UACC/NQZ Airport, Kazakhstan

World Heritage Sites Air Adventures – Hammer, Sickle, and Yoke
November 29th, 2025
Flight Log #05 – Tanbaly Suns, Steppe Skies & Midnight Ramen
Guest Co‑Pilot: Olga Kurylenko

Almaty International Airport, UAAA. Dawn is doing that noir thing it loves here—city lights fading under a bruised purple sky, snow on the peaks pretending to be innocent while the ramp smells like kerosene, cold metal, and somebody’s improvised breakfast shawarma. Maunakea sits in black and gold, sulking like a sports car forced to admit it’s technically a utility vehicle, while Cropduster walks his ritual circle, fingers along the fuselage like he’s checking a pulse only he can hear. Marisa appears at the airstairs with two mugs and a look that says she has already planned today’s escape routes, backup escape routes, and three different ways to steal this airplane if the paperwork gets weird.

The coffee is Kazakh‑strong and suspiciously good, the kind that tastes like a life choice, and breakfast is “local fusion”: lagman broth deepened with beef bones, hand‑pulled noodles, chili oil, dill, and a dollop of yogurt that melts across the top like fog over the steppe—someone’s idea of Central Asian ramen and, annoyingly, an excellent one. Kai and Charlie pinwheel around my boots like overexcited stunt doubles trying to improvise their own entrance, while Lani shadows Cropduster with the professional focus of a bodyguard who would absolutely pass any state security audition on the first try. By the time I slide into the right seat, the sun is just breaking over the Tian Shan, Maunakea is humming, and Marisa leans into the cockpit to murmur, “Okay, drama queen, today it’s rock art, saints, mountains, and birds. Try not to narrate us into a no‑fly list.”

We launch west and north, leaving Almaty’s sprawl to flatten into winter‑faded fields until the land kinks into low, dry folds and Tanbaly Gorge cuts a quiet line through the Chu‑Ili mountains. The Petroglyphs of the Archaeological Landscape of Tanbaly sit out here, thousands of carvings chipped into open rock faces—solar‑headed figures, animals, strange costumed beings, and processions scattered across about 48 complexes with some 5,000 images stretching from the Bronze Age into the early 20th century. From above, the gorge reads as a narrow green stitch in brown cloth, but knowing what is on those walls feels like flying over the storyboards of people who never expected an audience in the sky.

I key the intercom. “Imagine carving your whole belief system into stone because you think that’s the most permanent medium available,” I say. “No streaming, no cloud backup, just rock and hope.” Marisa chuckles in the cabin. “So, like, the original editing nightmare—no undo button?” Down below, the sacred core of Tanbaly and its surrounding burial grounds and settlements form a kind of open‑air archive of pastoral life and ritual; up here, Maunakea hums through thin morning air, and for a moment our little turboprop feels like a very temporary annotation over something that has already survived millennia and several empires. Kai presses his nose to the window, fogging the glass, while Charlie sprawls at Marisa’s feet, unimpressed by ancient rock art unless someone confirms it is about snacks.

We swing northwest toward Turkestan, the steppe smoothing out into long, low horizons until one improbable geometry interrupts it: the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, rising in the northeastern quarter of the city like a test shot for an entire architectural era. Built between 1389 and 1405 under Timur, it looms above the older town, a massive Timurid complex of brick, conical domes, and glazed tile, anchored over the burial place of a 12th‑century Sufi poet and mystic whose small original mausoleum attracted pilgrims long before this giant version arrived.

From our altitude, the plan of the building is obvious—huge central hall, radiating chambers, courtyards around it like a composed frame—and the turquoise‑tinted dome catches sun even through thin cloud, throwing back a color that does not belong to the surrounding plain. This mausoleum helped set the pattern for later Timurid monuments, both in scale and in its use of innovative structural techniques and ornamental tilework. On the intercom, Marisa tilts her head toward the window. “Big guy really woke up one morning and said, ‘Let’s build a theological celebrity center with bonus research into load‑bearing brick,’ huh?” I smile. “Well, it worked. He got an architectural prototype, Yasawi got a bigger front door, and now we get a fly‑over cameo.” Lani watches the world through the cockpit doorway, ears pricked, as if personally assessing the defensive potential of 14th‑century walls.

