Kazakhstan Travel Podcast with Aigerim Serik

society, culture, places, travel, documentary, education · EN-US

Aigerim Serik hosts a podcast about travelling through Kazakhstan the way a resident would: settling in one place, learning it, then moving somewhere connected to it. The country's geography makes that approach necessary. Most of the interior is thinly populated steppe, with continental cold and heat, and people concentrated in urban corridors in the far north and south. Each episode grounds itself in a particular place: Almaty's foothills, Astana's windswept avenues, Shymkent's bazaars, and the Betpak-Dala desert, a dry interior region far from the usual tourist route. The host also follows connections between these places, such as the railways and roads that tie the steppe together. Over a couple of years, the show moves with the seasons. Winter arrives cold and dry across the northern plains; summer brings heat and aridity to the southern oases and deserts. The host returns to earlier stops as they change, and the series builds a slow, accumulated sense of how Kazak