On Sunday, 30 August I went back to look for the rock carvings, the petroglyphs as they are called here, at Eshkiolmes where I had been two weeks ago coming back empty handed. Eshkiolmes about 280km north east of Almaty near the city of Taldykorgan. This time I went with an expert guide, Misha, from the archeology department in Almaty. When we eventually got the Eshkiolmes I realized that two weeks back I had only narrowly missed the carvings. I had simply not climbed high enough.
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This week I traveled to Central Kazakhstan to visit the cities of Karaganda and Astana, the capital, for business. It was my first visit to Karaganda while I have previously been to Astana.
I went with a colleague from the office and we started off on Tuesday from Almaty with Air Astana for a two hours twenty minutes flight to Karaganda. It wasn’t exactly a pleasure excursion. Air Astana has the wisdom to put passengers in a Fokker 50 aircraft packed like sardines in seats that barely fit a 12 year old to fly you 900km to your next destination. 380km/h average speed isn’t exactly fast.
Karaganda is one of the major cities of Kazakhstan. It’s the coal and mining capital of the country. Already during the Soviet days it was an important industrial base. And of course it looks like another typical Soviet city from a lay out and architecture standpoint. The Soviets knew how the design the most boring cities. Karaganda does come across as a neat town and definitely not run-down as many other places.
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On Sunday, 16 August I went of to look for rock carvings, petroglyphs as they are called here, at a location called Eshkiolmes about 280km north east of Almaty near the city of Taldykorgan.
This is not a location that has signposts to it. So, I first had to find the GPS coordinates, then look for a suitable route on Google Earth and finally, via few more steps, transfer the coordinates to my Garmin Oregon. However, to my despair I found out a few kilometers before the end point that not the entire route, as I had plotted it, was on the GPS. I learned the hard way that there is a maximum of 250 route points on any route one prepares. Luckily I had made some prints of the Google Earth pictures of the location we were heading too. This was good enough to get us in the right neighborhood. You can find a copy of the actual route on Wikiloc
I had learned about this location from some references in guide books and eventually found out this site is on the “Tentative Lists” of the UNESCO World Heritage List list. So just on the basis of this reference it should be worth a visit. The Eshkiolmes mountain range, a 30 km long western spur of the Dzungar Alatau system on the north of the Koksu river, houses numerous archaeological objects from Late Bronze to Middle Ages. The main group is located in the middle part of the valley: settlements, burials and petroglyphs of Late Bronze and Early Iron epochs belonging to the same cultural complex. The petroglyphs are the most remarkable remains: more than 4000 well preserved engravings spanning from the very beginning of the nomadic society to the Middle Ages.
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Kazakhstan | Hans August 31, 2009 | 
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