Almaty. Day 30

 I was pleased to discover yesterday's belief that there's not much to see in Almaty was wrong; we had a very pleasant day today. I am also coming to like Almaty. It has far too many cars - traffic is slow everywhere and cars frequently double park which slows it even more. But in the city centre, where we are staying, there are many crumbling old soviet apartment blocks and there are now shops with neon signs in their entries, so it is developing an interesting character. There are many coffee shops and beyond the area we're in are lots of shiny new developments.

We started the day going to the Medeu cable car, up a long valley. Near the cable car station is a huge icerink (currently dry, as it's too warm) which was a high altitude eastern bloc training camp, and there are ski jumps on another hill. It skimmed the treetops, kind of slowly, for 4.5 km up to the Shymbulak ski resort, which of course had no snow at this time of year. Then we took another two cable cars another 3km to the highest point we could reach. I'm not sure how high that was, but enough that I got out of breath with vigorous walking.


With the queues, waiting in between, taking photos and everything we spent the whole morning going up and back.

Then we went to the Museum of Archaeology. It was in a very large building and there were few other tourists there (again - Almaty is full of asian tourists and they went up the cable cars but not to the parks and museums). They had most of a woolly mammoth, various stone age artifacts and a whole lot of things from the Golden Horde and more recent nomadic culture. It was better than expected.

We went to another restaurant for lunch - I think we're used to this food now and enjoyed it. And that was it. It was late afternoon and the end of the tour.



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