The Other Big Apple (Almaty) - January 16th - 28th, 2024
It's not the capital (partly due to the major earthquake fault just a few kilometers away), but Almaty is the biggest city and by far the most metropolitan area of Kazakhstan. It didn't really exist until the early 20th century, and expanded greatly during Kazakhstan's time under the USSR, so all the construction is relatively new and most of it distinctly Soviet. The city takes its name from the Russian word for apple, "elma", and the plentiful nearby orchards combine with its cultural significance to fuel its reputation as "The Big Apple" of Kazakhstan.
First and foremost, we had a *nice* (for us) place to stay in Almaty. Another apartment, this one with a little less space, but still plenty of room for gear and drying laundry, and improvements on so many little things that had given us heartburn back in Erzurum (like a hassle-to-use squat toilet, a finicky boiler/radiator system, and questionably potable water). We looked forward to having 2 weeks in what was easily the nicest place we'd stayed for the entire trip so far. One of the hosts had given us a good tip to do our grocery shopping at the Magnum about a half kilometer away, because it's cheaper, and we did go over there for our biggest shopping trips. But literally just downstairs and around the corner from the apartment was also a Stolichny, a more expensive and high-falutin grocer stocked with all manner of delicious goodies. Ginger ale and Dr. Pepper! A wall of 100% fruit juices and all varieties of coffee! Mystery pastries, fresh bread, and dumplings from the deli! Susan and I often stopped in with glee, joking about how we basically lived above Rosauers in Bozeman.
I still don't think it's fair to say we really visited *Kazakhstan*, feeling more comfortable to qualify that statement with "But really only around Almaty." Especially after all that time in Türkiye, and ending with Erzurum, it was a bit of a shock to be in a city that seemed as "western" or "European" as Almaty did. The grid city layout, the metro system, big glass and concrete buildings, dog-walkers in the parks, holiday lights strung up around town, and coffee shops, coffee shops, coffee shops. They love their coffee in Almaty, with small boutique cafes or classy chains dotted on more street corners than not, and they know how to brew a good cup; Susan and I gave up any pretense of getting back on the wagon and indulged in some much-missed professionally administered caffeine. Alongside the places serving croissants or more adventurous breakfasts (eggs benedict and salmon on a waffle!?), this made for some nice, slow mornings on rest days. Our biases exposed, we traded several comments about how our expectations for most of Türkiye and Almaty should have been switched around.
Breakfasts weren't the only meals we enjoyed, though, and we had one very delicious and nice dinner at the restaurant Tarih, where we had our most thorough tasting of horse meat - Susan enjoyed an exceptionally tender and savory horse heart, while I had their chefs' special version of beshbarmak and lagman noodles. Our other night out didn't go nearly so well - we tried to go to the "bar and grill" right under the apartment, but after awkwardly walking in what seemed to be a private group event with one or two people drunk and passed out in booths, decided to try somewhere else. We ended up at Navat, which supposedly also had very good and relatively authentic Kazakh cuisine, but as we wandered into their hotel-attached location, Susan spied a children's play area, and the novel-sized menus gave us further misgivings. The food came out not quite heated all the way through from the microwave. Our consensus was that we'd gone for dinner to the Kazakh version of Chuck E. Cheese.
Around Almaty we also visited a few Soviet WWII memorials, a reminder of just how far through the world that chapter of history resonated. These were located near the baroque Ascension Cathedral, and I was pretty intrigued to see a functioning Orthodox church instead of a museum-ified cave one. (Our taxi driver on our first day in Almaty assured us that "All Kazakhs are Muslim", but they have a visible Christian minority, we never heard one call to prayer, and it's not hard to find pork in the grocery stores... so go figure.) If the goal of big Catholic and Protestant cathedrals is to humble you into silence with massive, airy architecture, Orthodox churches try to blind you into submission with hundreds of gold icons gleaming at you from every angle. Domes and decorative ceilings stil featured heavily; bright decorative reds and greens accented the cheerful yellow exterior, and the sky blue and white interior created even more of a sense of light and space. Jeez, that's a lot of icons though - I started to understand why some corners of Christianity started to get a little concerned about the whole idol-worship thing.
Almaty has an art museum, so of course we spent a good chunk of a day wandering around there, and found ourselves really pleasantly surprised by the number of pieces they had and the quality of displays. Some were contemporary works, including pile weavings/rugs/carpets done by Kuttybek Zhakyp, who put a twist on traditional modes of Kazakh craft to create displays that evoked their nomadic culture with a modern flair in a medium with a really cool 3D component. Pieces by artists attempting to grapple with the immense changes brought by Soviet industrialization and collectivization also really interested us. They had one display dedicated to domestically-famous artist Tokbolat Togysbayev, who did many portraits of national poet-hero Abai Qunanbaiuly. A different display further down the hall showcased many amateur works mimicking those of national painter Abilkhan Kasteev but in other mediums, ranging from macaroni art to legos to watercolors, and it was really nice to see a museum devote a section to a community project like that.
