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.
Kazakhstan Silk Road — Turkestan & Almaty » 8-Day Tour is a 8-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 $1810 per person for two travellers down to $1170 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
8-day Kazakhstan itinerary
Met at Almaty airport and straight into the Green Bazaar, which is the fastest possible introduction to Kazakhstan: horse sausage hanging in coils, Korean salads left behind by Stalin's deportations, mountains of dried apricots, and traders in four languages. Almaty sits under the Tien Shan and was the capital until 1997.
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 along the old Silk Road to Taraz, a caravan city already ancient when the Arabs arrived. Outside it stand the Karakhanid mausoleums, and the loveliest of them is Aisha-Bibi — a small 12th-century tomb covered in carved terracotta tiles, built, the story goes, by a khan for the girl who died on her way to marry him. Her nurse Babaji-Khatun is buried beside her. On to Shymkent.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Shymkent in the morning — Ordabasy Square, where the three Kazakh hordes united against the Dzhungars in 1726, the regional museum, and a bazaar that is one of the great southern markets. Then north to Turkestan, the spiritual capital of the Turkic world.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
The whole day at the Yasawi complex. Tamerlane commissioned it in 1389 to honour the Sufi saint who Islamised the steppe, and it is the finest Timurid architecture in Kazakhstan — a 39-metre dome, the largest brick dome in Central Asia, and a two-tonne bronze cauldron cast for the pilgrims. It was never finished: Tamerlane died and the scaffolding holes remain. Below the complex is the Hilvet, the underground cell where Yasawi spent the last years of his life, having decided that no man should live above ground longer than the Prophet did.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Otrar is a mound of ruins and one of the hinge points of world history. In 1218 its governor executed a Mongol trade caravan as spies; Genghis Khan's response was to erase Khwarezm from the map and kill, by some counts, millions of people. Tamerlane himself died here in 1405, on his way to invade China. Now it is wind and brick and a small museum, and you have it to yourself.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Sayram is the oldest continuously inhabited town in Kazakhstan and the birthplace of Yasawi himself; his parents' tombs are still venerated here. Then into Aksu-Zhabagly, the oldest nature reserve in Central Asia — a canyon, snow leopards nobody ever sees, and in April a hillside of wild Greig's tulips, the ancestors of every tulip in Holland.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
A transfer to Almaty airport for your onward flight. End of our services.
