Continuing his journey through Central Asia, Ryan Wilson follows a friend’s tracks across Kazakhstan’s Asy Plateau toward Charyn Canyon and meets some of the incredibly friendly local people who call it home…

Urban Sprawl to Mountain Paradise

It could be easy to get comfortable in a place like Almaty, Kazakhstan, with trees shading the streets that are lined with nice cafes and views to the mountains that sit right on the edge of the city.  In a different scenario, I might want to spend a week or two here to explore the area a bit more.  But with a big storm system moving in that would last a handful of days, I cut my stay short in an effort to make my way across the Asy plateau while the gettin’ was good.

The first day out of the city was, predictably, one of the worst of the trip as I found myself on a road without even a dirt shoulder to escape to and big trucks hauling gravel that were flying by at mach speed in both directions.  After hours of this, I could breathe a big sigh of relief when I said goodbye to the lowlands and started heading up the mountain.  I grabbed dinner to-go from a cafe in the last town at the foot of the mountain, and climbed into the valley in the dark to look for a place to camp.

There were still homes and farms scattered throughout the area, but I had a couple of spots that looked promising from eyeing over the satellite map, though it always gets tougher in the dark.

The first spot that looked good turned out to be a construction site, with a crew still working, so I kept heading up the valley.  Eventually, I turned down a small overgrown road that would dead-end on the map at some sort of big farm, but I was hopeful that there would be a way to get near the river before that.  Of course, as I made my way up the tiny road with my light off, trying to be stealthy, I came across a man in full camouflage, on a horse with his dog.  He was confused by what I was doing there, but when I said “çadır” (tent in Turkish, but it’s close to the Kazakh word), he told me to follow him, and he took me to a perfect spot, tucked into the trees.

I was following my Instagram buddy, Justin Bill’s, GPS track that he sent me many years ago, after he came through this area in 2018.  We’d swapped many routes across South America and other parts of Asia over the years, and I always admired his photography and his taste in bike routes, which lined up well with mine.  His photos from Kazakhstan were a big inspiration for me to come back here and see the place for myself after he sadly passed away in 2024.  It felt only fitting to follow his tracks one more time.  Do yourself a favor and scroll through his feed for a while.

The Feast

The sun comes up early here, before 5am, and it was going to be pushing 90°F, so I started early and managed to make a lot of progress by lunchtime.  Around then, I came across a small yurt camp that a family from Almaty had rented for the day to have a bunch of family and friends together.  They waved me over and asked if I wanted to join them.   “Kuurdak lunch is in 2 hours.” 

Kuurdak is a staple dish across most of Central Asia, with a bunch of sheep meat, potatoes, onion, and usually a savory sauce.  

While a part of me wanted to keep making progress up the climb, this seemed like a really fun crew, so I stuck around and played volleyball for a while before the feast began.  There was Kuurdak, of course, with the sheep head and all, and no yurt party would be complete without ‘kumis’, aka horse milk.  The kumis is certainly an acquired taste, which I have somehow yet to acquire, even though I’ve had it quite a few times at this point, yet I’ve never met a central asian person that doesn’t love it. 

After struggling through a couple of sips, trying not to make a sour face, I realized I’d have to just chug it to get it over with.  1, 2, 3, down the hatch.  Of course, my new friends took this as meaning I’m really loving it and need a refill…

The Climb to Asy

A few hours after arriving, I said my goodbyes and got back to climbing.  Immediately, the gradient was ridiculously steep, and the road condition started to deteriorate.  Nothing like grinding up a 15% climb with a stomach jammed full of horse milk and sheep’s head!  

Soon, the forest I was ascending through began to clear, and beyond that was like an endless green carpet of grass, topped by peaks that still had a scattering of snow still on them.  Yurts dotted the landscape all around as marmot squeeled warnings to their little furry buddies that a strange intruder was in their midst (me).  They’d scramble toward their little dens, but some would stop and stare at me for a while before diving in.

High up in the hills, along a ridge, I could spot what looked like an observatory from a distance.  As I made my way further up the climb, with the sun starting to fade toward the horizon, a LandCruiser came up alongside me and stopped for a minute to chat.  It was the man who runs the observatory, along with a couple of astronomers from Europe, and they invited me to meet them at the observatory for tea.

