Whilst it has a few ancient Silk Road monuments in the south and vast steppe lands to the north, for us at WILD FRONTIERS, the mountains along Kazakhstan’s southern fringes are the real attraction with their icy peaks, clear lakes, swift rivers, and forested valleys– this is not the country recently made famous in the West by inimitable Borat – the Kazakhstan you will visit is pure adventure.
The ninth largest country in the world – it is twice the size of other four former Soviet Central Asian republics put together - Kazakhstan lies at the heart of the Euroasian steppe and at the cross-roads of ancient civilizations. Despite early colonisation by the tsars, the Kazaks remained largely nomadic well into the 20th century – most people being just two or three generations from nomadism as is shown by their wild horseback sports and the lingering custom of bride-stealing.
Group Adventure Tours and Tailor-Made Holidays in Kazakhstan and along the Silk Road.
Kazak is a Turkic word meaning free rider, adventurer, outlaw -just what they were to the settled Uzbeks south of the Syr Darya. They are decended from Jenghiz Khan’s hordes but came under the control of the Uzbeks following the disintegration of the Golden Horde in the 14th century. Internal feud in 1468 split the population and those who remained in the north of the Syr Darya became Kazaks (those who settled further south gave their name to the modern Uzbekistan). By the late 15th century, the Kazaks had established one of the world’s last great nomadic empires that menaced their neighbours and even briefly occupied Samarkand. Fissures between the three great Kazaks hordes– with which Kazaks today still identify – deepened, weakened their ability to resist external threats and their ruin came from the Oryats, a warlike, expansionist Mongolian people. To fend off the Oryats, the Kazaks swore allegiance to Russia in the mid 18th century but this brought them little respite from the oppression and it is estimated that between one and four million Kazaks died in various revolts and famines during the next 100 or so years. Kazakhstan finally threw off the Russian/Soviet yoke in 1991 when it was granted independence.
Whilst our Action Adventure trip to Kazakhstan is not for the faint-hearted it makes an incredible adventure travel destination, providing the intrepid tourist with an adrenalin-filled holiday.
