About our trip

This blog documents Dom and Claire’s latest installment in a series of vacations to increasingly less hygienically acceptable locales as we visit Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Don’t worry, we know nothing about these countries either.

Departing June 21 and returning July 13, we expect to visit the following places Wikitravel claims exist.

  • Kazakhstan:
    • Almaty, former capital and largest city
    • Saty
  • Kyrgyzstan:
    • Karakol
    • Cholpon Ata
    • Naryn
    • Jalal Abad
    • Toktogul
    • Bishkek, current capital and boringest city

The trip begins with a 12-hour flight to Istanbul, where we wait four hours before flying another five hours to Almaty. For three weeks, we’ll explore what are probably the two least demagogic Stans by car, foot, horse, and falcon. Then it’s back to Istanbul for a nearly-but-not-quite-long-enough-to-see-any-of-the-city layover, and a final, seemingly endless flight, whose physical and mental effects on us can only be remedied by the most powerful elixir known to the West: Whataburger Dr. Pepper.

Here is a rough map of our travels, which begin in Almaty and go clockwise until we finish in Bishkek. We’re playing it a bit by ear after we get into Kyrgyzstan, so this map is essentially an ambitious wish list.

On this trip, we will be:

  • Exploring Almaty, “the most European city in Asia”, which got its nickname due to the ubiquity of black-and-white horizontal-striped shirts and the booming market for pastel eyeglasses frames
  • Hiking through pristine mountains until they are pristine no more
  • Visiting Lake Mynzhylgy, where down-on-their-luck Kazakhs make wishes as they throw their spare vowels in
  • Successfully spending five days in Kazakhstan without making a single Borat joke
  • Crossing the border from Kazakhstan, greatest country in world, into Kyrgyzstan, a country run by little girls
  • Inexplicably struggling to come up with a clever joke about our rental car, a Russian-made SUV called the Patriot
  • Drinking fermented milk from all manner of non-bovine mammal: sheep, horse, Uzbek, etc.
  • Breathing easy knowing that no one reading this blog can tell if we’re spelling anything correctly
  • Visiting Issyk Kul, the world’s second-largest mountain lake after Titicaca, which we visited two years ago because we like to enjoy the finer large mountain lakes in life
  • Eating massive amounts of hearty plov, which you may know by the emasculated translation “pilaf”

Past mistakes in judgment can be found here:

Future journeys: