MOTORCYCLE TRAVEL IN Kazakhstan

Riding Charyn Canyon by motorcycle is the most repeated weekend trip among Almaty-based motorcycle travelers, and the first image anyone searching "Kazakhstan motorcycle route" comes across.

The canyon runs 154 km along the Charyn River, with red sandstone walls up to 300 meters deep. The current shape of its most famous stretch, the Valley of Castles, was carved by combined water and wind erosion just about a million years ago, a geological blink of an eye compared to other canyons on the planet.

20 km from the main entrance, a relict forest of Sogdian ash trees survives, considered living remnants of the ice age. Charyn National Park was officially established in 2004, and in 2021 a team of German researchers extracted an unbroken five-million-year climate record from its rock layers.

Linking Kolsai Lakes and Kaindy Lake by motorcycle is, along with Charyn, the other half of the "golden triangle" every motorcycle traveler passing through Almaty sets out to ride.

Kaindy is the more photographed of the two: it formed when the 1911 Kebin earthquake, one of the strongest ever recorded in Central Asia, triggered a limestone landslide that dammed the gorge. Meltwater then covered a forest of Schrenk's spruce, and today its bare white trunks still poke through the surface, more than a century later, like the masts of a sunken fleet, in a lake barely 400 meters long but nearly 30 meters deep.

The first of the three Kolsai Lakes, at 1,818 meters above sea level, is reached on mountain pavement; the dirt spur to Kaindy, on the other hand, demands real traction and solid handling on loose rock.

Reaching the Singing Dune of Altyn-Emel by motorcycle means crossing into the third point of Almaty's golden triangle, already deep in real steppe and desert terrain.

The dune measures 1.5 km long and 120 meters high, and when the wind blows from the west it produces a deep, sustained, organ-like sound that gives it its name; the exact physical cause is still not fully explained. The surrounding park, created in 1996 across 460,000 hectares, is Kazakhstan's largest nature reserve.

Around it, the Aktau and Katutau mountains expose rock formations between 200 and 400 million years old, with layers reaching 300 million years in some sections, a landscape that shifts color through the day and demands constant traction over loose sand for much of the ride.

Crossing the Silk Road from Beyneu to Aktau by motorcycle means entering Kazakhstan through the gate almost every long-distance rider crossing Central Asia toward China or Mongolia uses.

This highway, now signed as KAZ06 (formerly M32), is part of a corridor running over 2,680 km that connects the Russian border to the Chinese one, and for years the Beyneu-Aktau stretch was the one most repeated in trip reports on forums like Horizons Unlimited and ADVrider because of how demanding its surface was, before the Kazakh government completed repaving work in recent years.

The scenery is pure Mangystau desert: flat steppe with no shade, the Ustyurt Plateau rising to the south, the perfect preview of what waits further on at Bozzhyra and Sherkala.

Riding up to Big Almaty Lake by motorcycle is the mountain-curve escape most repeated among the city's own motorcycle clubs, the classic Friday-afternoon ride.

The road climbs 15 km from downtown to an alpine lake 1.6 km long at 2,511 meters above sea level, with depths reaching 40 meters and a turquoise color that shifts through the season with glacial meltwater. The water stays so cold (8-10°C year-round) that swimming is banned: it's the city's main source of drinking water.

It also serves as the gateway to Ile-Alatau National Park and the dirt turn-off toward the Assy Plateau, the route many adventure riders use as an off-road alternative to the paved highway toward Kegen and the Kolsai Lakes.

Reaching Bozzhyra Canyon by motorcycle means riding into Kazakhstan's most Martian landscape, far enough from the Almaty circuit that you can still cross it almost without meeting another traveler.

The road first passes Sherkala, a 332-meter yurt-shaped mountain whose name means "lion's castle" in Persian; its slopes and caves still hold traces of ancient settlements and medieval necropolises from the Mangystau region. Further on, the Torysh Valley (Valley of the Balls) exposes spherical rock concretions scattered across the desert like meteorites.

Bozzhyra itself is a set of white clay cliffs on the Ustyurt Plateau, layered in pink, blue and white by millions of years of erosion, compared again and again to the Grand Canyon, but almost always ridden on 4x4 or enduro bikes, never on pavement.

Reaching Turkestan by motorcycle means touching the spiritual heart of the Silk Road with your own hands: the city has archaeological records dating back to the 4th century and served as capital of the Kazakh Khanate between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Its mausoleum, dedicated to the Sufi philosopher Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, was commissioned by Timur (Tamerlane) in the 1390s over the saint's tomb, and today it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site: the unfinished dome on its main facade was deliberately left that way, standing as a record of Timurid construction techniques.

In 2021 the Organization of Turkic States proclaimed Turkestan the "Spiritual Capital of the Turkic World," and the 160 km highway connecting it to Shymkent is, along with the road to Almaty, one of the best-paved stretches in the entire country.

Riding the road to Medeu and Shymbulak by motorcycle is the fastest way to trade the noise of the capital for high mountain air, gaining nearly 900 meters of elevation over just 25 km of tight switchbacks and flawless pavement.

Medeu, at 1,691 meters, holds the world's highest ice-skating rink, built in the Soviet era and still in use today. A bit further up, the base of the Shymbulak ski resort sits at 2,200 meters, with 4,979-meter Talgar Peak dominating the horizon behind it.

It's the shortest, most accessible curvy road in the country, the one any motorcycle traveler visiting Almaty for the first time rides before working up to the dirt tracks of Assy or Kolsai.

Reaching the ship graveyard of Aralsk by motorcycle means riding, on two wheels, into one of the largest man-made ecological disasters of the 20th century.

The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth-largest lake, covering 68,000 km² in 1960. Soviet irrigation projects that diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers shrank it to just 10% of its original size by 2007. Aralsk, once the region's main fishing port, now sits about 15 km from the nearest shoreline, with rusted ship hulls stranded on sand where water once stood.

It's not all loss: the Kok-Aral Dam, completed in 2005, managed to partially restore the North Aral Sea and brought some life back to local fishing, a route that is, at once, an environmental warning and proof that recovery is possible.

Reaching the Tamgaly Petroglyphs by motorcycle is the closest ancient-history ride to Almaty, just 170 km northwest by road.

The site holds close to 5,000 carvings spread across 48 locations, with the oldest dating back some 3,000 years, to the Bronze Age, made by the peoples who preceded the Saka and Scythian tribes of the steppe. The most recent carvings date to the 18th and 19th centuries, making the site an almost unbroken record of three thousand years of human presence on the same rock.

UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 2004, and although the final approach requires a few kilometers of dirt, it's one of the few routes on this list that can be comfortably done as a day trip, there and back from the city.