Kazakhstan is the world’s ninth largest country and the largest landlocked country in the world. It’s about the size of western Europe. About 60% of the country’s GDP comes through the oil and gas industries and Kazakhstan also has lots of mineral wealth. On a side note, while Kazakhstan is rich with oil and gas, we were told that 15% of their energy comes from windmill farms and we saw some driving into Almaty. It is a very fiscally sound country. Officially, Kazakhstan is a democratic, secular, constitutional republic but the government is in strong control of everything.

There are only about 10 urban areas in Kazakhstan with the rest being small towns and nomadic areas. Some 80% of Kazakhstan is steppes, like where the nomads lived. Kazakhstan has very low population density. They also have very low tourism so far, mostly because of poor infrastructure in terms of what the rest of the world expects when they travel. Probably for such reasons, we were only in Kazakhstan for two days.

Our tour of Kazakhstan was very atypical because we mostly visited Almaty. Almaty is the largest city in Kazakhstan by a wide margin with around 1.8 million people. It is Kazakhstan’s most cosmopolitan city. Almaty was the Kazakh state capital from 1929 until 1997, under Russia. In 1998 the capital was shifted to Astana, far to the north. But Almaty remains the major commercial and cultural center of Kazakhstan.

Settlements in Almaty date back to around 1000 BC and of course, it was on a silk road trade route. While those days are long gone, people must still be doing a lot of trading of something here because the traffic was horrendous as you can see in all these photos.

We spent such a short time in Almaty and Kazakhstan, I tried to take lots of photos. This batch is from our bus ride into town. These are all moving-bus-through-the-windows photos but they will still help paint a picture of what we saw.

The first photo was just the highway into town. I was beginning to wonder if we were going to make it. Traffic wasn’t just heavy, it was chaotic.

The mountains on the north side of Lake Issyk-Kul are the same mountains that are seen here, on the south side of Almaty.

When I saw the Ritz-Carlton building, I knew we weren’t out on the steppes.

The fourth photo just shows some of the architecture and cranes still building more buildings.

The last photo shows some housing units. You might be able to see lots of satellite dishes on the roofs.

Welcome to Kazakhstan.