We’re in the back seat of a bukhanka: a Soviet-era minibus, whose squat, stocky shape explains its nickname – the Russian word translates as “bread loaf”.
Our driver, Bauyrzhan, a man with a kindly face, shuts his door with the force the rudimentary design of this converted off-road van requires – think trying to close a rusty, recalcitrant, dilapidated farmyard gate.
And then we’re off, as he brings us on an earth-shuddering, white-knuckle ride, zigzagging our way around boulders, through rivers and nosing our way into, across and out of enormous, lake-like potholes.
After about 30 minutes, our white smoke-coloured bukhanka comes to a stop. Bauyrzhan smiles and doffs his cap when we give him a round of applause for his expert stewardship through terrain AA Roadwatch might call “challenging”.
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Soon we’re walking uphill on a track parallel to a valley where the dominant palette tone of the bottle-green spruce trees on either side is offset by the chartreuse willow trees that unspool along the valley floor.
And in a gorge, we see it: a Tiffany Blue lake studded with branchless, barkless trees that eerily jut out of the water. This serpentine-shaped lake is a fledgling. An earthquake in 1911 triggered a landslide that blocked the gorge and created a natural dam. This was filled by a glacial river that submerged the spruce trees – making them look a bit like the masts of sunken ships.
The lake’s otherworldly quality is intensified by a startling contrast: above the surface the trees are bare, but below – preserved by the cold water – the branches remain intact, creating the mystical impression of an underwater forest.
“The colour of the lake changes all the time,” says Sultan, our guide. This, he says, is caused by variations in weather, but also by limestone deposits that refract light in such a way that in photos, depending on the day, the hue shifts from azure to cyan to mint.
I’m at Lake Kaindy in the south of Kazakhstan, a country where striking landscapes give way to staggering ones. Straddling eastern Europe and central Asia, Kazakhstan is the world’s largest landlocked country but has one of the lowest population densities on the planet. Its scale is monumental: the country is home to about 48,000 lakes, 90,000 wolves and shares a land border with Russia that, extraordinarily, stretches to nearly 7,000km.
In the 19th century, the expanding Russian empire took control of Kazakhstan, and from 1936 until 1991 it was part of the USSR. Both the tsarist and Soviet authorities encouraged Russians to immigrate to Kazakhstan. It was also a place to sentence dissidents and to where the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, was exiled. Today about 15 per cent of the country’s population are ethnic Russians.
Since the turn of the millennium, Kazakhstan’s economy has been transformed by high international prices for its oil and gas, accounting for more than 60 per cent of its total exports.
And, of course, there’s Borat. The 2006 mockumentary comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan follows a fictional Kazakh journalist on a road trip through the US.
Sacha Baron Cohen won a Golden Globe Award for his portrayal of the titular character who expresses a barrage of offensive views. The film was initially denounced by the Kazakhstan government, but by 2012 it claimed that the number of tourists visiting the country had increased tenfold.
In response – and perhaps recognising that the picture’s real target was satirising American attitudes and hypocrisies – Kazakhstan launched a tourism campaign festooned with Borat’s catchphrase: “Very nice!”
But that tongue-in-cheek tagline grossly undersells Kazakhstan’s high-definition, turbocharged scenery. In the Medeu Valley, for example, we take two ear-popping cable cars on our way to the Bogdanovich Glacier.
Starting from about 3,200m, we snake our way along a boulder-strewn trail, past corrie lakes and through huge sweeps of moraine. A playful, cocoa-brown marmot is dwarfed by a swashbuckling backdrop: a jumble of 4,000m peaks spearing the sky.
Hiking deeper into this valley, we seem to stray into a moonscape. We’re flanked by gorges, escarpments, marooned hulks of rock and – underscoring the sense of the lunar – a massive cirque that resembles a crater. And now in the foreground is the Bogdanovich Glacier, its snow tongue fringed by saw-toothed mountain peaks that scrape against serrated clouds in a mouthwash-blue sky.
Returning on the cable car, in the distance the city of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest and the birthplace of the apple, unfurls before us. We pass Shymbulak Resort Hotel, our accommodation for the previous two nights. The snug hotel has a sauna, heated outdoor pool and, in the bar, an eggbox-grey bust of Vladimir Lenin. From the hotel, we glimpsed salmon-pink sunsets above the lights of Almaty.
We see more celestial acrobatics as we enter another part of the Zailiisky Alatau mountains, the Assy Plateau. It’s late afternoon and our 4x4 drivers are negotiating a jagged, ricocheting track through a 40km-valley framed by silhouetted peaks. The sky is infused with a painterly extravagance: faint, shimmering shafts of light slant through bulky, smudgy clouds.
For the next three nights, we’ll camp in the Zhenishke Valley. During these treks, we’ll be accompanied by Dina, who invariably dresses in pastel-bright colours. “I am the only guide in Kazakhstan who wears pink shorts!” she says. A former oil and gas engineer, Dina’s love of travel was inspired by the novels of Jules Verne.
We eat a Kazakh national soup called shurpa – a tasty broth with hefty chunks of beef, carrot and potato – and drink rosehip berry tea from a wild harvest foraged earlier by Victoria, our camp cook. In the star-pricked night sky, we see the constellations Pegasus and the Plough, the planets Venus and Mars, and even craters on the moon.
