Kazakhstan’s largest city and its erstwhile capital, Almaty can come as a big surprise for a person touring Central Asia. The city has a very European vibe – very well planned and developed and beautiful. There are footpaths and cycling lanes everywhere, fountains and benches for people to enjoy the evening, plenty of parks for children and the city has mandates to add a certain number of public spaces every year! It is truly amazing how well they have prioritized urban planning keeping the citizen at the center of it all. It is perfect for a family trip with kids – read on for more details on this!

Before 1993, Almaty was called Alma-Ata – “alma” translates to apple and “ata” is grandfather – so Almaty is technically the “the grandfather of apples”. The oldest ancestor of the modern day apple has been traced back to the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan!

Almaty is the perfect base to explore the lakes and mountains of the Tian Shan range. There are quite a few unique national parks in the area which can be covered in quick day trips.

Now that we have some background, let’s dive back into Day 2 when we just arrived at our hotel in Almaty after a beautiful tour of the Kolsai and Kaindy lakes and Charyn Canyon. This is also the perfect time to subscribe and get your free virtual world tour (through our blog, of course!).

Day 2

After we’d settled into our room, we started looking for dinner options. We had not taken a local SIM in Kazakhstan – so we had to do all our planning when we had Wifi. We found an authentic Georgian place nearby and decided to go there for dinner. It started drizzling and we picked up the umbrellas that were kept in the hotel for guests. The weather was beautiful – nice and cool with a drizzle. The streets were lit up and nicely maintained – we felt like we were in Europe.

For dinner, we had the original Khachapuri – shaped like a pizza and filled with cheese, spinach and an egg on top. Even the thick crusty parts were stuffed with cheese. We also ordered Khinkali – Georgian dumplings filled with lamb, herbs and a juicy broth. They were essentially soup dumplings. They were significantly different from the Manti that we had been eating so far – those were also filled with meat but dry and had to be eaten with yogurt. We also ordered some vegetable stew, Georgian style fried chicken and a Russian honey cake (which was delicious!). With happy tummies, we ended the day.

Day 3

It was our last day of sightseeing for this trip and the plan was to enjoy Almaty. We did not have any plan for the day. So we quickly put together an itinerary on Google maps and marked all the places we wanted to visit. Then we struck off the ones which seemed like a stretch and which would greatly increase the amount of walking involved (we skipped the Central park and Republic Square).

We started the day with a walk to the Big Apple Coffee Shop down the road from where we were staying. One thing that we were constantly impressed with was how well the city was being maintained and planned for the future. Public spaces was a constant feature everywhere we went – parks, broad footpaths, cycling roads, play areas for children – it was very well thought out and executed. There were still more public spaces being created!

And their maintenance was also good – there were people sweeping the streets, blowing away dried leaves from the grass and footpaths using a leaf blower and even trucks which were washing the roads with pressure jets. There were sprinklers employed to water the plants regularly. Vehicles drove as per the street lights and gave way for pedestrian crossings (this wasn’t very good in Uzbekistan). For a city so young (it was being rebuilt after independence from USSR), they had sure got their priorities right, at least in terms of city planning. We felt sad thinking about the state of Bangalore and the city it could have been – with its amazing parks, lakes and weather.

Parth did not miss out on the opportunity and jumped right on a jungle gym and slide that he saw. He had to be extracted from it and taken along. For breakfast, we had some interesting looking pancakes and shakshuka along with coffee.

The waiter there was kind enough to give us his phone’s hotspot to let us book Yandex cabs to go to Panfilov park. That’s when we discovered that we could book two cabs together on Yandex. And the tracking would appear on the same map! So, no switching back and forth to check the status of each booking – both would appear together on the same screen and the same map! Yandex worked on offline mode as well to help navigate our current location and use most of the other functions – like ride history. Uber and Ola had miles to go to catch up to Yandex in terms of features. The biggest downside of Yandex was the size of the app and the fact that it would drain out our battery if active for too long. So, we had to kill the app every time we were done using it.

The roads around the park were broken as new pipes were being laid. We walked across the makeshift bridge and entered the park. It was a beautiful park which had memorials for the 28 soldiers from this area who died defending Moscow from the German invasion during the World War.

As we walked down the pathways, we saw some squirrels running around. They were the most peculiar looking squirrels we’d ever seen – they had pointy ears and a long and bushy tail! They were more than twice the size of Indian squirrels. We spotted two of them running around chasing one another. Parth joined in the chase along with 2 other kids in the park. Parth was making friends with every kid he came across – they were bonding over “kukoo-achi” peekaboo and games which involved chasing each other.

We walked over to the Zenkov Cathedral which stood in the middle of the park. It is a Russian Orthodox church built in 1907. It is apparently made entirely of wood, no nails and one of the only buildings that was unaffected by the 1911 earthquake. We couldn’t figure out the “wooden” part as there was a lot of plaster and tile work which had been done on the structure. It was very eclectic inside – way more than any cathedral we had been to – many paintings adorned the walls, there were golden candle holders of various shapes and sizes all over the place and images of bishops stood staring from the walls. It was a mix of colours that greeted us everywhere we looked.

