Most of us have barely been able to go anywhere for two years, so perhaps it’s time to venture a bit further than usual and try somewhere new. Nick Powell has been looking at how Kazakhstan offers a trip with a difference.
After two years when a global pandemic made international tourism almost impossible, the sector is bouncing back. Many travellers are looking for a different kind of trip, to somewhere further away than usual, with a real sense of adventure.
Kazakhstan certainly fits that bill as it’s a vast country with a rich history and plenty for foreigners to discover for themselves. Until now tourism has only been a very small part of the economy but efforts to attract more visitors were well underway when coronavirus struck.
But the work to improve facilities and infrastructure has continued, leaving the country well placed to attract more tourists than ever before. It is now comfortably possible to combine a visit to Kazakhstan’s extraordinary purpose-built capital city of Nur-Sultan with a trip to ancient Turkestan on the Silk Road.
It’s a journey that takes you from the striking modern architecture of the capital to the magnificent mausoleum of the 12th century poet and philosopher Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, built on the orders of Tamerlane the Great, who had defeated the Golden Horde.
The newly-built Turkestan airport means the flight from Nur-Sultan takes less than two hours, crossing the Great Steppe where the Kazakhs lived their traditionally nomadic lives until the twentieth century.
After visiting the mausoleum, you pass beyond the city walls into the rabat, where a nomadic village has been created. If want to take a closer look at what you saw from the air, a ‘flying theatre’ offers a high-speed virtual tour of Kazakhstan led by a falcon, the nomads’ companion on their journeys.
Both the cutting-edge modernity and the rich traditions of Kazakhstan are a world away from the comic fantasy of the two ‘Borat’ films. The first film horrified many Kazakhs, even if the real targets were Americans only too keen to believe in the bigoted anti-hero.
By the time of the second film, audiences were in on the joke and Kazakh tourism decided to seize the marketing opportunity. Social media videos highlighted various attractions and borrowed Borat’s catchphrase ‘very nice’.
Repurposed like that, it’s a phrase that neatly underplays the magnificence of what’s on offer in Kazakhstan. More people will soon get to see for themselves a country where the man in the movie never set foot.
English (US) ·