Visiting Burabay National Park

At the northern end of Kazakhstan you’ll find Burabay National Park. The park isn’t especially well known outside the country, so I showed up not really knowing what to expect. Right near the entrance was this bust of someone I couldn’t identify. For all I knew at the time, he could have been a famous person from the region or someone connected with the history of the park.

Deeper inside Burabay I came across this stele as well. One of the challenges of traveling solo through a place where you don’t speak the local language is that you inevitably come across things you never fully understand. Sometimes that makes the trip more interesting, although it also means a few mysteries follow you home.

Burabay sits about 250 kilometers north of Astana and has a completely different landscape from the open plains I had seen farther south. Instead of endless grasslands, this area was filled with evergreen forests, lakes, rocky hills, and much cooler temperatures. The first forest areas I passed looked like younger regrowth, especially along the roads.

Farther along the trails, the forest became denser and had a much greater variety of plants. The scenery reminded me a little of northern forests in North America, although the mosquitoes also reminded me of hiking in Alaska. They were horrible!

Burabay also had plenty of white-barked trees that immediately reminded me of forests in colder parts of North America. I hadn’t really appreciated how far north I was until later looking at Burabay on a map. The cooler temperatures and vegetation definitely made this part of Kazakhstan feel very different from the rest of my trip.

To be honest, I figured I’d be a rare visitor to Burabay and have most of the place to myself. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Some of the scenic areas around the lake had dozens of cars parked along the road, and the more developed parts of the park were surprisingly busy.

There were large families having picnics, people playing sports, and groups simply enjoying the cool spring weather. Farther into the park I found a large open area with a few stands selling food and ice cream. Burabay clearly wasn’t some forgotten wilderness to the locals!

The park is pretty well maintained, with several hiking trails through the woods and some more casual walking paths along the lakes. There were also plenty of organized groups on the trails that looked like school trips or local tours.

Once you leave the easier paths, the terrain gets much rougher. Some of the hillsides are rocky and steep, with exposed roots where rain and runoff have washed away the surrounding soil. Hiking off trail would definitely be more challenging here.

There were also some great scrambling opportunities, and I’m sure plenty of potential rock climbing routes as well. Had I brought my climbing harness, I probably would have spent a lot more time exploring some of these rocky walls. Burabay isn’t a high mountain range, but there’s enough exposed rock to keep things interesting.

I visited in May when daytime temperatures were around the 50s Fahrenheit, or roughly 10°C. At night it actually dropped close to freezing. The overcast skies and colder weather took away some of the color from the scenery, but the lake and surrounding forest were still beautiful.

It was strange to be this far inland and come across a small sandy beach. The lake had several bays and islands, and I could easily imagine this being a popular place in warmer weather for swimming and boating.

The sky itself ended up putting on one of the best shows of the day. I saw the largest sun halo I had ever seen in my life stretching across the clouds above Burabay.

There are also plenty of small rocky islands scattered around the lake. Boats can be rented around the park, and I watched several families pull up to this little island and climb to the top.

These final areas were probably the most scenic parts of the park that I came across. With the forest, lakes, and rocky hills, Burabay had a completely different personality from the Kazakhstan I had experienced farther south. I imagine this place would look especially beautiful in the winter when everything is buried in snow and the lakes freeze over.

This pyramid-shaped mountain was probably the most unusual landmark I saw in the park. When I first spotted it from a distance, I seriously thought I was looking at the remains of some ancient fortress. From far away the rock looked more like a wall built by people than a natural formation. I’ve heard Burabay called the “Switzerland of Kazakhstan,” which might be pushing things a little considering these mountains are tiny compared with the Alps, but the combination of lakes, forests, and rocky peaks definitely makes this one of the more scenic parts of northern Kazakhstan.