Start at the Green Bazaar, and start early — aim to be inside by about nine, when the meat halls are still cold and loud and before the tour groups arrive. If I had one hour in the low city, this is the hour I would protect. The meat gallery sells kazy and shuzhuk, the cured horse sausage that anchors a Kazakh table; the Korean counters heaped with morkovcha and funchoza are the legacy of the Koryo-saram deported here from the Soviet Far East in 1937, and their food is now simply Almaty food. Upstairs the dried fruit and nut sellers will feed you apricots until you buy something. Try kurt, the hard salted curd balls, once. Most visitors try it exactly once.
In late summer, buy apples. Genetic work on the domestic apple points to the wild Malus sieversii of these foothills as its ancestor, and the name Alma-Ata — the city's Soviet-era name, used from 1921 until 1993 — plays on alma, apple. Before that it was Verny, the Tsarist fort and town that the 1911 earthquake largely flattened. The apple story is the rare tourist-board claim that stands up.
The bazaar stands at the Zenkov and Zhibek Zholy crossroads, and Panfilov Park's eastern boundary is Zenkov Street two blocks south: about 350 metres, four or five minutes on foot, no navigation required. The park holds the Ascension Cathedral, Zenkov's cathedral, a tall and ludicrously ornate wooden church painted in sherbet colours. Guides will tell you it is among the tallest timber buildings anywhere; what is not in dispute is that it came through the 1911 earthquake that levelled much of the town around it. On the eastern side of the park, facing Kaldayakov Street, the Memorial of Glory and its eternal flame commemorate the 28 Panfilov Guardsmen. It is worth knowing that a Soviet military prosecutor's investigation in the 1940s concluded the original newspaper account of the episode had been substantially invented. That changes nothing about how the memorial functions locally, and knowing it makes standing there more interesting, not less.
At the park's edge, the Museum of Folk Musical Instruments occupies a wooden building of its own and takes about forty-five minutes: dombras, kobyzes, and recordings that explain why Kazakh music sounds the way it does. It is the right size of museum.
Lunch in a chaikhana on hand-pulled lagman, manty or a samsa from a tandoor. Uyghur and Dungan cooking is one of the real pleasures of this city; ashlyanfu, a cold, sour, chilli-slicked noodle dish, is the thing to order when it is hot.
For the afternoon, pick one museum, not three. The Kasteyev State Museum of Arts is my choice, largely for the applied-art rooms — carpets, saddlery, silverwork — which tell you more about the steppe than another vitrine of potsherds. The Central State Museum near Republic Square is the alternative, with ethnography, a yurt and a replica of the Golden Man. Check opening days before you build a morning around either; museums here typically take a day off early in the week, and the Green Bazaar usually closes one day a week too.
End on the Arbat, the pedestrianised stretch of Zhibek Zholy, and the walking section of Panfilov Street, then ride the Kok Tobe cable car up from Dostyk Avenue near the Palace of the Republic at dusk. Go for the light on the grid and the mountain wall behind it, not for the fairground at the top, which you can safely ignore.
Leave by about half past eight. Scheduled city buses have long run up to Medeu from the eastern side of town, and a taxi takes roughly half an hour if you beat the traffic. Medeu sits at around 1,690 metres: an open-air speed skating rink in a bowl of Tian Shan spruce, the Picea schrenkiana that is the signature tree of this range. By the rink's own account it has hosted a remarkable number of world records, thanks to thin air and hard ice.
Behind it stands the mudflow dam, built by directed explosion in the late 1960s and credited with saving the city from the debris flow of 1973. The staircase up its face runs to roughly 840 steps, and locals run it as a fitness benchmark. Doing it before you get on a lift is optional and character-building.
From Medeu the gondola climbs to the Shymbulak base at about 2,260 metres, and chairlift sections continue to Talgar Pass at roughly 3,200 metres. Allow a couple of hours from the city for the whole ascent, including transfers and queues, and understand what it does to you: from around 800 metres in bed to over three thousand in a morning. Headaches are common, breathlessness is normal, and the sensible response is water, a slow pace at the top and no alcohol the night before. The gondola and the upper chairlift sections are ticketed separately, so budget for the full ride rather than the first stage — and check the current tariff before you go, because it changes. More importantly, confirm the lifts are actually turning: the upper sections close for wind and take maintenance days midweek in the shoulder seasons.
Be off the exposed top by early afternoon. Summer weather here builds cloud through the day and thunderstorms are routine on the pass. If the lifts are shut, walk instead: the Kimasar gorge above Medeu is an easy, pretty valley, and Butakovka to the east has a waterfall at the head of a short trail.