Sadly, the national history museum kind of let us down, despite looking really impressive from the outside. We did learn a thing or two, but the exhibits weren't laid out very well and the collections were a little scattershot, although maybe comparing to a country as rich in archeological resources as Türkiye isn't fair.
Being just a few blocks away from the national theater and opera house, we also took the chance to do something a little unique and go see a show! I was a little sad because tickets for Swan Lake were sold out, but we did manage to get in to see "Juno & Avos" ("Maybe and Perhaps"), a ballet based on a rock opera that was really popular in Russia in the 80’s. We read the plot beforehand (basically a sad story about a Russian noble who travels to California, falls in love with a Spanish princess, then dies on his way back to Russia and his love never finds out), but still struggled to follow the performance (did the noble's best friend/fool fall off the ship but then came back to life later?), but we did really enjoy the music and the dance performance. In perhaps our greatest moment of culture shock in Kazakhstan, during the curtain call at the end of the the audience clapped IN UNISON for several minutes as the cast took their bows. Forgive my preconceptions, but it seemed preeeetty Soviet.
Oh, and about that earthquake fault - one night, after Susan had fallen asleep and I was still awake doing something of questionable value, I noticed the curtains starting to sway a little bit. Then the lamp. Then myself. Pretty worried, and thinking that Susan was an expert because she'd experienced one kind-of serious tremor while in China, I tried to wake her up to get her informed opinion on what the hell to do. Ever the heavy sleeper, at first Susan barely regained consciousness, and just kind of waved her hand and mumbled something. Eventually the word "earthquake" got through to her and she woke up enough to feel a few tremors. We listened for sounds of the neighbors evacuating, put some semblance of clothes on in case we needed to head out ourselves, and looked out to see if people were filling the streets, but everything seemed normal... so Susan nonchalantly went back to bed. The next day we found out it had been a 5.1 magnitude quake centered just across the border in China, and that some emergency alerts had gone out to people's phones about leaving their apartment buildings... but I guess I didn't get that one *shrug*.
Of course, our main priority for visiting Almaty was winter sports, because why else were we hauling so much equipment around? At the foot of the Ala-Too mountains, a western arm of the massive Tian Shan range that stretches across northern China and bleeds into the central Asian steppes of the 'Stans, Almaty has its fair share of access to mountain sports. Just outside the city sits Shymbulak ski resort, and ever eager we headed up there on our second day in the city, hoping to catch some of the fresh snow that had been falling off-and-on since our arrival. We found the right bus, surprised to see it was already packed (thank God we only had our boots, not full skis), but that ended up working in our favor since we couldn't figure out how to pay so we just skulked for free, unnoticed in the crowd at the back.
(On our way home that day we tried an alternate method of bus payment that still didn't work, and sweated a bit as a ticket checker actually came on board and hassled some snowboarders about not paying. But we skated under the radar and the next day saw us on a multi-hour adventure trying to find this elusive bus card.)
Sadly there wasn't much fresh powder to be found up high; most of it had fallen the day we arrived. On the pistes our experiences on ice in Erzurum came in handy pretty quick, since some of the spots were even worse. Shymbulak seemed to have an above-average percentage of beginner snowboarders, and sadly not a lot of very beginner-friendly terrain, so while Susan and I tried to be understanding and sympathetic to the monopodal neophytes we also saw *a lot* of snowboarders SCRAAAAAPing their way down the hill, sometimes just riding it out on their butt, and a few people just using their snowboard as a straight-up sled. All this to say that some patches were particularly bad, with snow that would give any semblance of purchase long since shoved towards the bottom of the hill. Still, it was skiing and it was fun, and we enjoyed being on some new terrain to switch things up. The rentals were better, too - the shops at the resort actually offered different levels of rental (something we'd really taken for granted in the US), and while their "VIP'' skis weren't exactly high-end models, they seemed to at least get a little maintenance (someone noticed that I nicked a base on a rock and charged us extra for the repair) and were newer if nothing else, which counts for something when you're trying to get an edge to bite into ice. We still had to fight to get offered a ski longer than 160cm, and some days we had better luck than others, but never had to ski on spoons or soulless wooden planks like a few days in Erzurum.
