Leafy Almaty

Urban, conrete, Soviet; but with charm

Welcome to the home of the apple! Orchards aplenty, boulevards a many; grided roads like New York, gridlocked roads like Sao Paulo; uphill roads like San Francisco, high altitude like Mexico City; so basically a bit like Berlin but not really, all set in the stunning Tian Shan mountains. The city of Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest and, as the Lonely Planet would probably say, 'most cosmopolitan city - a cultural and financial centre', is lush. I do dislike guide books immensely! 

The apple supposedly originates here in leafy Almaty; more certainly, the apple's extinction will begin here - the orchards are actually all but destroyed by 'ill-considered building developments' as one horrible guide book puts it. 

 

Autumn in full swing

First stop: Medeu. I can't help you with the pronunciation of this, other than to suggest emphasising the second 'e' but making more of an 'eh' sound, but cross it with an 'ow' sound. So get someone to poke you with a pin while simultaneously trying to say 'eh'. Me-DEH(ow)-eu. As you can tell, Russian lessons are progressing at about the same rate as the Turan Express train.

Me-DEH(ow)-eu is an Olympic sized skating rink, so basically it's massive, nestled in the mountains above Almaty. If you read a guide book it will tell you the very unimportant 'fact' that Medeu is the highest altitude Olympic sized skating rink in the world; your book may mis-quote it as the highest or biggest skating rink in the world, but it is neither. Please wash your hands after using your guide book. Yuck.

Almaty: 'nestled' in the mountains, according to a leading guide book.

I was looking forward to skating on a big rink, and to showing off my skating skills to my friends. However, the president of Azerbijan must not have realised we were coming and quite crassly decided to visit Me-DEH(ow)-eu at the same time; the place was on lock down with policemen everywhere and certainly no skating. It was nice to see so many big hats.

Medeu in a cloud. See guide book for irrelevant details.

The ice-rink is massive, and its apparent size was exaggerated by the cloud which we were in at the time: it was never possible to see from one end to the other. There's a gigantic metal sculpture of some speed skaters, and classically colossal flood lights whose rays couldn't cut through the cloud. The place had an air of mystery about it; and the shear size of it seemed very soviet. I actually don't know why. Maybe I just wanted it to seem soviet.

Steps up the dam. Guide books are bad.

We walked beyond the rink and up the steps on the adjacent dam which stops mud slides engulfing Almaty. Your guide book may tell you there are 831 steps up the dam; it may say 840; it may say 842. Be careful with those things, they're both useless and dangerous. 

We climbed the steps, turned down a very generous offer from a taxi driver to commandeer our worldly wealth in exchange for a short trip higher up the mountain, enjoyed the view of the cloud from above - vastly different to its appearance from below - and returned down the steps to the sound of the Russian national anthem being belted from the huge speakers on the enormous PA system at the undisputed heavywight ice-rink champion of the world, Med-DEH(ow)-eu, and got the bus back to town for some seriously delicious lamb at a resturant whose name is too long to remember.