How Many Ways Can You Get Around in Kazakstan? Anybody Got a Camel?

In the last 24 hours we've been really active, traveling across a wide stretch of Kazakhstan

We traveled on foot, by car, and by overnight train.

I thought I would show a bunch of pictures in this blog post, because they can tell the story well.  

We started out yesterday in Turkistan, the place with the crummy hotel, and set off across what they call the "steppe".  This is the vast grassland that makes up much of K-stan.  I'm gonna use that abbreviation because it's hard to keep typing out Kazakhstan. 

It is pretty dry here.  They have water problems, as in - not enough.   But the hot and dry climate has been a tremendous aid in preserving the historical and ancient ruins that dot the landscape.

As we traveled by car for a couple hundred miles, we passed a lot of scenery, including a whole bunch of camels, just kind of walking down the road.

Then we came to the ancient village of Otrar.  It is very remote, but was once a part of the Silk Road where goods traveled from east to west.  They mostly used ... you guessed it - camels - to travel back and forth.

There were some amazing buildings, and the area was described in one sense as a ghost town, but people still live and work around there.  I would describe it as a remote village that contains a lot of historic ruins.  There are a lot of such villages and towns in that region. 

One of the more amazing things was a giant mound that looked like a hill.  It was previously in ancient times a full-on town with a palace and other structures.  Then Genghis Khan showed up and conquered the place ... and killed everyone.  

He was generally a pretty fair player but for some reason he was really pissed at these guys.  Our guide told us the story.  

They are restoring the place basically by digging away all the dirt to reveal the buildings.  

There are a ton of archaeologists here involved in active research and uncovering the past.  Seems like the whole country is full of sites.  You can't stick a shovel in the ground here without finding another historical treasure or something of cultural significance. 

We spent a lot of time in the car on the way, and our driver stopped a couple times to encourage us to sample the local produce.  They are big on melons here, and they were delicious.  Fiona captured me with a big smile on my face eating watermelon on the side of the road.  It was a nice break on a hot dry day. 

We pressed on to the city of Shymkent (pronounced Shim Kent) where there were even more ruins.  I won't keeping bombarding readers with more ancient ruin pictures, but the landscape was interesting, and we began to encounter more mountains.  

This scene shows a special feature of K-stan - Apple Trees.  This country is known as the origin of apples, and they grow everywhere, with a vast variety, many we've never seen before.  And all kinds of other tree fruits: Plums, Pears, Apricots, Peaches, Pomegranates, plus Walnuts and Pistachios and a bunch of other stuff. 

At night we made our way to the train station in Shymkent to take the all night train back to Almaty. It was another decent sleeper car and we arrived back in the city in the morning.  On the way we were able to see the majestic mountains that surround the city. 

When you walk out of the train station, there is a statue of a soldier standing in the sun with the mountains behind him.  Couldn't resist the picture. 

After checking into the hotel, we went for a walk around the city.  We hit some of the local colorful street markets and eventually hit the central park that houses the massive Church of Saint Nicholas. It was nice to see a church, there are more mosques here in K-stan, although they are not known as a particularly religious society.  The mosques are mostly empty.

This is a Russian Orthodox church.  This being a former Soviet Union country, there is a lot of Russian influence here (I want to expand on that in another blog post).  Of course, the Orthodox church uses a lot of iconography in their worship.  The interior of this place was eye-popping.

We're back in Almaty for a couple days.  We are planning to take a trip outside the city tomorrow up into the mountains for some hiking.  It will be nice to be up in the trees and lakes.