Almaty - Day 2

Early start to the day for my canyons excursion. Sergey picked me up at 7am and off we went.

Took over 2 hours to reach beautiful Charyn canyon. Hiked the length of the interior red rock area and also hiked most of the upper rim for panoramic shots. Wow it was hot inside the canyon, over 40C. Super popular and teeming with people

I thought that was awesome until we drove off road to the Moon canyon. Spectacular tight golden rock formations. Continuing off road, really off road, to Stone Shelf which was perhaps even better. We had lunch right there. And deeper off road to two spots Napoleon and Austrian viewpoints. Geez it really didn't seem possible to keep getting better, but it did. Came across a number of camels in our off road venturing and even some on the highway. All these off road locations we were the only souls anywhere.

On return i briefly rested and then made my way to a craft beer place i had researched. Finally some really good beer 🍺 😋 From there went to a traditional kazakh restaurant that Sergey recommended and i hesitantly ordered the traditional horse meat meal. Pretty good but one time deal for me :) Also tried fermented horse milk which is also absolutely never happening again! Yuck!!! It was 100x worse than i was anticipating haha, and my expectations were super low.

Bounced around town to a few other places, trying more kazakh wine in a few nice places, chatting with some locals and eventually calling it a night.Okumaya devam et