody had composed it: the brook, the low Central Asian hills, horses grazing loose in the field, and the bus parked absurdly at the far end of it all. There are views you photograph and views you simply stand in. That was the second kind.
XIV. Kaindy, and Two Detours
The bus to Kaindy is an old yellow thing on a bad road, and it bounces, and Soviet-era music plays throughout, and it was one of the most enjoyable hours of the week precisely because it was uncomfortable.
Kaindy itself I had never seen anything like. An earthquake dammed a valley a century ago and drowned a forest, and the trees are still standing in the water β bare trunks rising straight out of a green lake, dead and vertical and completely silent. From above, through the water, you can see the submerged bases. It is a short hike in and it is genuinely unlike anything else.
Detour one: why these lakes are still beautiful.
You cannot drive to Kolsai. You cannot drive to Kaindy. You cannot drive to the top of Big Almaty Lake. You walk, and if you cannot walk, there is a Soviet truck.
That single fact does more conservation work than any regulation. It means the government is forced to build proper trails, which they have. It means the crowd self-selects. And it means the arrival is earned, so people treat the place differently when they get there. In India we drive to the viewpoint. We build the road right up to the edge and then wonder why the edge is covered in wrappers.
Detour two: nobody camps in India.
Around Big Almaty Lake there were families camped out. Ordinary families. Tents, kids, food, drinking water taken straight from the spring β water clean enough that nobody thought twice.
There is a real camping culture here, and there is essentially none in India, and this bothers me more than almost anything else I saw. We talk endlessly about the beauty of our nature. We have Himalayas. And you cannot, as an ordinary person, decide on a Friday to drive an hour out of Bangalore and pitch a tent. There is nowhere sanctioned to do it. You have to go through an organised group, pay a package, be shepherded. In Singapore β Singapore, which is a city with a garden attached β people camp by themselves routinely.
The obvious defence is population. Too many people, not enough land. I want to test that, because I am not sure it holds. Can you camp near Tokyo? Near London? Near New York? If people in those cities can put up a tent within an hour of their homes, then population is an excuse, not a reason. A society that camps is a society that is outdoorsy, that is fit, that treats nature as something you go into rather than something you photograph from a car window. I would like to know why we are not that, and where in India it is being done well, and whether it can be copied.
Detour three: Mithun Da in Kazakhstan.
This came up in the bus and again in the baths. The older men β the uncles, never the young β love Indian cinema. Mithun Chakraborty is a legend. Raj Kapoor is a legend. These are men who grew up when the Soviet Union and India were close, when Indian films were among the few foreign films that arrived, and it has stayed with them for forty years.
It has not transferred. The young people are not consuming anything Indian. What has replaced it is American and British television, comprehensively.
That is a story about soft power decaying in real time, and I find it genuinely sad. Whatever cultural reach India had in the Soviet sphere in the 1970s and 80s, it is now living entirely in the memories of men over sixty. And what is Indian soft power now? In France, when I visited, the association was IT and mathematics β competent, respectable, and utterly unromantic. Nobody falls in love with a country because of its engineers. Raj Kapoor probably died without knowing he was a household name across a third of Asia. I doubt anyone alive today is building that.
We got back to Almaty and went to Marmaris β the recommendation from the British girls β a few kilometres off the main drag. It was excellent. I had a vegetarian doner that I still think about. My friends got proper meat and were equally happy. We went back a second time later in the week, which is the highest compliment available on a short trip.
XV. Arasan
Thursday was the bath day, and Arasan was the single most interesting building I entered in Kazakhstan.
It is a Soviet-era public bathhouse and it is immaculate β spotlessly clean, efficiently organised, and considerably more technologically sophisticated than a public bath has any need to be. We skipped breakfast for it and ate afterwards at Benedict's, where I had eggs benedict with salmon roe, which is not a Kazakh dish and which I do not apologise for.
The Russian banya is the centrepiece and it is brutal. The Finnish sauna and the Turkish hammam are pleasant rooms you sit in. The banya is an argument you are having with the air. We could not last. The Russian uncles could, and did, and were visibly delighted by the presence of three Indians who could not.
Then the cold pool, which is where the day turned.
Around eighteen degrees. I stood at the edge for a long time, doing the arithmetic of not getting in. Then a small child jumped in without breaking stride, and that settled it β I was not going to be beaten by a child in a foreign country. I got in and swam about ten laps. It was a short pool, so ten laps is perhaps two lengths of a real one, but in eighteen-degree water it felt like a expedition. My friends declined. I loved it.
After that, the baptismal font at twelve degrees, which is a different order of cold entirely. Two minutes in and my legs began to go numb β not cold, numb, the body starting to withdraw from its own extremities. And there were buckets, of course, which you haul up and pour over your head, and the three of us lined up and did it simultaneously, shouting, which was exactly as stupid and as excellent as it sounds.
Almost everyone else was naked. Completely, unselfconsciously naked. We wore swimming trunks and felt, for the first time all week, conspicuous.
There were things I did not try. The felt hat, which you wear in the banya and whose purpose I still do not properly understand. The venik β the bundle of leafy birch branches you beat yourself with, which is apparently the entire point of a proper banya and which we lacked the nerve to attempt. I want to go back and do both.
