Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country on Earth and one of the least explored — the canyons of Charyn, the futuristic capital Astana, the Silk Road mausoleums of Turkestan, the Altai mountains and even the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Distances are huge; with a private driver and guide, they become part of the adventure.
Almaty & Charyn Canyon » 5-Day Kazakhstan Highlights is a 5-day private tour of Kazakhstan, run on your own dates with a private guide and driver. You stay in 4-star hotels in the cities and comfortable guesthouses or yurts in remote areas, with full board on steppe and mountain days.
Prices are per person and drop as your group grows — from $1220 per person for two travellers down to $790 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
5-day Kazakhstan itinerary
Met at Almaty airport and driven into a city that has snow peaks at the end of its avenues. Almaty was the capital until 1997 and remains the country's cultural heart. The evening is a walk down the Arbat, the pedestrian street where the city comes out to eat, busk and be seen — a good, easy first hour in Central Asia.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Zenkov Cathedral is a wooden Russian Orthodox church built in 1907 without a single nail, and it survived the 1911 earthquake that flattened almost everything else in the city — engineers still come to look at it. The Central State Museum runs from Scythian gold to Soviet industry. The Green Bazaar is where the city actually shops. Then the cable car up Kok-Tobe for the panorama: the whole grid of Almaty laid out below, the Tien Shan behind it.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Charyn Canyon is Kazakhstan's Grand Canyon and gets a fraction of the visitors. Red sandstone walls rise 200 metres, weathered into the spires and turrets that give the Valley of Castles its name, and you walk down through them to the river at the bottom. The canyon shelters a grove of Sogdian ash — a species that survived the last Ice Age here and almost nowhere else. On the way back, Big Almaty Lake: turquoise, glacial, at 2,500 metres.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Medeu is the highest Olympic-size skating rink in the world at 1,691 metres, and its thin mountain air and glacier meltwater made it a speed-skating record factory — more than 120 world records were set on this ice. Above it, the Shymbulak gondola lifts you to 3,200 metres for a walk with the Tien Shan all around. Back down to the bazaar in the afternoon.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
A transfer to Almaty airport for your onward flight. End of our services.
