lf you love remoteness, wide open spaces, lunar landscapes, long hypnotic train rides and horse sausage (and who doesn’t?), you’ll be in your element in Kazakhstan. But it’s not all barren steppes-there’s also cosmopolitan Almaty and the spectacular spurs of the Tian Shan and Altay mountains to explore. And if it occasionally seems that the landscape has been bombarded by nuclear explosions, well, that’s because Soviet rocket scientists began using Kazakhstan as a sandpit in the late 1940s.

April to June (spring) and September to November (autumn)

Market-hoping in Almaty, the mercantile city that gathers together Chinese, Uzbek, Russian and Turkish traders Nature-spotting in Almatinsky Nature Reserve for the super-rare leopard and arkhar (big-horned wild sheep) Gazing at the view across Lake Burabay, also seen on the 10 tenge banknote Making the pilgrimage to Kazakhstn’s greatest building, the mausoleum of Kozha Akhmed Yasaui Trekking the mighty Altay mountains, border to both Russia and China

Read The Silk Road: A Hitory by lrene Frank and David Brownstone, a richly illustrated and mapped history of the legendary caravan routes

Listen to pop-folk fusionists Urker’s Made in Kazakhstan, using the string instruments the dombyra and kobyz

Watch Ail G’s mateBorat for cultural clashes when a supposed Kazakhstani visits the UK and US

Eat qazy, the smoked horsemeat sausage sometimes served sliced with cold noodles

Drink shubat, fermented camel’s milk

Asalam aleykum (‘peace be with you’ in Kazakh)

Borat the traveling Kazakhstani TV celebrity; big furry hats; Silk Road traders haggling over a tenge; barren steppes spanning the horizon; Soviet-era service

Ever-changing visa and border rules’ enjoying a truly great local yogurt

The ninth largest country in the world, Kazakhstan lies at the heart of the great Eurasian steppe, the band of grassland stretching from Mongolia to Hungary, which has served for millennia as the highway and grazing ground of nomadic horseback peoples.