Kazakhstan

Almaty didn't feel like the Central Asia I'd pictured. Panfilov Park, right in the middle of the city, does an enormous amount of work in a small footprint — the Ascension Cathedral rises up in yellow, blue and pink, an entirely wooden building built without a single nail, apparently still standing because it flexed rather than cracked in the 1911 earthquake that flattened most of the rest of the city. Around it the park turns solemn fast: an eternal flame and a wall of names for the 28 Panfilov Guardsmen who held the line outside Moscow in 1941, a separate memorial for Aliya and Manshuk, the two Kazakh women who became Heroes of the Soviet Union, and then, almost incongruously, a row of decommissioned tanks and artillery sitting in the open air like a playground. Lunch afterwards was Uzbek in an Almaty restaurant that had somehow assembled a better plov than anything in the countries actually next door.

The real reason to come out this way, though, is what's an hour or two outside the city. Charyn Canyon opens up out of flat steppe with almost no warning — the Valley of Castles, a run of red sandstone spires and ridgelines that every single write-up compares to the Grand Canyon, and for once the comparison holds. Down in the gorge the Ili River cuts a green ribbon through all that rust-coloured rock, and somewhere along the trail a family in traditional Kazakh dress had set up with a golden eagle and a camel-hair coat for photos, which felt less like a tourist trap and more like a genuine point of pride.

Kaindy Lake, further into the Tian Shan foothills, is the strangest of the three. A 1911 earthquake and landslide dammed a gorge and drowned an entire spruce forest; a century later the trunks are still standing, bleached grey and bone-dry above the waterline, sticking straight up out of turquoise water that's cold enough to numb your feet in seconds. It looks like a photograph that's been edited too hard until you're standing right in front of it.