Leaving our camp early on the second day, we descend into a sharp-edged gorge and through towering spruce trees. We remove our boots to cross shallow rivers, the bone-chilling water a refreshing balm when the temperature is already 26 degrees by 8am.
Emerging from the forest, the magnificent valley radiating in front of us, we see a tan-hued golden eagle. With its immense wings outstretched, it floats in a sky that, as though to complement the bird’s effervescence, is showboating in baby blue.
“The golden eagle is one of our country’s symbols,” Sultan, who represented Kazakhstan in cycling, tells us. Underlining its importance in the national psyche, the golden eagle is emblazoned on the light-blue Kazakhstan flag.
Kazakhs have hunted with these birds of prey for millenniums. Captured from the nest and trained for years, they accompany the hunter, or berkutchi, when pursuing game and they swoop down to capture their target. Sultan emphasises that the berkutchi do not use guns – they consider the hunt an ancient art form where they forge a partnership with the bird.
It’s a tradition that’s woven into another essential thread of Kazakh identity: the country’s nomadic heritage. Its most evocative symbol is the yurt. And at the top of a valley, beside a pen of rambunctious sheep and goats, we come to one of these chalk-white nomadic dwellings and we’re invited to look inside.
Earlier in the trip at the Huns Ethno Village, we learned about yurts while sitting inside one. The circular frame, built using birch and willow wood, is capped by a felt cover made from sheep’s wool.
The doorway is deliberately low so that you must bow when you enter – a mark of respect for the home and family. Likewise, we’re asked to step in with our right foot. This is a sign of bringing good intentions. Stepping in with your left indicates the opposite. We try fermented horse milk. It’s intended to taste sharp and sourish – and it sure does – but its purveyors maintain that it improves indigestion.
Afterwards, we watch virtuoso male and female riders in traditional nomadic dress as they perform astounding equestrian feats. Most impressively, a rider standing ramrod upright and holding the saddle’s pommel uses his hands and waist as a fulcrum to “bounce” his feet off the ground so that he can spring – multiple times – from one side to the other of his galloping horse.
Back in the Zhenishke Valley, after hiking about 18km, while waiting for the 4x4s to bring us to the next camp, we stand on a perch that gives a kaleidoscopic view across a mosaic of laurel-green undulating hills and to the gorge from where we started.
When we get to the camp, our attentive crew has erected an avocado-green tent with a wood-burning sauna, set up so that we can move from the hot sauna to the adjacent cool river. The sauna tent, with a chimney protruding through the top, has freshly-cut wood, a basin, a sauna ladle and – channelling the full Finnish sauna ethos – a whisk made from small beech branches. Experiencing such spa-like treatment in the middle of a gigantic valley in the southeastern corner of Kazakhstan is as surreal as it sounds.
On our first day in this valley, we descended through thickets of hardy wild rosehip bushes and meadows popping with sapphire-blue gentians and toothpaste-white edelweiss.
In one meadow, perfumed with mint and sage, we see a herd of horses, their coats a mixture of tawny, chestnut and caramel colours, grazing in the morning sunshine. They seem indifferent to us, but after a few minutes one horse walks towards us and insistently nods their head. “Okay,” says Dina, “it’s time to go.”
That morning, shortly after leaving our camp, a biting ascent unveiled an incandescent panorama: the Tian Shan mountains. With a peak of more than 7,000m, they form part of the Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan-China border. In Chinese, the name translates as Mountains of Heaven. The name is felicitous.
From here they seem to partially extend around us in a cinematic, magisterial arc. Against the cerulean sky, the gleam of their snow-dusted tops is operatic. The widescreen effect creates a feeling that seems almost time-stilling. Like all our other days in this valley, no one else is here.
And the feeling that this beguiling landscape is ours alone accentuates the sense of being in a place apart. A place that’s vast, wild, hospitable, diverse, astonishing. And glimpsing some of that place through the window of a boisterous, bone-jangling bukhanka just adds spice to the flavour of an exhilarating ride.
Kazakhstan: One of the five Stans of central Asia
Kazakhstan is one of five countries in Central Asia informally known as “the Stans”: a mammoth region extending from the Caspian Sea to China. The suffix “-stan” means “land of”. So Kazakhstan is the “land of the Kazakhs”. The countries share some common heritage (all are former members of the USSR, for example), but their cultures, languages and landscapes are very different.
While the Silk Road passed through all five, it’s most closely associated with the city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan – a Unesco World Heritage Site of majestic Islamic architecture. Part of that ancient trade route is now the Pamir Highway. With a maximum elevation of 4,655m, it’s one of the highest roads in the world. The bulk of it, including the summit, runs through Tajikistan, the smallest country in the region.
The Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges dominate neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, a country that is 80 per cent mountainous and home to Issyk-Kul Lake – the world’s second-largest alpine lake, sometimes called the Pearl of Central Asia. Turkmenistan – one of the least-visited countries on Earth because of its visa restrictions – is more than 70 per cent desert. Lonely Planet described its capital Ashgabat as “where Las Vegas meets Pyongyang”.
Brendan Daly travelled as a guest of KE Adventure, keadventure.com. The 13-day Mountains and Deserts of Kazakhstan trip, starting and ending in Almaty, costs from €3,120 per person. From 2026, KE Adventure offers a new 12-day Kazakhstan Snow Leopard Trek from about €3,225 per person. Brendan Daly flew with Turkish Airlines, turkishairlines.com, from Dublin to Istanbul and Istanbul to Almaty
