I will review here Altyn Emel National Park, visited in October 2024 as a tour from Almaty. We combined it with a trip to Tamgaly Petroglyphs. The cost was “outrageous” but we paid ($830 for 3 days in a van) and in the end we were happy with the result. It was a “minor” misunderstanding between the company who arranged it and us and the driver, he wanted to take us to Tamgaly Tas which is on the way to Altyn Emel, we caught it early and he took the Almaty ring road to Tamgaly WHS, then returned to Almaty and drove all the way to the village of Basshi (on Google maps Kalinino). It is 260 km from Almaty and generally an easy drive but in our case it was a day with 580km and we got there in the dark, not pleasant. As usual Google maps messed things a bit because it shows a road up North between Tamgaly Petroglyphs and Basshi, we only did a couple kilometers on it and it was horrible, don’t try. Since I didn’t know that I accepted the plan to see Tamgaly and get to Basshi in the same day and the driver and the tour company surely came up with this plan because they thought we are only going to Tamgaly Tas. 

In Basshi there is the visitor centre to the Altyn Emel park, cost is 800 tenge per person per day plus something extra for the car (200 tenge), go there at 9 am to get the permit. There are two trips to be done in the park, one to Aktau mountains (total 150 km from Basshi, longer with a detour to Kakutau mountains), we spent a full second day here taking a fairly decent hike in the canyon at Aktau mountains, some younger and more energetic people might want to climb the sides of the canyon. Kakutau mountains are different, lava formations. On the way back to our guesthouse in Bacchi we stopped by the 700 old Willow tree, we were impressed, other tourists found it uninteresting, just an old tree. On our third day we went early to the Singing Dune, that is 100 km retur from Basshi, we loved it alone in the morning sun. We also loved the ride early in the day, we saw plenty of gazelles/Saiga antelopes and some Przewalski horses and some birds. Other tourists at the guesthouse combined Aktau with the Singing dune and loved to be there at sunset. Since these two sites are in opposite directions this is a total of about 240 km on unpaved roads that probably shouldn’t be driven in a regular car (they probably don’t even let you get in).

We spent two nights at the Ardak guesthouse in Basshi, the host is phenomenal, food was great, room comfortable with en suite bathroom, we reserved using +7 777 010 0244 on WhatsApp (different than the number listed in google maps. We were back in Almaty at 3 pm, early enough to see a museum before catching our evening flight to Turkistan.