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The ninth-largest country on earth crossed on three sleeper trains and a hired UAZ — a capital built on a plain in ten years, two Gulag museums on the line south, the mountains at the end of the Almaty metro, a mausoleum Timur died before finishing, and a sea that a dam brought partway back.
Astana
The capital moved here from Almaty on 10 December 1997, onto a windy plain that had been the provincial town of Tselinograd. Everything on the left bank has been built since: Baiterek, whose observation deck sits at 97 metres for the year of the move, Foster's tent at Khan Shatyr, and the Nur-Alem sphere left over from EXPO 2017. The city was Akmola, then Astana, then Nur-Sultan from March 2019, then Astana again from September 2022, and the street signs have not all caught up.
Akmol and ALZHIR
Thirty-seven kilometres west of the city, at a village then called Malinovka, the NKVD ran a camp specifically for the wives of men it had already shot or sentenced. It operated from 1938 to 1953 and more than eighteen thousand women passed through it, many with children who were taken from them at three. The memorial museum opened in 2007 and is plainly done. Back in the city, the National Museum in the afternoon puts the steppe archaeology and the Kazakh khanate in front of the Soviet century rather than behind it.
Karaganda and Dolinka
Three hours south by train to the coal city, then forty minutes out to the village of Dolinka, where the administrative headquarters of Karlag stands and is now the museum. Karlag ran from 1931 to 1959 across an area larger than several European countries, and Karaganda was built by the people it held and then by Germans, Poles, Koreans and Chechens deported here in whole populations. The museum uses the original building, cellars included, which is the reason to come rather than read about it.
Almaty
Arrive in the morning with mountains filling the southern end of every street. Zenkov's Ascension Cathedral in Panfilov park went up in 1907 as one of the tallest timber buildings anywhere and was still standing after the Kebin earthquake of 1911 when much of the town was not. Then the Green Bazaar for horse sausage and dried apricots, the Arasan baths in the afternoon, and Kok-Tobe on the cable car if the smog has lifted.
Medeu and the lake
Bus 12 to the skating rink at 1,691 metres, opened in 1972 and thin enough in the air that speed skaters set world records on it for two decades. The wall above it is a mudflow dam blasted into place by two directed explosions, October 1966 and April 1967, and filled to its design profile in 1972; on 15 July 1973 it caught the flow that came down the Malaya Almatinka, and it was raised afterwards on the strength of what that day had shown. Higher again, Big Almaty Lake is the city's drinking water: no swimming, no wading, and a checkpoint on the road above it because the track past the observatory runs to the Kyrgyz border zone.
Charyn
East along the Kegen road to a red sandstone gorge cut by a river that still runs at the bottom of it. The Valley of Castles is a two-kilometre walk down and a slower one back, best in the last two hours of light. Downstream there is a grove of Sogdian ash, a relict stand that pre-dates the last glaciation and survives here and almost nowhere else, and it is worth the extra half hour of driving.
Kaindy and Kolsai
South-west to Saty. The Kebin earthquake of 1911 dropped a limestone slope across a gorge above the village and the water backed up behind it; the spruces that were standing when it filled are standing still, bare trunks out of very cold, very clear water. The last few kilometres are a 4×4 track or a horse. The first Kolsai lake is a drive; the second is five kilometres uphill on foot; the third sits under the watershed and needs a border-zone permit, because the pass beyond it goes to Issyk-Kul.
Back to Almaty, then south
A day mostly spent moving. Down out of the mountains, four and a half hours on the Kegen road, and an afternoon in the city to do laundry and see the Central State Museum. Then the evening train south. Buy food before boarding — the restaurant car is a rumour on some services and everybody else in the carriage has arrived with a bag of tomatoes, bread and boiled eggs, which is the correct approach.
Turkestan
Fifteen hours down the line and into the south, arriving early afternoon. Timur ordered the mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi built in 1389 and work stopped when he died in 1405; the main portal never received its facing, and the holes the scaffolding sat in are open in the brickwork to this day. The Taykazan inside, a two-tonne bronze cauldron cast in 1399, went to the Hermitage in 1935 and came back in September 1989. UNESCO listed the building in 2003, the first site in Kazakhstan to go on. Turkestan became a regional capital in 2018 and the town around the monument has been rebuilt wholesale since, which you will notice within a hundred metres.
