Holiday in Central Asia (2): getting there
I knew that this trip would be challenging but I didn’t expect the challenges to begin before we even reached the region. However, the evening before departure, we were notified that our UK Tour Manager had just gone down with covid so that we would be dependent solely on local guides.
On Day 1 of our 26-day trip, to reach the starting point of the tour, there were two Turkish Airline flights: one from London to Istanbul and then another from Istanbul to Almaty.
The first flight of just over 3 hours went smoothly. Once at Istanbul airport, the good news was that it is a super modern facility opened in 2019 – although free WiFi is only available for an hour after scanning one’s passport details. The bad news was that the onward flight was delayed by two hours turning a three-hour wait into a five-hour one. The second flight was just over 4.5 hours.
We were met at Almaty airport – a wholly inadequate facility – by our local guide, a Russian called Svetlana, and driven the short distance to the 30-storey Ritz-Carlton Hotel which is as good as any Western hotel. Indeed it was so modern that the rooms had sliding panels in the drawers with a fixed electronic pad that controlled the lights, the curtains, the air conditioning and probably all sorts of other things that I never discovered.
It was now 8 am local time. Since I had left home at 7 am and Kazakhstan is five hours ahead of UK time, the journey door to door had been 20 hours. After a quick breakfast, it was time for bed.