Almaty 20/07/26

Almaty

Hellish journey on a diabolically hot bus to Almaty. It was an endless straight road through the desert to get there, and I didn’t have as much data as the driver so I couldn’t distract myself on Insta reels like him.

The next day, I wanted a day entirely to myself. I wandered around a bazaar, a war museum, and went to the Arasana baths.

THE ARASANA BATHS

A labyrinth of tiled hallways with rooms for Turkish hamams, Finnish sauna and Russian saunas.

I think of myself as a top dog in sauna terms back in the UK – I live by the unspoken rule that you must outstay the guy who comes into the sauna immediately after you at the least.

This is not the UK. This is the big leagues. These are serious players. For a start, they’re mainly naked. Walking into the main Russian sauna I felt like a team in the conference division stepping out into Wembley.

In the UK, to heat the sauna up you’ll timidly ask the others in the sauna if you could put a ladle onto the little pile of coals.

The Almaty Russian Sauna is a different experience. In the Almaty Russian sauna, if you fancy yourself a sauna big dog, and everyone who comes in fancies themself a sauna big dog, you grab a metal cup on the end of a long pole. You use this on the mechanism to open the metal doors high up on the wall, quite literally opening up a furnace. You then ladle in pints of water like a stoker on a Victorian steam engine shovels in coal to the boiler, and the temperature rises a noticeable 2 or 3 degrees. The others in the sauna indicate they aren’t bothered by or even notice  this increase in heat, as the conversational hubub simply increases, as does the slapping with birch leaves. The locals slap themselves on the back with birch leaves for some reason. Worth also mentioning there are children in here. I can see how the USSR bred men with the fortitude to defeat the Nazis. After a few instances of the furnace door being cranked open I had to stagger out, the last beads of liquid in my body leaving my pores and my eyebrows singeing. It’s tough when you’ve been chronically dehydrated for the last two weeks.

Excellent experience all round.

ALMATY ATTRACTIONS

I booked a 2 day tour to the main things to do in South East Kazakhstan – look at canyons and lakes. Felt very touristy. The people on the tour were fun though. Most polygots Ive met speak European languages. People here spoke Polish, Russian, Kazakhstan. Our guide learnt English from YouTube. She was furious at how hard some words I’m English were to pronounce, that ‘Square’ and ‘Squirrel’ were supposedly pronounced differently, and that ‘chicken’ and ‘kitchen’ were meant to be different words.

I also went to the Almaty art museum. Best art museum I’ve been too. You rarely see central Asians depicted in art in the west. Here you have rugged steppe herdsmen and idealised soviet era collective workers with fantastical jaw lines.

4 days felt like enough here. Tajikistan next.