Road to Almaty
A few of my friends discussed visiting Almaty, the largest and most populated city in Kazakhstan. We were nearing the end of our study abroad in neighboring Kyrgyzstan and decided it would be worth seeing another city in the region. Many people told us that Almaty is a vastly different city from Bishkek. Kazakhstan is known to be the most developed country in Central Asia due to its abundance of natural resources such as oil. After independence in 1991, Kazakhstan grew much faster because of its market economy successes. This enabled Almaty to modernize its city much faster than Bishkek.
The Kordai border station is located about thirty minutes north of Bishkek. A long line of cars stood in front of the station waiting to cross over. Once the line started to move, we exited the van and walked through the border station while our driver transited through with the van. I’d say the entire process from waiting in the line of cars to getting my passport stamped inside took about forty-five minutes. It must have been a busy time of day. I transited through the same station a year later on an early summer morning in fifteen minutes.
My driver taking a phone call as we wait in traffic at the boarder station.
The Kazakh government has officially changed the alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin as seen below on this sign. Cyrillic is still widely used throughout the country, however, the change is in effort to revive Kazakh culture thus detaching from old Russification policies implemented during the Soviet Union.
The Kazakhstani government has a 2050 initiatives plan meant to push the nation into one of the most developed nations in the world.
For more information on these goals:
This is the Kordai Vista International Wind Farm. I tried searching for data on this farm but found brief paragraphs on the date of its construction etc.
This small convenient store is filled with mostly sugared drinks and junk food. I noticed these options are more common throughout the region. There were a few options for traditional Kazakh food such as samsa — baked bread filled with meat.
The A-2 highway system runs from Tashkent, Uzbekistan to Almaty, Kazakhstan. The route between Kordai and Almaty is still under construction. Several stretches of road turn into dirt until it opens back up into two paved lanes. I saw a large sign standing before the unpaved section with a few international development names on it such as the World Bank. Our driver told us these road conditions have been this way for years.
Almaty is nestled into the north side of the Zailiyskiy Alatoi mountain range. In fact, Lake Issyk-Kul sits just over the same mountains, however, there is no established highway that cuts through the range making it extremely difficult to travel through.
The ride to Almaty was long and tiresome. The first step was to find an ATM and exchange our Kyrgyz Soms for Kazakh Tenge. Afterward, we ate inside a small Cuban cafe. This was the beginning of eating at numerous Western-style restaurants. For instance, we ate an early lunch at Arizona Coffee for delicious pizza, smoked salmon, and scrambled eggs.
A shopkeeper practicing afternoon prayer.
A night in Almaty doesn’t end without visiting a few bars and nightclubs. Furmanov Street has a high concentration of fun places conveniently located next to each other. The entry fees were high in some places because they preferred we sit at a table rather than walking around. The table was worth it and with the four of us, we paid around $142 for twenty-three cocktails. Sounds more fun right? The bill might have been lower but our waiter was rapid fire with bringing out the next round of drinks.
To our surprise, a lot of people speak English as a third language after Kazakh and Russian. We wanted to practice our Russian but local people our age wanted to practice their English with us. This made for some interesting conversation.