I was feeling quite exhausted from a very long day as I was approaching the pass, and wasn’t really feeling too interested in adding the extra few hundred feet to get to the ridge that the observatory was on.  Then I hit the pass, and it’s amazing how arriving at the top to a stunning sunset view will give that extra boost in energy.   

I got lucky to get a rare tour of the observatory, which was built in the 1980s, during the Soviet Union era.  It’s not a place that is open to the public, but the cloudy skies meant the visiting crew from Europe wasn’t going to be working, and that opened up a rare opportunity to walk around inside.

They gave me a room to spend the night, and I even got a hot shower!  A small miracle, and something I wasn’t expecting to get for the next few days, at least.

Plateau Life

We shared breakfast in the morning, and they sent me away with a pannier full of baked goods, boiled eggs, and canned foods they had stocked.  There was a raging headwind that I already knew was going to spoil the rolling descent I had been looking forward to for a while, but the landscape more than made up for it.  From rolling wildflower meadows at the top, the terrain slowly shifted toward arid canyons.

Things got even more arid as I reached the edge of the mountains, at the stunning blue Bartogay lake.  The place looked more like something out of Bolivia than what I’d become used to seeing in Kazakhstan.

I opted to skip the main tourist zone of the famed Charyn Canyon, with some new rules in place that meant you can’t cycle on the dirt roads in the park, so I went looking for the next best thing, just down the river.  In some small miracle, I had a roaring tailwind that sent me flying along the paved road that I linked up with.  Without that, I would have never made it anywhere close to the canyon by sunset, but the wind gods were suddenly in my favor.

I turned off the road onto a tiny double-track road and made my way out to the edge of the canyon just after sunset.  I couldn’t have timed it any closer, and I had to pedal as hard as I could for about an hour, but the spot was perfect.  Somehow, I even managed not to get blown off the mountain that night!

Mutual Friends

The next day, I made my way toward the small village of Aksay.  There were two shops, but almost no one in the streets.  I sat under a small shaded area with the ground covered in shards of glass from a million shattered alcohol bottles. It wasn’t great, but at least I was out of the sun enjoying my ice cream.  

After a little bit, I got ready to leave town, but right as I did, a man came up to say hello and ask where I was from and where I was going.  It wasn’t long before he asked me to come to his home for tea.  I happily accepted and followed him through the dusty Aksay streets.  

When I arrived, the whole family was there to welcome me as they were slaughtering a couple of sheep in the backyard.  Some of the sheep meat was to sell, but some was for, you guessed it, a big kuurdak feast that the family was having.  I’m not quite sure if this is a daily occurrence or if I just happen to stumble into everyone’s special occasion, but I will consider myself lucky to get invited.

After the messy business of the slaughter was done, we sat down for some legit farm-to-table kuurdak with the whole crew.  We talked about my trip and their family.  One of the brothers mentioned that there was one other cyclist that they had invited to their home a while back, as he scrambled for his phone and scrolled through his camera roll.

When he handed me the phone, I was in disbelief.  It was a photo of my friend Justin, in this very house, with one of their brothers.  Apparently, he rolled through town one evening, and luck or fate or whatever you want to believe brought them together the same way that it brought me there. They were sad to hear of Justin’s passing, and everyone said how much they enjoyed having him stay at their home.  It was a lasting memory they had, even seven years later.

The Road to Karakol

When I said goodbye, I aimed south and started making my way toward the Kyrgyzstan border once again. This time, I’d be entering from the Eastern side and taking the back route into Issyk Kul Lake.  Here, the landscape suddenly shifted back to the lush greens, with little bits of pine forest sprinkled in.  The weather shifted to match, from hot, sunny days to on-and-off rumbling storms and drizzling rain for much of the day.  It never really rained full-bore, but it was in a constant state of threatening.

Villages become much more frequent here; often times each village is separated by only a couple of kilometers.  Kids were roaming the streets on bikes, always looking to race me through town or show off their wheelie training progress.

I camped one last time amidst the farms of the valley and made one last push to the city of Karakol.  Easily the biggest town I’d been in since leaving Almaty, and a gateway to some of the most stunning parts of the Tian Shan mountains.  Stay tuned here as I traverse those mountains in the next episode!

See the Prospector frame he’s touring on and more at Tumbleweed Bikes.