Well, except for one time where we decided to go to a different resort near Almaty, Ak-Bulak (or as we christened it, "AWK! BULAAWWK!"). We went to a rental shop in town, which still offered a higher tier for ski rental, but I was a little jealous when they gave me one of the same old skis they used at Shymbulak while Susan got handed some nice looking yellow Fischer racey boys. After a long taxi ride there and a long wait in the line for the bottom gondola (because they had their other lift at the bottom closed), we hurriedly disembarked and clicked in. The chairlift to the very top had a much shorter line, but the map showed only blacks off the top and I hoped to do at least one warm up on the easier terrain at the bottom. Susan didn't want to endure another line, so she talked me into taking the lift and we rode to the top, trying to scope out our way to the bottom and a little nervous about the steepness.
In a classic "I told you so" moment, we got off the top lift and promptly realized mistakes had been made. Beneath us lay a choppy, steep slope that looked way too challenging for a first run and also seemed to lead off down the wrong side of the hill. So we struck out left and discovered an icy luge track, complete with random dirt patches, that led to the small bowl we'd hoped to ski. Eventually we made it over there, only to find ourselves looking down a stretch of real, ungroomed, black diamond terrain. Slowly, quads a burnin', we picked our way down, and Susan had to contend with the fact that race skis, however nice, aren't much fun in steep, choppy, tracked out powder.
But along our way down, once the skiing got fun again, we stumbled upon a tow rope and Susan coached me on catching my first t-bar. I probably looked as awkward as a cat in socks but managed to get on and off without tangling my skis or getting whacked by the t-bar. Achievement unlocked! Luckily this little lift served some mellow trees that kept Susan entertained the rest of the day, and after getting my snow-legs back under me I had fun going off the top lift a few more times and practicing quick, sharp turns on my super-light and much more powder-attuned skis.
Otherwise, Shymbulak provided several other pretty fun outings. Susan was sick one day and I had to navigate the jam-packed city bus myself, but it gave her the chance to get a bunch of blog written and then hold that over my head to get me to write as well. She felt better pretty quickly, and a couple other trips up the mountain on sunnier days gave us some really nice views of the high craggy peaks, Almaty sprawling against the plain far below, and even a little bit of glaciers still clinging to the mountains despite our warming climate.
As far as ice climbing, we never had too much luck there. For a while we'd been in contact with Kirill, a Kazakh climbing guide whose beta we'd depended on heavily for trying to get some climbing in around Erzurum, and he also had a trove of information about a few potential ice climbs around Almaty. Hoping to get a helping hand (and to offload some of the logistical burden), we'd been in contact about hiring a guide from his company to take us to one of the climbs, probably the most moderate but also most reliable one - the Maiden's Tears waterfall. (Kirill himself was off in Kyrgyzstan at the time, leading climbing clinics at our next planned destination after Almaty.) So Kirill put us in touch with Boris, a Russian alpinist who of course would be named Boris, and while the communication from them was stellar it turned out the ice was not. Boris went and inspected during one of our first days there, sent us some photos... and yeah, it wasn't in. We were super grateful he didn't just take us up there anyway and still ask for our money. This warm winter was starting to hurt.
We decided to hike up to Maiden's Tears ourselves anyway a few days later, and after another hour of research decided that it would be best to take a Yandex taxi up and then walk the extra couple kilometers to catch a bus to go home. (Public transportation to a national park right outside your city - what a concept!) Much to our delight they hadn't been exaggerating the straightforward nature of the approach (walk up the trail, look left, and it's there!), and there were free public thermal baths along the way! Noted for the next time to bring swimsuits to enjoy the natural hot tubs.
The ice looked *really close* to being climbable, so I convinced Susan to climb partway up and check it out. But then we needed to pitch out a part I thought we might be able to solo, and I still didn't take it seriously, climbing in my big puffy and mittens, which made everything much more difficult and slower (placing ice screws with mittens is far from ideal). By the time I got up to what I had thought would be the "real climbing" the sun was starting to bake the ice, so I brought up Susan behind me and we rappelled down to climb (and soak) another day.
Another day we hiked to Butavkosky Falls after a cold snap, hoping to find it frozen solid, but no dice. I kind of wanted to try it anyway, but Susan talked me out of it, which definitely ended up being the right call because I would have been in over my head and it wasn't clear we'd actually be able to get down. So instead we played around in the ice cave like a couple of kids and then took all the heavy gear on a lovely hike up and over a neighboring ridge, ending up at the ski base to catch a bus home.
We gave it a few more days and then made one last go at Maiden's Tears, now knowing we should just do it as one long pitch from the bottom (and bring our swimsuits). When we arrived the ice did actually look substantially better and more protectable, so we geared up quickly to give it a go! I got up the bottom efficiently and with confidence, but quickly became stymied at the small vertical curtain that guarded the next section. I guess it had been a little too long since our training at the Palandoken ice park. Susan very very patiently held me and belayed as I hung on screws to get up and over, before moving on to the last little (but awkward) column... and doing the same slow and tedious thing. And of course at the top one last small freak-out awaited me as I had to get a good 20 feet above my last screw on increasingly rotten snow, searching for some sort of anchor, before tacking left and taking a few nervous steps on ball-bearing gravel spread over a slab to get to some tat sketchily slung around a horn.
