Charyn Canyon National Park

Charyn Canyon National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Charyn Canyon lies two hundred kilometres east of Almaty, three to three and a half hours by road across the steppe towards the Chinese border, and it is the most popular day trip out of Kazakhstan's largest city. The group day tours sold in Almaty leave at seven or eight, reach the canyon around eleven, allow three hours or so to walk down into the Valley of Castles, along its floor to the river and back, and return by evening; the small-group and private versions leave earlier or later to avoid the midday heat and crowd, and the sunset departures, which arrive in mid-afternoon and start home after dark, show the rock at its best colour. The entrance fee to the national park is small and is paid at the barrier.

The day is often extended: two-day tours add the alpine Kolsai lakes and Lake Kaindy, with its drowned spruce trunks standing in turquoise water, sleeping in a guesthouse in the village of Saty, and the three- to five-day loops add the dunes and painted mountains of Altyn-Emel. A few operators take walkers away from the tourist valley to the quieter Black, Moon and Temirlik canyons further along the river system, off-trail and much emptier. At the main site there is a visitor centre, parking on the rim, stairs down, a small eco-park by the river with yurts, bungalows and a café where it is possible to stay the night, and open trucks that, for a fee, save tired visitors the two-kilometre uphill walk back. With a rental car the road is paved all the way.

Visiting Charyn Canyon National Park: what you will see

The national park was created in 2004 and covers about 1,250 square kilometres along the Charyn river, a tributary of the Ili that rises in the Tian Shan and has cut, over some twelve million years, through the red sedimentary rock of a dry basin, a system of canyons about ninety kilometres long and up to 300 metres deep. The comparison with the Grand Canyon that every brochure makes is misleading as to scale and fair as to colour. The part that everyone visits is a dry side gorge, the Valley of Castles, Dolina Zamkov, about three kilometres long and twenty to eighty metres wide, where wind and water have carved the soft red and ochre conglomerate and sandstone into towers, walls, buttresses, balanced rocks and pinnacles to which guides attach names, the Witch's Gorge, the Devil's Gorge;

a track, first a stairway from the rim, leads down through it, flat and easy underfoot, to the river, which runs fast, cold and grey-green between poplars and willows, a startling strip of vegetation in the desert. It is possible to walk the rim as well, with views down into the labyrinth and south to the snow line of the Tian Shan. Further downstream, reached by a different road, the river shelters a grove of Sogdian ash, a relict species surviving from the forests of the Ice Age, some of the trees several hundred years old, which has been protected since 1964 and is one of very few such groves in the world. The surrounding desert steppe has goitered gazelles, argali on the heights, wolves, foxes, tolai hares, and eagles, vultures and saker falcons overhead, and the canyon walls have yielded fossils of mastodons and ancient rhinoceroses. The light at the end of the day, when the rock turns from orange to deep red, is what people remember.

Charyn Canyon National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open daily, with the barrier staffed from early morning to evening. April to June and September to October are the months to go, with mild days and, in spring, a brief green flush and flowers on the steppe; July and August are very hot, 35 to 40 degrees on the shadeless canyon floor at midday, when a sunset tour is much the better choice and two litres of water a head a minimum;

winter is cold, often below minus ten, with a dusting of snow on the red rock, few visitors and sometimes an icy stairway. The river is too fast and cold for swimming. Allow a full day from Almaty. The Kolsai lakes and Kaindy are two hours south, Altyn-Emel three hours north-west, and the Big Almaty lake and Shymbulak are near the city.