Kolsai Lakes

From Charyn Canyon, we drove another 300km to the Kolsai Lakes National Park, the road mostly holding up. This was good luck, as Nash Mash had a dodgy front tyre by this point. We arrived mid-afternoon, and were met by a very industrious 13-year-old named Kausar, who welcomed us to the eponymous Kausar Guesthouse—she’s the only family member who speaks (some) English. We stayed with the family for four nights, hiking during the day and delighting the guesthouse children with our Uno prowess in the evening.

The lakes in this region were formed during the 1911 earthquake that shook everything as far as Almaty and beyond, and caused rock slides that dammed up several valleys. Since then, the snow melt from the Tien Shan mountains’ has created new glacial lakes, which are gorgeously blue but impossibly cold. We discovered this after a sweaty 3hr hike to reach Kolsai II, where neither of us could manage more than two minutes in the water.

Another highlight was driving up to Kaindy Lake, along the second worst road either of us have ever seen (Namibia still holds the No.1 spot). It’s so bad that many 4x4s without high enough clearance aren't up to the task—tourists have to rely on a fleet of ancient marshrutkas (grey Soviet mini-buses), which shudder their way up the ravine at vomit-inducing speeds. But we believed in Nash Mash, and we had paid for bulletproof car insurance, so we decided to brave it ourselves. And boy was it an adventure! This wasn't just a bumpy road: it was a world-class collection of rocks, occasionally visited by hallucinations of roadhood. It was like driving over a cheese grater. We brought a 6L bottle of drinking water with us; by the time we arrived, it had carbonated itself. And that doesn't even take into account the two ford crossings...

The drive was worth it though, both for the adrenaline rush of driving through two rivers, and for the lake itself. The electric blue waters are punctuated by a skeleton army of dead spruce trees, which were drowned when the valley flooded in 1911.

On our way back, one of the marshrutkas broke down, having flooded its engine with water in one of the crossings. Dan and a strapping Russian pushed it out of the way and we continued on, only for it to come barrelling past, apparently revived, before breaking down before the next river, blocking the road again. We waited and cheered when it coughed back to life, zooming away ahead of us. However, the third time it broke down we were not so patient, and it was a sweet sweet victory to sail past on the uphill and beat it back to the main road. We have truly embraced the Kazakh people's competitive, 'zero sum' approach to driving.

This was a restful stop after a few long driving days, with landscapes more like Canada or Scotland than the desolate Steppes we drove across last week. Tolsya, the matriarch of the guesthouse, pressed some raspberry jam on us as we left, we suspect as thanks for keeping her youngest, Nurai, entertained—or rather, inverted (see photos for more).

We’re now on a sweltering bus, with thankfully opaque windows, braving the Kazakh driving to the border. This wraps up our two-week Kazakh adventure... the next dispatch will come Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.Baca lagi