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.
Aral Sea & Baikonur Cosmodrome » 10-Day Kazakhstan Unique Tour 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.
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.
West to Turkestan and the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi — the Sufi master whose teaching turned the Turkic steppe to Islam. Tamerlane ordered the mausoleum built in 1389 and it was never finished; the scaffolding holes are still in the façade, and the unfinished portal is part of why it is on the UNESCO list. It is the holiest building in Kazakhstan; three pilgrimages here are said to equal one hajj. On to Kyzylorda.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Baikonur is the oldest and largest space launch facility on Earth, leased by Russia from Kazakhstan and still, today, the only way humans reach the International Space Station. Sputnik went up from here in 1957. So did Gagarin, in 1961. You see the pads, the museum, and the modest cottage where he slept the night before he became the first human being in space — the bed is made exactly as he left it.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
A full day inside the cosmodrome. The assembly halls, where rockets are still put together horizontally and rolled to the pad on rails — a Soviet design decision that has outlived the Soviet Union. The abandoned Buran, the USSR's answer to the Space Shuttle: it flew once, unmanned and fully automated in 1988, and was then left to rot in a hangar. And the memorials to Gagarin and to Korolev, the chief designer whose name was a state secret while he was alive.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
North to Aralsk, which was a busy fishing port until the sea walked away from it. Soviet irrigation diverted the two rivers feeding the Aral in the 1960s; by 2007 the sea had lost 90% of its volume. The old harbour is dry ground, and the rusting trawlers sit in sand and camel thorn, kilometres from any water. It is one of the largest man-made environmental disasters in history, and standing in it is a very quiet experience.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
But there is a second half to the story. In 2005 Kazakhstan finished the Kok-Aral dam, walling off the northern lobe of the sea and letting the Syr Darya refill it. The water rose faster than anyone predicted, the salinity fell, the fish came back, and Aralsk's fishermen went back to work. You go out to the shoreline and meet them. It is the rarest thing in environmental journalism: a place where it is getting better.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Across into Uzbekistan to Moynaq, on the southern lobe, where there was no dam and no recovery. The ship cemetery here is the famous one — a dozen hulls in a desert that was seabed within living memory. The small museum holds the photographs of what the town used to be. Then on to Nukus.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
The Savitsky Museum is the improbable one. Igor Savitsky spent decades smuggling banned Soviet avant-garde art out to Nukus — a town so remote and so unimportant that Moscow never bothered to look. He saved tens of thousands of works that would otherwise have been destroyed, and they are still here, in the desert, in what is now the second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde in the world. Then the flight back to Almaty.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
A transfer to Almaty airport for your onward flight. End of our services.
