ALMATY
City and mountains in one day
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When we bought our air tickets to Thailand, AirAstana, the airline we were supposed to fly on, offered us a daily Stopover for 1 euro (Stopover is a stopover in a transit city). It included: a 4 star hotel with breakfast, and car transfers to and from the airport. We took advantage of an unexpected promotion to discover a new country. The airline in-flight treated us to goodies made in Kazakhstan and also gave us small souvenirs made of felt.
Almaty's nighttime airport glowed with festive lights as we boarded the car sent to pick us up from our hotel.
We were hosted by the four-star hotel Kazzhol. We remembered it very much for the variety of meat dishes. The Kazakhs are very good at cooking meat, we confirm this with our own experience.
The room was comfortable and included all the necessary accessories for life. To familiarize ourselves with the country, we watched local TV channels. Unlike Ukrainian TV, where we were used to watching regular political confrontation, Kazakhstani TV was somehow pastoral: there was a cheerful race of skiers, a gardener managed to graft a branch of an apple tree onto a pear tree, and even sad news from abroad was presented in a peaceful way.
Very often New York is called the Big Apple, but visiting Almaty we know that it is the most apple city, as the name translates as Apple-Father. The next photo shows local skyscrapers. The photo was taken from the window of a cab that took us to the walking part of the city.
We like to look at and photograph murals in different cities around the world. Almaty turned out to be a very interesting city in this respect. Artworks on the walls of houses are often found here and some, in our opinion, are of artistic value.
The central promenade street, despite the approaching New Year's holidays was practically empty.
We admired the dancing of a tipsy Santa Claus and went on to explore Almaty further.
As a connoisseur of the beautiful, I took a photo near the monument to the two-stringed dombra. This instrument is so important for Kazakhstanis that every first Sunday in July they celebrate Dombra Day.
In contrast to the empty New Year's Eve avenue, one of the streets was crowded with active trade. Apparently, it was not a pre-holiday fair, but a permanent food market in the city center.
The next location we explored was the 28 Panfilovtsev Park.
The main sculptural composition of this park in Almaty is the Kremlin teeth, which are defended by a group of soldiers, under whose feet is a quote: “Russia is great, and there is nowhere to retreat. Moscow is behind us!”. This composition, here, in four thousand kilometers from these cogs, frankly speaking, causes double impressions.
On the left and right, there are bas-reliefs of Red Army soldiers (without horses) and Kazakh warriors (on horses). Probably these revolutionary elements should add local color to the complex of monuments.
After taking a photo near the entrance stella, we head deeper into the park.
In the very center stands the Ascension Cathedral. Until 2003, it was the tallest wooden church in the world (54 meters). Now, after the consecration of the Romanian temple in Marmarosh (75 meters), the cathedral in Almaty has moved to the second place in the book of records. The unusual shape and coloring of the domes attracted our attention, but we could not get inside, as restoration work was being carried out around the entire perimeter of the building.
We knew that 15-16 kilometers from the park there is a mountain resort Chimbulak with the famous Medeu skating rink and decided to discover this world-famous sports complex. Fortunately, at that time Uber was already working in Almaty and we were able to get there for an incredible 93 hryvnias. For comparison, in Ukraine it would have cost at least twice as much.
And here we are at the entrance to the famous Medeu skating rink, which we used to know as Medeo and saw many times in Soviet sports news programs. Even today it is the world's largest high-mountain complex for winter sports, with an ice rink with an area of 10500 square meters. The availability of clean water sources for pouring makes the ice of this rink one of the fastest in the world. Over 200 world records have been set here in the history of speed skating.
Before entering the rink, we posed for a bas-relief on the facade of the sports complex 😉
And then went to conquer the summit with the help of a modern cable car.
There were horses grazing on the lower slopes. We took great pleasure in photographing them through the glass of the elevator cabin.
The cable car consists of three segments. After the first of them, we thought it necessary to take a selfie. Since the goal of our trip was Thailand and we did not plan to climb the Kazakh mountains, we were dressed in very light autumn jackets. Every 100-200 meters of altitude, the temperature dropped by about a degree, and when we got to the top, it was really minus 30 degrees.
The views were incredible. But the cold was also incredible and pierced right through.
Looking out from the icy cabin of the cable car, we envied the skiers who started from the top, because:
a) They had warm ski suits.
b) They will soon find themselves below, where it is much warmer.
The skiers' starting point is opposite the Bogdanovich Glacier. You can see it in the center of the next photo. It is located at an altitude of 3,500 meters and looks as if water flowed into a funnel and suddenly froze.
A real salvation for us was a bar at an altitude of 3200 meters, which was called "3200".
We warmed up there, drank some mulled wine and had a pleasant chat with the locals, who were very interested in the events that had taken place in Ukraine in recent years.
At the top, my camera refused to work because of the low temperatures, and we really wanted to get down as soon as possible. It was very cold, waiting in the wind for our cabin, climbing into its icy interior and slowly, slowly descending, stretching our fingers and toes to avoid frostbite. And here we are on the lower plateau, where there are cafes, equipment rentals and small shops.
Although it was still quite cold at this level, after the summit we felt warm and fuzzy. We walked around the plateau in different directions and went down to the lower station of the funicular.
I couldn't help but take a selfie while flying over the largest skating rink in the world!!! Fantastic nature, a cool landmark and the feeling of flying - that's what I'll remember about Medeu.
Not far from the entrance to the complex we found a restaurant with a familiar name 😉
Having descended to the lower station of the funicular, we discovered that we had no internet and could not call an Uber. We went into the equipment rental and started talking to the guy who worked there. He turned out to be from Belarus and having once visited Kazakhstan, he fell in love with its beauty and moved to Almaty to live and work. He kindly shared his mobile internet with us, thanks to which we were able to call a taxi. Twenty minutes along the mountain serpentines and we were again walking along the pre-New Year streets of the former capital of Kazakhstan.
An evening walk brought us to a mural with Nikolai Gogol and his famous quote: "Lift my eyelids...", written for some reason in English 😊😊😊
We were also surprised by a bookstore with a name that is well known to all travelers who have ever booked a hotel online 😊😊😊
Returning to the hotel, we even managed to sleep for a couple of hours before the person who brought us from the airport came to pick us up again to take us back to the Almaty airport.
We hope that you were interested in our adventures in Almaty. And we, promoting our motto:
“Be sure to travel!”,
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