Close to the cathedral was a children’s park with many kids playing. He spent a good 20 mins playing there, telling an “anna” to not climb on the slide because it was Parth’s turn and generally running around the whole thing climbing up and down.

Our next stop was Zhibek Zholy Street. We couldn’t visit the Green Bazaar as it was closed on Mondays. So we decided to walk along the street and see if we could find any souvenirs. All shops around the bazaar were shut – so no luck there! But as soon as we crossed the bazaar, the air was thick with the smell of chocolate. It smelled more like hot chocolate. Curious, we walked towards the smell (like how Tom and Jerry float towards the scent of food).

It took us to the doors of the Lotte Rakhat factory. We could see people working inside the chocolate factory and remembered Willy Wonka. Sadly, we did not get entry into the factory. Instead they pointed us to a store where they sold their products at factory price. We bought a bunch of chocolates, wafers and biscuits. We stopped outside, finished the wafers, walked in and bought some more!

We continued walking down Zhibek Zholy towards the metro station. On the way, we picked up some Boba tea. Parth did a great job of sucking the boba pearls till the end of the straw but couldn’t get it into his mouth as he was biting the straw and making it too narrow. Finally, he had to wait till we finished the drink, opened the lid and gave him the boba. He was delighted! He was enjoying Almaty the most!

We entered the Almaty metro. The ticket counter is on the level below ground level. The platform is almost 4 levels below that. It feels like you are reading the Earth’s core to find the metro train. Do exercise caution and hold the handrails of the escalator so that you don’t fall down after realising the depth and angle of it. To give you a comparison, the Bangalore metro stations go to depths of 80 feet below the ground. In Almaty, it is over 250 feet! And mostly covered on a single escalator!

The stations were standard unlike those in Tashkent. The trains were also the new type – a typical metro like any other city.

We got down at the Almaly station, took the walking street in front of the Opera House and walked to our hotel. Parth ran off to play in the fountains on the street.

We got back to our room, rested for a while and went out for lunch to a nearby cafe. We ordered some burgers, sandwiches and pad thai. They said it would take 30 mins and Parth decided to sleep at that very moment. So we went back to the room, put him to sleep in the bed and brought in our food as takeaway. Everything was excellent – the place was called Cafe Plus and it is right behind D’Rami.

We left our room at around 4pm, got cabs and went to the Kok Tobe gondola start point. We got return tickets for the cable car. It was a ride which offered a panoramic view of the city. We passed by homes, hotels and even the highway. At the top of the hill was an entire amusement park! It had an upside-down house, a Ferris wheel, remote control cars for kids, souvenir shops, roller coasters and even a zoo! There were very good viewpoints for the city from where we could spot artificial ski slopes. A family walked up to us and asked if we could click a photo together – Indians are famous here as well. Parth seemed keen on driving an RC jeep – so we put him in one. One minute into the ride, he started crying and screaming. He made it to 2 mins (out of 5) and we had to get him out.

We visited the zoo, walked around the rides, got some ice cream and then took the cable car back to the city. The area just outside the cable car station – in front of the Republic palace had a huge fountain. Parth ran straight towards it. And Nam was fully prepared for this. She changed him into his swimming shorts and let him join the other kids playing in the water. Ever since we saw such fountains in Vietnam, Nam wanted to enter and play in it. Now, she was living it through Parth – in fact, she had packed swimming shorts for this very purpose! He was initially not too happy that the water was cold but slowly adjusted to it. We had to literally pull him away when it was time to leave. We stood in the shade of the Abay monument, changed him into warm clothes and walked towards the Abay metro station.

Maps.me is the best maps app in Central Asia. Its offline maps feature is miles ahead of Google maps. And the level of detail is astounding – it even tells you where the benches on the footpath are, which places have cycling roads, where to find currency exchanges and ATMs (with high accuracy) and even lets you go on navigation mode completely offline! This along with Yandex made us realise that Google and Uber are far from the best options out there.

We took the metro from Abay back to Almaly, had some coffee and ice cream and walked to our dinner place – a restaurant called Aurora that was right opposite our hotel. There was some huge party happening there and all the waiters were attending to it. They were so distracted that they brought a chicken dish when we had ordered vegetarian. Poor experience and a sad way to end the trip. But we didn’t mind much as we were all quite tired and wanted to get back to the room. We packed our stuff and got into bed.

Day 4

It was our day to head back home. We booked Yandex cabs at 4:45am (the sun was already out) and left for the Almaty airport – it was a bit far from the city center and took about 25 mins (this was a lot as compared to our previous stays but significantly better than Indian cities). We took Air Astana back to Delhi and then split to reach our homes in Mumbai, Kochi and Bangalore. Everyone was home by 7pm. Tired, because we had walked for more than 7km per day on average, but happy to have travelled to these beautiful countries.

And that concludes the short trip to Kazakhstan. Check out our other blogs on Kazakhstan here to plan your perfect itinerary:

• The Kazakh Itinerary – the perfect short and sweet itinerary through the Steppes
• Captivating Kazakhstan – Awe-Inspiring nature at its finest – a journey through steppes, mountains, lakes and canyons

The next part will be our itinerary and travel tips which will help you plan your trip. Subscribe right here! Leave us a comment below if you liked this one. Feel free to share this with your travel-loving friends!