Otrar and Arystanbab
An hour south to a mound of eroded mud brick that was a city of tens of thousands. In 1218 its governor had a Mongol trade caravan seized and its merchants killed; Genghis Khan took Otrar in 1220 after a siege of about five months and it never recovered its position. Timur died here in February 1405, on the march towards China — which is the reason the mausoleum you saw yesterday has no front. The Arystanbab mausoleum, a few kilometres away, is where pilgrims stop before Turkestan rather than after it.
Sauran, then west
Forty-five minutes north-west on the Kyzylorda road, forty-odd kilometres out and a kilometre off the tarmac, the walls of Sauran stand in outline on open steppe — mud brick, unreconstructed, no ticket office and usually nobody at all. It was a walled city of the White Horde and later a Shibanid centre, and sixteenth-century writers described the kariz, underground channels dug by prisoners to bring water in. Back to Turkestan for the evening train up the old Orenburg–Tashkent line.
Aralsk
A fishing port with no water in it. The mosaic in the railway station records 1921, when the Aral fishermen answered an appeal from Lenin during the Volga famine and sent fourteen wagons of fish north. The regional museum has the photographs of the harbour full, which is the useful preparation for walking out onto what was the harbour floor. The ship carcasses in the famous photographs are at Zhalanash, an hour and a half away, and most were cut up for scrap years ago — go if you want, knowing that.
Across the seabed to Karateren
South-west in a UAZ over the Aralkum — the desert that is the old sea floor, salt crust, planted saxaul and camels standing in it. There is no marked road and no fuel between the two ends. Karateren is a fishing village of about a hundred and fifty people at the south-eastern corner of the North Aral, and the nets in the yard are the whole argument about this place, made in one image.
The Kokaral dam
Half an hour north-west to the embankment thrown across the Berg Strait, the channel that used to join the two halves of the sea. Thirteen kilometres of earth and a concrete spillway, finished in August 2005. Water goes over the spillway when the north is full and runs away south down a dry bed towards the southern basin, which will not be filled by it. Stand on the crest and look both ways; then back across the seabed to Aralsk.
Out via Kyzylorda
Six and a half hours back down the line to the provincial capital, which has an airport with daily flights to Almaty and Astana. Kyzylorda sits on the Syr Darya among rice paddies — the region grows around nine tenths of Kazakhstan's rice, on the last stretch of the river before what is left of it reaches the delta. Rice is close to the thirstiest crop the Syr Darya could be asked to carry, and it is planted immediately upstream of the sea that is waiting on the water.
Good to know
Book the trains yourself and book them early: Kazakhstan Temir Zholy opens sales about forty-five days ahead, tickets are issued against a passport number and are not transferable, and the name on the ticket is checked against the document at the carriage door. Take kupe (four berths, a door) rather than platskart on the long legs if you are sleeping three nights on the train; the Talgo services are the fastest on the Astana–Almaty axis and worth targeting. Seasons are the other constraint. May to mid-June and September are the windows where everything on this route works at once: July and August are 40 °C in Turkestan and on the Aral, and winter on the steppe reaches −30 °C with the Kolsai road under snow and the seabed tracks impassable. Most European, British, North American and Australian passports get thirty days visa-free; arriving by air or staying in hotels registers you automatically, but a private stay after an overland entry can require registration with the migration service within a few working days, so ask at the first hotel rather than at the border on the way out. The Aral leg cannot be improvised. There are no signposted roads on the seabed, no fuel and no water between Aralsk and Karateren, and the drivers who do it work out of Aralsk with old UAZ vans and know which tracks the salt has softened — arrange it a day or two ahead through your guesthouse and take more water than you think the day needs. The third Kolsai lake and anything approaching the Kyrgyz watershed sit in the border zone and need a permit obtained in advance; the first two lakes and Kaindy do not. Baikonur is a closed city leased to Russia and administered by it, and entry needs a permit arranged months ahead through an accredited operator, so treat it as a separate trip rather than a detour. Cards work almost everywhere in Almaty, Astana and the regional capitals; carry tenge in cash for Saty, Karateren and every driver on the route.
Shorter or longer?
Fly from Kyzylorda or Almaty to Aktau and give the Caspian side five or six days — the chalk amphitheatre at Bozjyra, the lone massif at Sherkala, and the underground mosque at Beket-Ata, which is a working pilgrimage site and not a monument. It needs its own 4×4 and its own driver.
Almaty, Medeu, Charyn, Kolsai and Kaindy, then one overnight train down to Turkestan and Otrar and out from there. Keeps the mountains and the mausoleum, drops the capital, both camp museums and the entire Aral leg.