Cold winter deserts of Turan

I will review here Altyn Emel National Park, visited in October 2024 as a tour from Almaty. We combined it with a trip to Tamgaly Petroglyphs. The cost was “outrageous” but we paid ($830 for 3 days in a van) and in the end we were happy with the result. It was a “minor” misunderstanding between the company who arranged it and us and the driver, he wanted to take us to Tamgaly Tas which is on the way to Altyn Emel, we caught it early and he took the Almaty ring road to Tamgaly WHS, then returned to Almaty and drove all the way to the village of Basshi (on Google maps Kalinino). It is 260 km from Almaty and generally an easy drive but in our case it was a day with 580km and we got there in the dark, not pleasant. As usual Google maps messed things a bit because it shows a road up North between Tamgaly Petroglyphs and Basshi, we only did a couple kilometers on it and it was horrible, don’t try. Since I didn’t know that I accepted the plan to see Tamgaly and get to Basshi in the same day and the driver and the tour company surely came up with this plan because they thought we are only going to Tamgaly Tas. 

In Basshi there is the visitor centre to the Altyn Emel park, cost is 800 tenge per person per day plus something extra for the car (200 tenge), …

The serial transnational site ‘Cold Deserts of Turan’ was added to the World Heritage List last week. It consists of a number of fairly remote and obscure nature reserves in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Only four community members claimed to have visited one of them, based on the respective Tentative Site entries.

However, there is a loophole (and I must give tribute to Clyde for pointing it out to me). Everybody who has made the road transfer between Bukhara (Uzbekistan) and Merv (Turkmenistan) via the land border at Turkmenabat will have crossed Repetek Nature Reserve. The main road goes right through component #8 of the nomination, as confirmed by the official maps, and the road is not excluded from the core zone. It even gained a bit of notoriety in the IUCN evaluation, as an example of “recent linear infrastructure development” that poses a threat to large mammal migrations – not only is Repetek crossed by the M37 highway, but also by the Turkmenabad-Ashgabat-Bereket-Turkmenbashya railway. But both are well-established nowadays, so there’s nothing to do about it.

I still remember the desert landscape on this drive and have written about it in my travel diary, although my observations and photos could easily have come from 10km before or after we crossed the Nature Reserve – I guess the buffer zone looks fairly similar. My photos show sand dunes covered in tough large plants (possibly the characteristic Black Saxaul), unidentified funny shrubs and a dung beetle at work. …

Visited Altyn Emel NP in 2022 while driving through Kazakhstan. It's most likely the easiest choice and on paper it also looks like a breeze from Almaty. Two problems with the location are: rental cars in Almaty all have a mileage limit because they DON'T want you to drive around the country with their cars so you'll need to look hard for a good deal that will give you unlimited mileage. In the end you are better off flying to the north for those sights and explore locally but even then the mileage limit of 100 km a day will be tight to do anything but just cruise around Almaty which is easily done by taxi anyway. Second problem is that if you don't have a car then you need to find some kind of driver but the tours (at least in 2022 which was still technically COVID time) there was zero infrastructure for this. You can try to find a guy who wants $100+ per day, and he probably won't speak English, but I got the feeling that nobody in Almaty really wants to do this as a job?! Before I start ranting, I eventually hired a car and did it on my own.

The park is only a couple of hours outside of town and once you are out of the city limits there aren't many cars on the road because it leads to...nowhere. I visited some weird rock carvings on the way which aren't inside the …