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.
Altai Mountains & Steppe Nomads » 10-Day East Kazakhstan is a 10-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 $2190 per person for two travellers down to $1430 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
10-day Kazakhstan itinerary
Met at Almaty airport and driven into the city that was Kazakhstan's capital until 1997 and is still, by any measure, its soul. Almaty sits directly under the Tien Shan — you look up from the boulevards and there are 4,000-metre snow peaks at the end of the street. The name means 'father of apples', and it is not a boast: geneticists have traced every apple on Earth back to the wild forests in these mountains.
Overnight: 4-star hotel / yurt in Katon-Karagay.
The morning in Almaty: the Central State Museum's Scythian gold, the nail-less wooden cathedral that outlived the 1911 earthquake, and Medeu, the world's highest Olympic rink. Then a flight north-east to Ust-Kamenogorsk, the gateway to the Kazakh Altai — a corner of the country almost no foreign traveller reaches.
Overnight: 4-star hotel / yurt in Katon-Karagay.
The regional museum first, for the Scythian and Kazakh nomadic collections that set up everything you will see in the mountains. Then out to the Bukhtarma Reservoir — a Soviet-made inland sea ringed by pine forest and granite, which Kazakhs call their Alps and which sees, on a busy day, almost nobody.
Overnight: 4-star hotel / yurt in Katon-Karagay.
Into Katon-Karagay, the largest national park in Kazakhstan and the wildest thing in the country: Altai snow peaks, larch forest, brown bear, and the last working eagle hunters of the Kazakh Altai. You sleep in a yurt — a real one, felt over a lattice frame, the same design that carried this culture across the steppe for two thousand years.
Overnight: 4-star hotel / yurt in Katon-Karagay.
Berkutchi — golden eagle hunting — is perhaps seven thousand years old and there may be fewer than 250 practitioners left. A hunter takes a female eaglet from the nest, trains her for years, hunts fox and wolf with her from horseback, and then releases her back to the wild to breed. You watch her fly to the fist from a hillside, and you understand immediately why UNESCO protects this. The afternoon is on horseback, on open steppe.
Overnight: 4-star hotel / yurt in Katon-Karagay.
Up to the Rakhmanov Springs, a Soviet-era alpine sanatorium built around thermal mineral waters at 1,760 metres, deep in larch forest. From the ridge above it, on a clear day, you see Belukha — 4,506 metres, the highest peak in Siberia and a sacred mountain to the Altai peoples, who hold that the hidden land of Shambhala lies somewhere beneath it.
Overnight: 4-star hotel / yurt in Katon-Karagay.
Down out of the mountains along the Irtysh, past the kurgans — Scythian burial mounds — that stud this landscape. The Saka who raised them buried their warriors in gold; the 'Golden Man' unearthed from one of these graves, in a suit of four thousand gold plaques, is now the national symbol of Kazakhstan. The regional collections put the finds in context.
Overnight: 4-star hotel / yurt in Katon-Karagay.
Semey is where Dostoevsky served five years of exile after Siberia, and the house he lived in is now his museum. It is also the birthplace of Abai, the poet who effectively created modern Kazakh literature. And it is the town that lived downwind of the Polygon — the Semipalatinsk Test Site, where the USSR detonated 456 nuclear devices between 1949 and 1989, many of them above ground, over a populated steppe. The memorial to the victims is one of the most affecting monuments in Central Asia.
Overnight: 4-star hotel / yurt in Katon-Karagay.
The flight back to Almaty, and a farewell dinner — beshbarmak, most likely, the national dish: boiled meat and flat noodles, eaten with the hands, which is exactly what the name means.
Overnight: 4-star hotel / yurt in Katon-Karagay.
A transfer to Almaty airport for your onward flight. End of our services.
