Kazakhstan Packages/Deals & Travel Agents Near Me

While still off the beaten path, Kazakhstan is benefiting from its oil-rich status to make a new image for itself. The country's decade-old capital is a showcase of modernity, rich with newly constructed skyscrapers and multicolored city lights. It's a multibillion-dollar flashy showcase, and it shows. This said, much of this country's vast landscape remains the way it was when Genghis Khan and his hordes swept across the Central Asian steppes: vast, desolate and empty.

In these vast landscapes, travelers will feel as if they've reached the final outposts of the civilized world: Bleak desert scenery leads to flat, seemingly endless plains, broken occasionally by isolated cities, many of them industrial wastelands dating from the Soviet era.

The plains end abruptly at sharply rising foothills and high mountains along the country's eastern and southeastern fringes, where the best attractions lie. According to Asian legend, somewhere in the Altay Mountains, which straddle Kazakhstan's borders with Russia and China, is Shambhala—the paradise that will someday reveal itself.

The country's biggest promise today lies below the waters of the Caspian Sea, on Kazakhstan's western border, where oil and gas reserves have made the country the richest of the republics in the region. The deposits found there are some of the largest found in modern history, and have laid the foundations for a more prosperous future for this central Asian state. But its strategic geopolitical situation has left this country flatly between Russian, Chinese interests—with U.S. interests also drilling in some of the most rich oil-fields.

Visiting Kazakhstan can still be challenging, especially for independent travelers. To this day much of the population speak only Kazakh or Russian languages, and public English-language signage is hard to come by. Crime rates can be high, especially in the cities, and foreigners are a target because they are widely perceived to be rich.

Also, Soviet-era suspicion of foreigners can create bureaucratic problems for those traveling alone. We recommend that visitors to Kazakhstan travel as part of an organized tour. That way costs will be fixed, and your tour guide will have the headaches.

Geography

Kazakhstan is characterized by vast steppes in the center and west, a great desert and dead sea in the south, and a great landlocked lake in the west. The magnificent Pamir, Tien-shan and Altai mountain ranges rise in the east (they are actually a spur of the Himalayas).

Though Kazakhstan may seem small when compared with Russia, it's really very large (and very empty)—in fact, it's larger than western Europe, with a population of more than 15 million.

History

The outside world first took notice of the region in the eighth century, when one of the main Silk Road routes, connecting China with Europe, passed through the area near Almaty. At the beginning of the 13th century, Genghis Khan invaded the region, bringing Mongol customs and language to the native Turks who lived there. Today, remnants of this Mongol heritage can be seen in the country's rough equestrian games and yurts that, to this day, dot the landscape.

The Russian Empire began seriously asserting its influence in the region in the mid-18th century, and Kazakhstan soon fell under Moscow's rule. Following the Communist revolution, Kazakhstan was declared a republic within the Soviet Union in 1936. The following decades of Soviet rule wreaked environmental and political havoc on the people, causing damage that will take decades to recover from.

Sovereignty finally arrived with the demise of Soviet communism in 1991. Kazakhstan was the last of the republics to leave the Soviet Union, and today, the country continues to have close ties with Russia—reinforced (and sometimes aggravated) by the fact that 30% of Kazakhstan's population are ethnic Russians.

Snapshot

Kazakhstan's main attractions are its architecture, historic sites, museums, art, hiking, mountain climbing and stark yet beautiful scenery. The country’s decade-old capital, Astana is a contrast to the country's other urban centers which suffer from Soviet-era malaise.

The country will appeal to experienced travelers with a broad range of interests and a great deal of flexibility. Don't go there if you can't tolerate delays or schedule changes, must have deluxe accommodations everywhere you go, or if you are looking for a destination with varied nightlife.

Potpourri

Once the fourth-largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea will soon be a relative puddle. Soviet irrigation systems begun in the 1960s diverted much of the water in the Syr Darya and Amu Darya (Oxus) rivers to cotton farms, effectively eliminating the sources of the lake. In 2005, engineers successfully completed a dike to preserve a small portion of the lake, now affectionately known as the Little Aral Sea. The result has been rising waters and fish stocks, leaving hope for an eventual restoration of the landscape.

Abandoned fishing boats from the now-defunct Aral Sea fishing fleet lie eerily on sand dunes, left high and dry as the waters receded in the 1970s and '80s.

Archaeologists excavating burial mounds near Pokrovka have unearthed the tombs of what appear to be female warriors, raising speculation that the skeletons may be the legendary race of women warriors called Amazons. The mythological Amazons were said to inhabit the shores of the Black Sea, 1,000 mi/1,600 km west of Pokrovka.

Traveling around Kazakhstan you will notice signs predicating prosperity for Kazakhstan by 2030. It's all part of President Nursultan Nazarbayev's plan to create an economic powerhouse of the country by that far-off date. While the country's shiny capital is slick, much of the development relies on exploiting the country's oil and resource wealth—and then slowly bringing the country into the modern era.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, most of the world was surprised to find that the U.S. and Kazakhstan were the most advanced space powers: The Soviet Union's liftoff site and hardware at Baikonur Cosmodrome were all stationed in this newly independent republic. Russia still controls Kazakhstan's space program, however—it has leased the property until 2050.

Kazakhstan boasts huge oil and gas reserves and large mineral deposits. Needless to say, several multinational corporations are working to develop business ties with the country. The power struggle for Kazakhstan's oil-wealth is dominated by Russia and China, the country's most influential neighbors.

Uncontrolled hunting in remote mountain areas—by both local nomadic yak herders and tourists—is threatening the country's rare Siberian ibex population.

Although most of the country's nuclear weapons have been dismantled and shipped to Russia, there is still a sizable area of radioactive contamination north of Semipalatinsk. Hundreds of nuclear tests were conducted there in the 1950s and '60s.

To this day, Kazakhstan's nearly empty steppes make it an integral part of Russia's space program since it is a perfect landing ground for descending capsules. Although still tightly controlled, tourists can now witness rocket launches at the famed Baikonur Cosmodrome, the launch site of the first human-manned space venture that propelled Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin into to the skies on 12 April 1961.