Greg and Mandy's Travels

OK, your first cultural lesson. Stan means ‘land’. There are seven ‘stans’. Just like we have Eng-land, Scot-land, Ice-land and so on, there is Kazakh-stan (land of the Kazakhs), Kyrgyz-stan (land of the Kyrgyzs) and so on. Seven of them actually. We’ll be going to four of them, bypassing Afghanistan and Pakistan because they are rather dangerous at the moment, and Turkmenistan because we felt like it.

The tour group consists of 13 – all from Australia. 4 couples and 5 singles. All of retirement age and, as you might expect of a group flying to Kazakhstan, all of them are very well traveled. Our tour guide for this part of the trip is a young Kazakh woman by the name of Valentina.

We are traveling through four countries that formed the backbone of the central part of the Silk Road, which was a network of routes running through central asia, allowing the free flow of goods and knowledge from Venice and Istanbul in the west across to Xian in the east, which was China’s capital at that stage. We will be moving eastwards.

Kazakhstan is the ninth largest country in the world. About the size of Western Australia, so it’s huge. We are in Almaty, which is the largest city in the country, but not the capital, though it used to be. The current capital is Astana which was created by the Soviets to fit all the bureaucrats and government machinery near their border, when they could no longer fit in Almaty. In March 2019, Kazakhstan renamed its capital to Nur-Sultan to honour the country’s outgoing long-term authoritarian president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and then a couple of weeks ago without warning the name of the capital was changed back to Astana from Nur-Sultan. Caught everybody by surprise. Tour guides, tourist brochures, web sites and software all scrambled to catch up. 

Whilst in the mood to change things, Kazakhstan has decided to change from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin alphabet. The words won’t be changing – just the way you write them. So soon, I’ll be able to pronounce the Kazakh language – I just won’t have a clue what it means. The opposite of French really, where you know what it means, but haven’t a clue how to pronounce it.

Today was a full day bus tour of the city. Started at the Museum of History which traced the development of the peoples in the region, then on to the Museum of Music with more three stringed instruments than you could shake a bow at. 

Visited Zenkov Cathedral, a 46 metre high wooden Orthodox church, and a wonderful park with monuments remembering the 125 thousand Kazakh soldiers that died as cannon fodder for the Soviets in WWII.

After lunch, we visited the main city market with its varous meat areas (yes, horse as one of them), then it was off to the Sunkar Birds of Prey show where we had a demonstration of the hunting skills of eagles, falcons, vultures and their handlers.

Tour dinner in the restaurant.