The Kazachstan Experience

Some time passed already since the last update on our travel experiences. A quick resume of our undertakings in Kazachstan.

In Shymkent, where according to our guidebook, there was supposed to be a "wonderful, amazing, splendid" bazaar, we found this very bazaar closed and deserted. The town is charming enough, but with few "sight-like" places of interest. We comforted ourselves with a very nice Turkish-style dinner to make up for that. Later, we found the bazaar anyway: it had moved out of the city and wasn't all that interesting after all.

From Shymkent we made a daytrip to nearby Sayram, one of the oldest settlements in Kazachstan, which boasts some ancient architecture. Getting there proved to be quite a challenge: even though Shymkent hosts hundreds of minibusses, none of these goes to Sayram. We mistakingly ended up taking a minibus to Sayram Street and were dropped litterally in the middle of nowhere. As a heavenly gift, we got on an intercity bus passing there. Sayram has some mosques, a minaret and a mausoleum, but we'll probably better remember the quite tasty birch sap softdrink and a Hoopoe we spotted.

Later, we made an overnight trip to Turkistan, where Kazachstan's most impressive man-made monument stands. The huge mausoleum of Yasaui (a Sufi teacher), surrounded with a charming rose garden. Not touristy at all and a wonderful place to just sit and relax. From there, we went to the sandy ruins of Sauran, a Silk Road settlement in the middle of the desert of which practially only the walls are still standing. Impressive enough, but as more often in this kind of place, looking for remains of pottery, tilework and mosaic and chasing weird desert creatures was much more fun than trying to find out where the old city gates might have been.

Back in Turkistan, we drove to Shymkent and further on to Uzbekistan.