Hitch Hiking from Astana to Almaty, Kazakhstan
The journey from Astana to Almaty is around 1200km, leading you from the new capital to the old, via Lake Balkhash. There is only one road to take, which makes hitch hiking an easier experience as there is very little route planning, and most cars are heading where you want to go.
This journey took us 3 days and 9 vehicles… here’s our experience.
We got a bus a long way out of Astana, that turned out to be the most expensive bus we’ve ever been on - 1200Tinge! But it dropped us in a great position for catching a ride.
After a quick drone flight we picked up a car within 15 minutes, a very nice young couple who were heading around 150km. The driver worked at Expo 2017, which we had visited that same day, so there was plenty to talk about.
They dropped us just outside a small town, where we walked for a few minutes to an intersection that lead in the right direction for us and waited around 10 minutes before our next ride: a photographer in a very nice 4x4. This driver took us around 50km and gave us so much information about photography business in Kazakhstan and how his story of becoming a successful professional photographer. He actually drove out of the city to drop us off, before returning to his original plans!
The third driver stopped within 15 minutes and we jumped into his new Kamaz military truck. This bumpy ride took us into the night, straight through a huge thunder storm, stopping at 1am to eat and sleep. We slept in the bed of the truck and at 5am got up for breakfast before hitting the road for another 2 hours. He took us around 400km, and explained he had seen us before the photographer picked us up, but had no where to turn around to get us… So he was very happy to find us again!
He left us at a gas station outside Balkhash, where 3 Polish travellers jumped in, explaining they had a problem here with people trying to mug them and steal their things… On this negative note we waited 5 minutes before a car of 3 young Kazakh guys picked us up and took us around 25km to a small village on the edge of Lake Balkhash. We spent here a couple of hours, enjoying the sunshine and the incredibly blue water, before lunch and heading back to the road.
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The rain started and in minutes a driver stopped to take us 3km to the intersection. This big guy was very interested in what we were doing in Kazakhstan and was happy to help us out of the rain.
Here we waited around 30 minutes - our longest wait yet. Watching the rain in the distance and the lake change colour depending if the sun was shining on the water or not. While watching the lake, a car stopped with 2 men who were heading straight to Astana! So we got in with our bags on our laps and drove around 200km, stopping for a speeding ticket and an overturned watermelon truck (to buy a watermelon, of course). We asked them to let us out in the middle of no where because we saw a perfect camping spot.
This lead to the quietest night, washing in the lake, sleeping under the stars and getting up again with sunrise, ready for another day of hitch hiking.
We walked back to the road and didn’t wait long until 2 men stopped in an old Russian truck. They didn’t have space for us in the cab, but we could fit in the bed of the truck with some big gas barrels… So we had a very bumpy but incredibly fun 50km journey with them!
The let us out at a small gas station where the road split and we wait for about an hour before moving from the gas station to the junction. We waited at the junction for another 45 minutes. This wait seemed very long compared to the others, but there were not so many cars passing, maybe 1 every few minutes? But standing in the mid-day sun, with temperatures between 35 and 40 degrees, made this a bit of an uncomfortable wait.
We then got a ride in a big freight truck that was new in 2015. The driver had come all the way from Germany and was really knowledgeable about travel. Him and Reggie didn’t stop talking for the 5 hours it took to travel 250km… The road before Almaty is very bad, so he was driving around 40 or 50mk/h for a big section of this journey.
We were dropped at a perfect pot on the edge of the city to get a couple of buses and make our way to a hostel for the night, before joining our Couch Surfing hosts the next day.
This Vlog shows our time at Expo 2017, and our experience hitch hiking from Astana to Almaty from 4:46
If you liked this post, have a look at our blog post about Hitch Hiking Northern Kazakhstan or follow THIS LINK to see the video.