Having visited Turkmenistan & Uzbekistan in 2018, Hamish and I set off on a 3-week tour of the other 3 Stans – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan & Tajikistan.

We flew Pegasus Airlines from Stansted via Istanbul with a 4-hour stopover to arrive in Astana at 5 in the morning (4 hours ahead of UK).

Hotel Traditional whisked us to our room which was ready for sleep catch up and a late breakfast.

Astana is now the capital of Kazakhstan having shifted 1,350km from the largest city of Almaty in 1997. Quite an upheaval for government employees I would imagine.

Astana is a relatively new city constructed on vast steppes, infertile scrub that now surround the city and fill much of the vast country (9th biggest in the world by land mass).

On day 2 we hired a taxi for a few hours to take us around the city highlights.

The Nursultan Mosque is huge (the largest in Central Asia) but rather garish with its underground car park, attached restaurant & wedding hall.

Internally you were bizarrely only allowed to take photos on your phone as Hamish found out when made to delete all his camera shots.

We also visited the other main mosque, the presidential palace, heroes square, the opera house, a shopping mal built in the largest ‘tent’ in the world (Khan Shatyr) the Bayterek Monument (an odd looking tower giving great city views) and other quirky architecture.

We also booked to go to the state circus with front row tickets costing £8 (booked through the excellent Tickets.kz).

Amazing trapeze artists, an amusing trio of unpainted clowns and thankfully the only animals involved were well tended horses.

Amusingly pre-show kids could choose to be hoisted up towards the circus roof or to ride a pony around the arena.

A fun 90 minutes.

Astana can easily be seen in a day or two and we ended up killing time ahead of our overnight train to Almaty.