Figure 8 On A Bike

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. The Alatau mountains towering south of Almaty

Erzurum had been a decent first stop for our winter tour, but Susan and I were both excited to go see the higher, colder, and hopefully snowier mountains of central Asia. But since we're Americans, and any land route from Erzurum to that part of the world has to pass through Russia or Iran, it was back west to Ankara first, before catching a long flight east, to Almaty in Kazakhstan. Besides, that gave us time to do a little sightseeing that we'd passed up during our previous stopover there. Walking through central Ankara