KZBlog

Merry Christmas today to any Orthodox readers. We had a lovely Christmas/New Years holiday, spent mostly with family. However we did get away to Almatau, a ski base near Almaty for a few days. It was lovely to be up in the mountains and we had a lot of fun skiing and walking around. I do recommend it as an alternative to Shimbulak because it gets you further out of the city, where the views are unspoiled by power lines and water pipes and other infrastructure. Almatau also features a pirate ship shaped ski rental base!

However we learned a lot about the Kazakhstan tourism industry in planning the trip and why it is hard to figure out what to do in Kazakhstan for fun. While there are a dozen similar ski bases around Almaty (which double as hiking bases in the summer), trying to make reservations at hotels at them is extremely difficult. Tourist agencies don’t provide much information; they are mainly interested in selling one-day group tours. We wanted a romantic weekend in the mountains alone and we didn’t want a tour guide leading us around telling us when to do what. Or the tour agents sell trips to sanatoria, some of which look quite nice but seem to be more focused on medical treatments–treatments for kidneys, intravenous vitamins and so on. Finally we found a tour agency, Alma Tour, that could make us a reservation at a hotel. However they could only provide transport if we had a large group. So then we had to find a taxi company that took us there. I recommend Mega Taxi (phone: +7 7272 33 31 11). Nevertheless we had to ask for directions a few times because there are practically no road signs!

When we got there we discovered that the ski base had no cafes or stores. It had one bar–built into the mountain like a little grotto, very cool!–and a few hotels and cottages. However each hotel had a cafeteria attached to it and you had to pay for your meals when you made your reservations. Each meal is served at a certain time and you get what they serve you. It would have been fine if we had been warned. As it was, our first day we spent an hour hiking down to the nearby village of Talgan to the only cafe in the area! We did finally manage to convince the hotel manager to sell us meal tickets.

Most interestingly, we talked to one of the ski instructors whose son rented out skis at one base. We told him about the troubles with making reservations, finding the place, and then choosing between which of the two ski bases to go to. He said they had tried to organize, tried to build better infrastructure, tried to coordinate both ski lifts so you could get from one to the other. But no one would invest in them and the oligarchs who have cottages in the area block them from developing too much–presumably either to keep their little paradise untouched or because they have investments in other ski bases. He pointed out that the ski track was poor with little snow coverage and a lot of bumps. And that the ski lift only goes a couple 100 meters up the mountain so you’re done skiing in 3 minutes. Plus, in terms of small business development in Kazakhstan, the owners of the buildings refuse to sell to the operators. So the ski instructor makes around 60 000 tenge a day in the winter and his son makes the same renting out skiis. That’s 120 000 tenge or $1000! Then they pay 60% of that to the owners! So for three months they make $400 a day, or $36 000 a year. Not too bad, but not enough to invest back into the business. Besides, they are afraid if they do buy equipment to groom the trails or make artificial snow, the landlords will probably increase their rent. If they get too successful, the owners will boot them out and run the business themselves.

So in short, Kazakhstan has a lot of great tourism potential, but there’s no investment and the people with the energy and desire to improve things don’t have any means or power to do so. And marketing and accessibility need to be vastly improved.

What do you think of Kazakhstan tourism? Know any great places to go? I’m starting a page on this site for people to share concrete information about things to do in Kazakhstan, with phone numbers, driving directions, names of contacts: Tourism in Kazakhstan. Let’s see how it turns out.