The Apple City

After a day in Almaty, I thought I'd seen everything. I stayed for another seven nights.

I would like to profess that I stayed in the city because I absolutely adored it. That I stayed because I felt the draw of the cosmopolitan city. That, after a few months travelling, I found my place, 'my city.' That I stayed longer than usual because I was enamoured by the charm of the location, by its multicultural food and by its proximity to nature. That I felt that I was no longer a tourist with my head stuck in between a museum and a Starbucks, but a true local, experiencing life in the city for what it was.

Of course, none of this was true.

I stayed in Almaty for over a week because I didn't know where to go next.

I expected, when I arrived in my first city in Kazakhstan, that I would be able to plan a route around the southern edge of the country. This had worked when arriving in most other countries or major locales. My strategy usually went as far as determining the transport to get me to the place, taking said transport and then, after arriving, working out what it was that people actually did in the place.

This strategy worked in both the macro, when planning over a period of months, and the micro, when planning what to do on a specific day. But it didn't seem to be working in Almaty.

With Kazakhstan being such a large country with low population density, it wasn't as easy to jump on a bus and hope for the best. There were small towns here and there but guesthouses weren't readily available like they were in Kyrgyzstan. Also, whilst there were local buses, a lot of the natural attractions were hard to access with public transport. You'd have to take a bus for a few hours to a small village. Then try to find someone to drive you to the entrance of a national park. Then hitchhike to the actual location. Then try to do it all again in reverse with the hope that you'd get home before the sun set at a quarter to five.

The difficulty of all this left me a little bewildered. There were tours you could do from Almaty. At first I was dissuaded by the price but I eventually decided I'd take the overnight tour leaving on Sunday morning and returning Monday evening. But Monday was forecast for pretty strong rain, not a fun day to be outside in below-zero temperatures. So I decided I'd take the tour on Tuesday. When I went to book Tuesday's tour the day before, it was sold out. So I had to take the tour on Thursday.

Whilst this was all going on, I did manage to explore Almaty itself. My favourite day was spent in Shymbulak, a ski resort located thirty minutes from the centre of the city by car. The autumn weather made for a mixture of rain, snow and mud. I hiked to a lovely waterfall perched between some new season snow with a Canadian I met at my hostel and a Malaysian we met whilst walking up the hundreds of stairs to the edge of the ski resort. We had hoped to catch the cable car back down after the hike but it was closed for maintenance, which made the day a little more gruelling.

Despite all this, I had a slow but enjoyable time in Almaty, spending a lot of time in Korean convenience stores and eating Lanzhou beef noodles almost nonstop