Some general comments about camping

We did not travel extensively in Kazakhstan. Directly south from the Russia border near Rubtsovsk, through Semipalantinsk and then to Alamaty. A short side trip to Charyn Canyon and back to Almaty and then to the Kyrgyz border and Bishkek. Thus we did not get a wide experience of finding camping places in towns/cities other than Almaty.

Almaty is a large, modern and expensive city. While there we stayed at the Holiday Inn for a few nights (US$300/night) and a spot we found near the local Mercedes dealer. We had GPS coordinates from other travelers but could never reconcile the coordinates with the place they described.

More generally Almaty seemed like a place one could spend a few days just about anywhere that parking was legal. That is also what we were told by locals.

In the countryside one could simply find a lace off the road and stop; just like the trucks.

The Mercedes dealer seemed like a good place to get a Mercedes truck/van serviced/fixed. They had a wide range of vehicles both in for service and for sale when we were there. Unfortunately they did not seem to have much Unimog expertise but thats a bit of a specialty.

Camping log download

The following links will provide downloads of our camping log for Kazakhstan in either GPX or plain text format.


Camping places for Kazakhstan - as a Garmin BaseCamp compatible GPX file

Camping places for Kazakhstan - as a plain text file

Diesel Fuel

Fuel was readily available from modern stations with a price of around 100+ tenge(KZT) per liter. That is pretty cheap at something like 65-70 US cents per liter.

Shipping parcels into Kazakstan

We had a small parcel shipped from Europe to an address in Almaty. The only complexity with this was that we had to go to the Fedex office and fill out some customs paper work before the parcel could be delivered.

Police

We got stopped a number of times by police check points who insiste don pointing out that our tinted windows were not legal in Kazakstan. Do your self a favor and don't have your windows tinted.