Holiday in Central Asia (6): city tour of Almaty, Kazakhstan
Our last day in Kazakhstan (Day 5) started with a surprise when one of our group Nova announced that overnight her partner Charles, who had never had covid, had just tested positive for the virus. The tour organisers decided that, while the rest of the group would fly to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, Charles & Nova would need to travel there by road and then isolate at our hotel there until he tested negative.
So, for the rest of us, the day was a tour of the city on a day when the temperature was 36C.
Almaty, which is located in the south-east corner of the country, was previously called Alma-Ata (Father of Apples) but, following independence, it was renamed to be closer in name to the original Silk Road settlement of Almatu. It used to be the capital but, in 1998, this was moved to Astana in the centre of the country which was subsequently renamed Nur-Sultan. This is all part of the ubiquitous post-Soviet rebranding in this region.
However, Almaty remains the largest city in the country with a population of about 2M. It is a surprisingly picturesque city with plenty of trees and overlooked by the Zailiysky Alatau mountains. It has only has one tube line with just 11 stations.
The tour started with a visit to the Central State Museum where pride of place goes to a large replica of the Golden Man – the national symbol of Kazakhstan – who was a 3rd or 4th century warrior whose gold-clan remains were uncovered in 1969 and are now located in the new capital. Next we took a cable car – or “the rope way” as a sign suggested in English – up the Kok Tobe (Green Hill) which affords splendid views over the city as well as offering a 2007 set of bronze statues of the four Beatles.
Back down from the cable car, we had lunch at a restaurant called “Assorti”. Afterwards we drove down Freedom Street (formerly Lenin Street) to Panfilov Park (named after an Almaty infantry unit who died fighting outside Moscow in 1941). At the heart of the square is the beautiful candy-coloured Zenkov Cathedral which was built between 1904-1906 entirely of wood (which is how it survived the earthquake of 1911).
Much of the square, as its name suggests, has military connotations with grandiose Soviet-designed monuments commemorating the dead of the Civil War in 1917-1920 and the Second World War in 1941-1945 plus a huge statue portraying the 28 Panfilov Heroes and an eternal flame of honour. Rather prosaically, we even made a short visit to the Kazakh Museum of Folk Musical Instruments which is located in a 1908 wooden building in the square.
It was time to say goodbye to Svetlana and make the short flight of 30 minutes from Almaty in Kazakhstan to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan – the second country on our tour of the ‘stans’. Our local guide was Olga – a Russian whose family has lived In Kyrgyzstan for five generations. Our hotel was the Hyatt, an excellent place, if not as opulent as the Ritz-Carlton in Almaty.