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| Arriving in Almaty, Kazakhstan |
After a sweaty, but interesting 30 hour train ride. We arrived in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, with nowhere to stay!
BUT! All was not lost, for Couchsurfing was on hand to help us out, in the form of Aigerim, a riduculously fun and interesting girl who allowed all of us to sleep in her living room at short notice! Sweet!
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| Independence Square |
You could definitely sense a increase in wealth when comparing Tashkent with Almaty. Huge 4x4s, sports cars, expensive restaurants.... You could instantly tell that earnings from resource rich Kazakhstan were being spent well here. The Tein Shan mountains looming over the city created an epic backdrop and it felt significantly milder than Tashkent, which was just unbelievably hot!
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| 'Kazakhstan' in Russian Cyrillic. |
We did a bunch of walking and sightseeing on our first day, seeing a nice mixture of old school Soviet architecture and monuments as well as more modern a futuristic buildings. The city haad a good vibe, and it felt that we really had taken one step closer to Asia proper.
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| Oil boom architecture |
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| Awesome night out |
That night, in true Kazakh fashion, we went out with some of Aigerim's friends to sample Almaty's nightlife. One too many vodka bottles later (and a free Jack Daniels t-shirt I won at a bar raffle!) we were stumbling around the dancefloor, somewhere, having an incredible time (as far as I can remember) and practising our (very) limited Kazakh and Russian on various tables of curious locals.
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| You can buy beer by the 3L bottle in supermarkets! AMAZING. |
An interesting tradition here was that a lot of the time you apparently go and eat dinner at the club! After a hearty meal of Lagman or Plov, over a lot of vodka, it is only natural to get up from the table and start dancing to some Russian electro!
Early the next morning (we were still quite intoxicated), Aigerim took us with her friends into the mountains for ECOFEST, a music festival sporting various performers from Kazakhstan, Russia and the Ukraine.
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| ECOFEST |
It was refreshingly cooler in the mountains and after sleeping in the warm sun and swiming in the icy cold river for a bit to nurse our hangovers, we were back in the game, despite being offered (politely forced) to drink more vodka by locals. As I tried to explain to a local Russian what I meant by the word ''hungover'', I was continually cut off by her asking: ''But why not?''
We also got interviewed by 2 magazines, a lot of people there were quite perplexed as to why any foreigners like us where here. A man asked Sam: ''ISRAEL?! ISRAEL?!'' To which Sam replied: ''No, I'm english! Why?''
''You look rich and smart!''
The next day Natasha (finally) arrived after missing her original flight to Almaty (it wasn't actually her fault!) and that day we had lunch with the infamous David from Stantours. This was the company who helped us out with our VISAS and our guide in Turkmenistan. For the record, if you ever feel like hanging out in Central Asia, THIS is your man!
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| Road to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan |
With our trip coming to an end in a couple of weeks, we decided to head off to Kyrgyzstan, before our flight back home from Almaty.