By this time I'd been on lead for over an hour and the sun was starting to bake the climb again, so Susan got herself up quickly and we made it down in one piece. Not exactly a proud climb but we made it up some Almaty ice! Susan even talked me into soaking in the tubs afterward, and while the water there was pleasant enough I had a bit of an ordeal getting out, drying off, and changing. A really friendly guy there even invited us to come take a class at his martial arts gym while we were in town; we never made it (since we were leaving in just a couple days), but everyone we met and talked with in Kazakhstan was super friendly and often very curious how us Americans ended up there. (One guy at Shymbulak even shared his big chunk of mystery meat with us while we all had lunch in the locker room!)
On our second to last day in Almaty, we managed to hook up with Boris and his guiding student for them to haul us up a mountain! Since the ice climbing hadn't been all that, and we still had a budget for a guiding day, we figured we'd take him up on the option of a moderate mountain ascent, and chose the peak Oktyabrenok as the objective. Before dawn we piled into Boris' SUV in front of our apartment and trundled up the road that also leads to the ski center, and through the application of some special magnet decals and several phone calls in Russian the guards farther along the road let us pass (apparently they'd really clamped down on traffic on the road, so it was good we didn't try to get up there ourselves!). He got the SUV as far as it would go up the snowy, unplowed Forest-Service-type roads and we unloaded into the cold, deep-blue air of the mountains just before dawn.
Susan and I really weren't sure what to expect for this outing, and just hoped that we could keep up with Boris and his student, Girguzel, and that they wouldn't have to rig a 3-to-1 pulley to literally haul us up something. But shortly after starting the hike Susan actually got chastised for going too fast and not pacing herself - vindication for me always going way slower than her in the mornings. We trudged up a trail under jagged peaks and a particularly impressive rock wall while Girguzel told us about how Boris had won a Piolet d'Or and was a super accomplished alpinist. Honestly, that was pretty cool to hear.
Eventually we broke off from the trail and tacked across snow slopes to a gulley. These slopes were definitely steep enough to avalanche, and some recent debris littered the ground near other nearby chutes, but Boris and Girguzel seemed unfazed, so... OK I guess! We didn't even have our beacons or any safety gear anyway. Eventually we got to a spot to gear up, and Susan and I sheepishly realized all our gear was much nicer than Girguzel's, and also that we probably had more mountaineering experience than her. But we still managed to take her advice in good humor and didn't say anything when we had to do an extra rappel and scrambly traverse because they got off route and exited the gully early.
Just below the summit Boris did a pitch of low 5th class climbing on some kind of crumbly orange rock, and I'm honestly grateful I didn't need to lead that myself. After that a short traverse over a snow bridge led us to the summit with impressive views of the peak of Abai farther along the ridge, toothy and imposing against the clear blue sky. Other mountains stretched endlessly in the distance, a mix of precarious pinnacles and broad snowy slopes that begged for backcountry skiers. Girguzel shared some freshly cooked beshbarmak (horse meat) with us, and while we weren't sure whether to believe her that horse is extra special and doesn't freeze, there was no debating it was delicious and satisfying. We felt a little silly because we really probably could have done this climb without a guide, certainly in the summer it would have been chill for us, but all things considered, the cheap-by-US-standards fee was well worth Boris doing the logistics to get us up that road and to do the technical climbing.
We headed down as the afternoon sun blasted the snow and continued to raise our worries about avalanches, and all the while Girguzel fawned over the wonderful mountain skills and ethics of her mentor. The road on the way down was closed for about an hour for construction, but that gave us the chance to stop by a mountain cafe we hadn't even noticed before and enjoy some really good, warm soup, perfect after the cold day - the US has some nice, "unspoiled" wilderness but sometimes a restaurant in the mountains is mighty nice! Back at home we did some research on Boris and found the climb he won the Piolet d'Or for. His partner had submitted a trip report to the AAJ of their new line on an unclimbed face of Cho Oyu, and a lot of the writeup just described how often they got hit by avalanches on the face. It made us reconsider whether we should have blindly followed Boris up that gulley earlier...
Overall it wasn't perfect, but our time in Almaty ended up being really enjoyable and kept us very busy. Rest days in the nice apartment felt relaxing and also gave us some valuable time to figure out what the heck we were going to do in the Alps during summer 2024. We weren't exactly making "gains" in our skills or doing anything too epic... but we weren't working! Mostly having fun outside in the winter and experiencing a new place I never expected to see, learning a lot about a whole different corner of the world, and what's better than that?
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