Big Almaty Lake (day2)

So we slept in and frittered around until we left at 11. We took the carseat with us so that I wouldn’t have to hold on to both the boys all the time… Alex actually insisted on sitting in it most of the way up the mountain though. We drove through the new part of the city… where the new JW Marriot is being finished!
There are a ton of beautiful new glass buildings going up on this side of Almaty! Amazing… I told jerry we might have to move to Almaty… they have tons of work! Construction, you know. We drove through a beautiful round-about where there is an entrance to a huge park… It had a beautiful entrance! Then we drove next to the park toward the edge of town. This side of town is crazy with the residential! Huge houses… one even looks like the Taj Mahal! Goodness!
Tons of construction! Finally we were out of town. We started going up hill… then the tarmac was gone… and there were lots of potholes! We passed yurts and most of them are little restaurants and such! Funny! The road was very curvy and lots of rocks and holes! Basically we were in the mountains! It was breathtaking! It was making us miss Baja actually! The road was like one of the ones in Mexico! It was awesome! We jiggled up the mountain! Some places the road was sooo bad and we had to go so slow! The bridges were funny! You could see where there was 2 layers of wood… one… the grain was going one way and the 2nd layer the grain going the other… then they covered the whole thing over with gravel and dirt… well… there were even potholes on the bridges and you could see through the layers! Yikes… it didn’t look very sturdy!! Jerry got a picture of one a little… Jerry road in the front on the way up so he was supposed to be taking pictures, he was kind of a mess… he would stick the camera out the window… yeah, well most of them are blurry… :) We had to go through a couple checkpoints… one was because it was a park I think and the other was some military… not sure why they were there… whatever… finally we got there! We walked in to the lake and when I reached the top of the little damn… I was literally speechless…. All I could do was breath! Barely! I didn’t want to ever forget what I saw! It was amazing! I took a bunch of pictures of course! I was a crazy person… I think I took about 250 total! Goodness! We walked along the lake… man-made, because they damned it up so that it would supply water down the mountain I guess. So there was a steep bank, made of concrete… but on all sides steep mountains went up! The lake was not that big, but it was beautiful and the water cold! The air was perfect today and the sun was shining! It was soooo nice! It was green all the way around and in the background one snowcapped mountain! BEAUTIFUL!!! We hiked up the side on one of the streams coming into the lake and rested there over looking the lake! Alex was loving it… Anthony was riding on Jerry in the bjorn. He was just hanging out, in his cute little hat… looking around. We put Anthony down on the large rock we were sitting on… he loved that! He could feel the rough rock all he wanted! He loves that you know! We walked around a while. They have some very cool plants with flowers up there. You will see some in the pictures…

All too soon we headed back toward the truck though! We stopped and took a couple family pictures up there using the tripod I hauled all the way… :) One picture was on an over-hanging rock… kind of cool. It was just the best day trip we had taken in Kazakhstan so far!

On the way down the mountain I rode in the front seat and Anthony rode in the carseat! It was a much shorter trip down it seemed!

I forgot to tell about some people we saw on the way up the mountain! They were parked in a spot by the river going down. They had a van and were pulling a trailer piled high with stuff… Sasha said they were camping… we wondered if they had a yurt. Well… on the way back down the mountain we saw them… they had a one tent set up and were working on another… as well as… drum roll please….. a intex pool! After some thought we decided that it was probably as big as ours which is 24 feet across!!! We laughed so hard and we had to take a picture… now that is camping! It was hilarious!!! There were a whole bunch of people there too!!

The whole experience was amazing and we would recommend it to anyone! If you can talk your driver into it! :) Oh my! We came home and we walked to the internet café for dinner and to check and send some emails…

Tomorrow we will have our last meeting at the office, have our embassy appointment at 3 and we are free to go home! In the morning we plan to shop and are hoping to meet up with some friends… we will see, though since we don’t have a phone in our apartment! Annoying!