Kok Zhailau and the Three Brothers mountain

When I say this walk was hard, I’m not joking. Do not take any notice of anything that tells you otherwise.

1600 meters of ascent and not a gentle traverse, just ludicrously steep paths. At times it felt that if you stopped, you would slide all the way back down the mountain/hill. Chuck in some altitude (we walked up to 3000meters ) and you have one potentially heart bursting hike.

We were very relieved to reach the Three Brothers (three stacks of rocks in a line) but we then decided to make it to a nice round 3000meters which meant another 20 minute climb.

High points were meeting all the super nice people on our way. We even met two men from Tajikistan. I was slightly concerned at first as Comron (one of the guys) was very keen to look at the map on Steve’s phone and grabbed it. I thought he was going to do a runner with it and I just didn’t have the energy to even think about chasing him. Luckily he just wanted a closer look! We then spent a considerable amount of time posing for photos with them.

The descent was a lot easier than the climb up but our knees were singing by the time we got to the bus stop. Standing room only on the bus but yet again some sweet young lads gave up their seats for us.

It does take a bit of getting used to having everyone so interested in us. A very old lady on the bus literally stared at me so much I pretended to go to sleep. Because our knowledge of Russian and Kazak is so poor it’s hard to talk to the older people. Luckily the younger ones tend to speak English.

Dinner was at a swanky place 5 minutes walk from our apartment, hence the attraction. We ended up having burgers which was ridiculous as we could have had that anywhere but we also had a bottle of Kazak wine which was very quaffable. Again, the ladies on the table next to us engaged us in conversation and were very keen to hear our thoughts on Kazakhstan. No problems there – we love it!