We turn southeast and climb, trading steppe for folds and fractures of rock until the Western Tien‑Shan rises under us, grey and white and unexpectedly green along the valleys. This World Heritage site stretches as a transnational network of 13 protected areas shared between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, part of one of the great mountain ranges of Central Asia. Elevations swing from around 1,100 meters up to roughly 4,000, and that range of height and climate has created a mosaic of habitats sheltering rich biodiversity, from wild fruit and nut forests to alpine meadows and high ridges where snow clings like old secrets.

Maunakea rides a thin layer of turbulence, wings twitching as updrafts nudge us; the dogs sway like professionals, long past caring. Marisa leans into the cockpit again, sunglasses on despite the instrument panel glow. “So this is where the planet does its casting call for mountain backdrops,” she observes. “Nice production value.” I glance out at the ridgelines and think of all the routes hidden in them—shepherd paths, smuggler tracks, border patrols, hikers with expensive boots—layered like subtitles in different languages. Western Tien‑Shan feels like a reminder that some of UNESCO’s list exists not because people built something monumental, but because they managed, for once, not to destroy what was already complicated and alive.

The mountains fall away behind us like a closed book, and we chase the horizon north until the world flattens into Saryarka—Steppe and Lakes of Northern Kazakhstan—where grasslands and water cut a quiet geometry into the map. This site protects two main clusters, the Naurzum State Nature Reserve and the Korgalzhyn State Nature Reserve, together holding extensive temperate steppe and a chain of fresh and salt lakes that function as a major crossroads on the Central Asian flyway. From above, some of the lakes gleam silver, others dark, punched into the pale land like thumbprints; between them, the steppe rolls on and on, broken only by faint tracks and the occasional glint that might be a road or a small settlement.

These wetlands serve as crucial stopover and breeding sites for migratory waterbirds shuttling between Africa, Europe, South Asia, and Siberia, including globally threatened species, while the surrounding steppe offers refuge to a large share of the region’s plant life and animals like the saiga antelope, now critically endangered after poaching and habitat loss. I look down and imagine the invisible highways above and below us—birds using thermals and instinct, antelope following their own routes, our PC‑12 slicing through with GPS and fuel calculations—as if Saryarka is a quiet control center for migrations that never file flight plans. Marisa taps my shoulder and points to Kai, who is watching the landscape with the rapt attention of a creature who fully believes those lakes exist purely for him to swim in later. “Don’t tell him about the antelope,” she whispers. “He’ll start a petition.”

Astana Nursultan Nazarbayev International Airport, UACC, rises out of the dusk like someone scattered models of future cities across the steppe and then left them under glass. We slide into approach behind a departing jet, Maunakea riding the last of the day’s crosswind, and Cropduster puts us down with that trademark landing: assertive, dead‑center, and just smooth enough that everyone pretends it was effortless. The ramp smells like frost, jet fuel, and fast food, the universal perfume of airports; somewhere a ground crew radio crackles, and Kai explodes down the airstairs like he personally owns Kazakhstan.

Inside the terminal fringe, we find exactly what the day has been promising: a Kazakh take on ramen that looks like someone let lamian, lagman, and a Tokyo chef share one kitchen. The broth is built on beef bones and shank, sharpened with garlic and chili, brightened with vinegar, then finished with hand‑pulled noodles, dill, scallions, a soft‑boiled egg, and slices of smoked horse sausage that announce exactly which steppe we landed on. Marisa stares into her bowl and grins. “You realize this is your third ‘ramen but make it local’ in three days, right? At this point it’s a food group.” I sip the broth—it hits smoke, heat, and home in rapid sequence—and shrug. “There are worse legacies than leaving a trail of improvised soups across Eurasia.”

We finish the night on the quiet side of the ramp, Maunakea ticking softly as she cools, dogs curled into their preferred positions: Lani at Cropduster’s heel, Kai at my boots, Charlie half across Marisa’s lap like a badly folded blanket. Above us, the sky is hard and clear, full of routes that birds and airplanes will trace tomorrow, some following the same ancient lines we flew today without ever seeing the petroglyphs, the mausoleum, the mountains, or the lakes that justified them. End log—Almaty International to Astana Nursultan Nazarbayev, Tanbaly’s carved suns, Turkestan’s blue domes, Tien‑Shan’s ridges, Saryarka’s mirrored basins; one aircraft, one improbable squadron, three dogs, and a bowl of steppe ramen convincing all of us, for one more night, that the world is still worth crossing slowly.Read more