One of the best things about using WHS as your travel compass is that it sometimes pushes you to go somewhere that seems inconvenient and involves a subject you have no interest in. And after you complete that visit, you are glad you did it. That was how it went with my June 2024 visit to Saryarka, the WHS of Steppe and Lakes.

The Korgalzhyn Nature Reserve (the most accessible part of Saryarka) superficially has a similar geographical position to the Kazakh capital Astana as Tanbaly WHS has to Kazakhstan's second city Almaty. Both need a full day trip to visit from the big city, with a car (rented or hired with a driver). Korgalzhyn lies only 125km away from Astana, and although it is a secondary road with a speed limit of 80 km/h, we arrived after about 1h45. The outgoing traffic from Astana is nowhere near as busy as in Almaty.  

But while you can roam around on your own in Tanbaly, Korgalzhyn needs a proper local guide and a 4x4 vehicle. The Reserve is crossed by sand roads and tracks only, and we also did a fair bit of off-roading through the steppe grass. The tracks were muddy at times as well – it had rained a lot in the past weeks, and the grass was very high. There were still some flowers, but they mostly bloom here in April/May.

Most foreign visitors here are birders – my guide said that Dutch and Danish were the most common nationalities. While driving from Astana, we also passed a small 4WD bus standing by the side of the road with foreigners around it glued to their binoculars. More birders on their way! The guide tested me out a bit on my bird knowledge, but when I failed to look impressed when we saw a black lark (a regional specialty) he started to focus on mammals and more iconic birds such as flamingoes. I did like the blue-cheeked bee-eater, however.

The numerous lakes of Korgalzhyn (some are salty, others are sweet water) are a breeding ground for Greater flamingos, and we saw dozens, maybe hundreds of them in several lakes. They look mostly white but are pink / orange under their wings which can be seen when they take off. We parked the car and walked up to one of the lakes to observe them more closely.

This first “Flamingo Lake” was still outside the borders of the conservation zone and thus also outside of the core zone of the WHS. Only after an hour or so, we passed a small sign indicating that we entered the "Reserved Zone". Nowhere, by the way, I saw the painted UNESCO inscription sign and park boundary gate as mentioned by Clyde and Solivagant in their reviews – have they disappeared in the 7 years that have passed since their visits, or did we take an ‘alternative’ entry?

The tour was conducted like a safari, so we sat in the car cruising the tracks in the hope of spotting something interesting. We spent most of the 4.5 hours in and around the reserve looking for typical steppe mammals such as the suslik (ground squirrel), the steppe marmot (very fat ones!), and - most notably - the saiga. The Saiga is an antelope with a characteristic floppy nose. The species became almost extinct in the 2010s but has since bounced back massively (so much that the Kazakh government has started a programme to shoot a number of them). It was Critically Endangered when Saryarka was inscribed as a WHS in 2008, but now it falls outside of the Threatened IUCN categories. Saiga are now more regularly seen than before in Korghalzhyn Reserve too, but still, locating one was hard work. At the lakes, there were many horses present and the guide said that the saiga do not like being in their presence. Only at the last place we looked, outside of the reserve and near farmland, I suddenly saw a golden-brownish animal running away from us in the distance - which could only be one species: a saiga!

The saiga are very skittish and they can also run fast (70km/h), so they easily outrun a 4x4 vehicle on a muddy trail. Now and then it stopped to look at us, and at those moments I tried to take pictures with my superzoom. At least you can see from its nose that it’s a saiga (photo bottom right). This individual was a young female, its nose is not as big as that of the male adults and females don’t have horns. Still, I was happy to have seen one. It was also funny to see it move: it runs and then also puts in a few crazy jumps here and there, like a gazelle.