I have been trying to work out what the hot-and-cold ritual actually did for me, and I do not think the honest answer is physiological. I do not know that it released any stress or repaired any muscle. What it did was tell me something about myself, briefly. This whole culture β the banya, the ice water, Putin releasing photographs of himself submerged in freezing lakes β treats cold as a demonstration of strength. Enduring is the content. And standing in twelve-degree water with my legs going numb, refusing to get out before the other two, I understood the appeal completely. It is not health. It is proof.
Afterwards, the Green Bazaar, which has everything: fresh juice pressed in front of you, cheese balls, mountains of dried fruit and nuts, all of it absurdly cheap. We bought too much.
Then we drank in the room and went out to a club called Queen of Darkness, and Thursday night in Almaty turned out to be nothing at all. The rain had arrived, right on Ashutosh's forecast, and the place was thin and flat. We left, walked around in the wet, ate at Marmaris again, and went to bed. Not every night is a story.
XVI. Shymbulak, in Cloud
Friday was Shymbulak, and Friday was rain.
The cable car up takes close to forty minutes, which is a long time to be suspended over a valley, and it is a genuinely beautiful ride even when the cloud keeps taking the view away from you and giving it back. At the top the mountains are magnificent in the glimpses you get of them. We had wanted to hike. It was too cold, too wet, and too windy, and we did not.
What we did instead was eat. Ramen at the top β chicken ramen with the chicken removed, which the kitchen managed without complaint, and which was still one of the best things I ate in the country. Cognac, because it was cold and we were on a mountain and there is a correct drink for that situation. And lunch at Paul, which satisfied a French craving I had been carrying around all week and which I recognise is a slightly ridiculous thing to satisfy in Kazakhstan.
I loved Shymbulak. Not for what we did there, because we barely did anything, but for what it obviously is. It is a real ski resort, properly built, with proper mountains above it. I want to come back in winter, with the right clothes and some actual preparation, and ski. It will be expensive. It will be far less expensive than anywhere in the Alps.
That night was the night. We had been building to it all week and we finally did it properly β out until half past four, and then walking the streets, and then breakfast at half past five in the morning as the light came back, which in Almaty in summer it does with indecent enthusiasm. We slept as the city woke up.
Saturday, consequently, does not exist. We surfaced somewhere past midday, walked a bit, and did very little, and it was the correct use of a Saturday.
XVII. The Meals I Have Not Mentioned
Two dinners deserve their own paragraph.
Daredzhani was the Georgian restaurant, and Georgian food was on my list from the moment Georgia fell off the itinerary β a small consolation prize, eating the cuisine of the country I did not get to. It was outstanding. Khachapuri, and then adjaruli khachapuri, the boat-shaped one with the egg cracked into the molten cheese, which is one of the great vegetarian dishes anywhere. Filling to the point of defeat. Genuinely, properly delicious.
Navat was the opposite balance: the food was fine, the room was wonderful. Musicians playing live until ten, and after they left, the speakers took over with Central Asian instrumental renditions of Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift, which sounds like a gimmick and was in fact lovely β the dombra doing things to a pop melody that the melody did not deserve. We also ordered a margherita pizza, a fully cowardly choice, and I refuse to defend it.
And there was the tea, which came with a felt hat over the pot. We assumed the hat was for us β that this was some ceremonial thing, that we were meant to put them on our heads β and were mildly disappointed when the waiter explained it goes on the teapot, to keep the tea warm. A cosy. An extremely stylish cosy, but a cosy.
The final morning we had breakfast at Six Pines, outdoors, in perfect weather. The shakshuka was superb. And then the airport, and the last raf coffee, drunk slowly and on purpose.
XVIII. Was Seven Days Enough?
If you had asked me before I left, I would have said seven days in Almaty was generous. Excessive, even. What is there to do?
Now, back home, I would answer it differently, and the difference is the whole trip.
Seven days is enough to see the things. Big Almaty Lake, Charyn, Kolsai, Kaindy, KΓΆk TΓΆbe, Shymbulak, Arasan, the Green Bazaar β we got all of it. If the question is coverage, seven days is plenty.
But coverage is not the same as knowing a place, and I do not think I know Almaty at all.
To know a city you have to slow down inside it. You have to go to the same cafΓ© three times, at three different hours, and notice that it is a different room each time. You have to walk a street with no destination. You have to be bored there. I felt exactly this about Copenhagen β everybody says four days is enough for Copenhagen, and I came away certain I had seen nothing, because I had been busy the whole time. The same is true here. I have been to the places. I have not been to the city.
You can push this argument until it becomes useless β no amount of time is ever enough, and at some point that stops being an insight. But I think two or three weeks is roughly the honest number for actually getting the feel of a place. Most of us never have that. We have seven days, and a return flight, and a life waiting.
So what I brought back is not Kazakhstan. It is a partial, tilted, three-men-in-their-thirties version of one city and its mountains. A currency with a smuggler's origin story. A coffee that should have gone global and didn't. A pedestrian crossing where cars stop. Two techniques for descending a mountain without ruining your knees. A twenty-two-year-old who was not worried about anything. A pool of twelve-degree water and the small, stupid, real pride of getting into it. An uncle who loves Mithun Chakraborty.
And one uncomfortable thing, which I am still carrying: that I paid more attention in seven days in a country I could not pronounce than I have paid in thirty years to my own. That is not Kazakhstan's fault. That is a thing about me, and it is the only souvenir from this trip that I actually have to do something about.