I returned after seeing only one.

On paper, this might look like a failed trip. Kazakhstan was supposed to be the beginning: a few days in one place, followed by another border, another city, and another country. I imagined the journey becoming larger each time I moved. Instead, I stayed until my body began asking me to go home.

The strange thing was that, by then, I no longer felt that I had travelled less.

I had begun the journey measuring it through movement. Crossing a border was progress. Reaching another destination meant that the trip was unfolding as planned. Remaining in one country, therefore, initially felt like failing to make the most of my time.

But somewhere along the way, I began measuring the journey differently.

Not by how many places I had entered, but by how many people had stopped being strangers.

The lake I never reached

One of those changes began on my first solo hike.

While trying to reach Titov Lake, I discovered that the route was far more technical than I had understood. I met seven hikers who invited me to join them, and after an unexpected night in the mountains, I returned with one of them, Sasha, despite neither of us speaking the other’s language.

By the time we reached Shymbulak, my friend had reported me missing and emergency services were preparing to search for me.

[Read the full Titov Lake story here.]

But the encounter did not end on the mountain.

I met Sarra, Omir, and Temir again. The people I had first known only as “the group” slowly became individuals, each with a life and history I would never have discovered during a brief encounter.

The restaurant that was not on my itinerary

The following day, I went to a Chinese restaurant.

After spending days surrounded by unfamiliar food, I missed something closer to what I normally ate at home. The restaurant was famous, butI had not marked it on any map.

It was simply somewhere I decided to eat.

There, I met Vlad.

He was Romanian and had travelled to more than forty countries. At first, he was simply another stranger I happened to meet far from both of our homes.

Over time, he became one of my dearest friends.

There is something almost unreasonable about friendship when viewed through the logic of an itinerary. You cannot schedule the moment when a stranger becomes important to you. You cannot reserve it in advance, assign it a location, or estimate how many hours it will require.

The meeting itself may happen in a few minutes.

The friendship does not.

Had I left Kazakhstan according to my original plan, Vlad might have remained a pleasant conversation in a Chinese restaurant. Instead, because I stayed, the encounter was given enough time to continue.

His extensive travels also complicated the lesson I was beginning to form. Travelling widely was not necessarily shallow. Vlad had seen far more countries than I had, yet he was capable of forming genuine connections wherever he went.

The problem was not the number of places.

It was whether we remained anywhere—physically or emotionally—long enough for an encounter to deepen.

Seeing a place through someone else

Then there was Maks, a mutual friend of Ruslan’s.

He introduced me to Big Almaty Lake and showed me the wild fruits growing along the trail. Later, on the way to Terra Glade, he introduced me to his sister and friends.

Terra Glade was one of the most beautiful valleys where I camped. But its beauty did not come from the landscape alone.

I was no longer passing through it as a solitary observer. I was walking with people who knew one another, noticed things I would have overlooked, and moved through the place with a familiarity I did not possess.

A photograph could preserve the shape of the valley. It could capture the light, the grass, and the mountains surrounding us.

But it could not fully preserve the feeling of being included.

The place became more beautiful because I was seeing community within it.

Ruslan welcomed me in another way. He invited me into the life of his family—with his wife and their baby, who has since grown into a very cool little child.

Even before these friendships developed, Kazakhstan had already begun introducing itself to me through strangers—including [the women I met by chance in a cable car]

Being welcomed into someone’s family home felt different from visiting another attraction.

By then, Kazakhstan was no longer a collection of mountains, lakes, and valleys.

It had become Sasha’s snail gesture. Sarra’s photography. Maks showing me fruit beside the trail. Vlad in a Chinese restaurant. Ruslan and his family welcoming me into their home.

The country had acquired faces.

What happens after “wow”?

The day after Titov adventure, I hiked another mountain: Bukreev Peak, this time with mutual friends of Ruslan.

The landscape was different. The route was different. The view was still beautiful.

But it was still a mountain.

This does not mean that mountains are interchangeable, or that Kazakhstan looks like every other place. Each landscape has its own history, ecology, and character.

What I began to notice was that novelty follows a similar emotional pattern.

A new landscape can make us say, “Wow.”

A particularly extraordinary one may make us say, “WOW.”

But even astonishment eventually becomes familiar.

The mountain remains magnificent. We are simply no longer seeing it for the first time.

The people beside us, however, can become more complex the longer we know them.

A landscape may reveal itself immediately. A person rarely does.

Three or four days may be enough to see the architecture of a city, try its food, visit its famous landscapes, and form an impression of the people who live there.

But an impression is not the same as understanding.

Understanding often begins when the first impression stops being sufficient.

It may require meeting someone for a second time, when neither person is performing the politeness of an introduction. It may require hearing about their childhood, family, disappointments, ambitions, and the society that shaped them.

It may require enough time for our initial interpretation of them to be proven wrong.

When we leave quickly, we carry our first impressions with us.

When we stay, those impressions have a chance to fail.

The sentence I had already read

Two years before travelling to Kazakhstan, I had read Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, written almost two thousand years ago.

In Letter 2, he wrote:

“Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.”

At the time, the sentence did not affect me very much.

I understood it grammatically. I may even have agreed with it. But agreement is not always the same as understanding.

What makes the passage more interesting is that Seneca was not primarily writing about tourism. He was warning Lucilius against jumping constantly from one writer to another without remaining with any of them long enough to digest their ideas.

He compared hurried reading to hurried travel: visiting many authors without becoming intimately acquainted with any of them.

There was an irony I could not ignore.

Two years earlier, I had skimmed past Seneca’s warning against skimming.

When I opened the book again after Kazakhstan, the words felt different.

Seneca had not given me a new idea. Instead, he had given language to something the journey had already begun teaching me.

Some ideas enter our minds before our lives have created a place for them.

We can underline them. We can remember them. We can even repeat them to other people. But until experience gives them weight, they remain ideas that belong mostly to the writer.

The second time I encountered Seneca’s sentence, it belonged partly to me.

I had travelled towards a lake and returned with friendships. I had entered a restaurant looking for familiar food and met someone who became dear to me. I had gone towards valleys expecting scenery and discovered that the people around me determined what kind of experience the landscape became.

I was not discovering something new to the world.

I was arriving, through experience, at a truth that was ancient but still new to me.

When my body changed the itinerary

Eventually, my body began asking me to return home.

My mind could still see the countries left on the itinerary. It could calculate the remaining days and imagine the borders I might still cross.

But the body keeps a different kind of record.

It does not care how elegant the itinerary looks or how many destinations remain unchecked. It notices fatigue, discomfort, and the point at which continuing is no longer an act of curiosity but a refusal to listen.

So I went home.

I did not visit all five Central Asian countries. I did not complete the route I had announced to myself. There were cities I did not see, trains I did not board, and borders I did not cross.

Yet I do not think the journey failed.

My original itinerary had assumed that more movement would automatically produce more experience. Kazakhstan taught me that movement is only one kind of experience.

Staying creates another.

Different journeys, different knowledge

I do not think everyone must spend weeks in one country. A short trip can still be joyful, meaningful, and worthwhile. Time, money, health, and responsibility determine how people are able to travel.

Nor do I think travelling widely prevents genuine connection. Vlad, after all, had visited more than forty countries and still became one of my closest friends.

Different ways of travelling simply produce different kinds of knowledge.

Moving quickly can give us range. It introduces us to contrasts, landscapes, food, languages, and ways of living that we might never otherwise encounter.

Remaining gives us revision.

It gives an acquaintance time to become a friend. It allows someone to contradict our first interpretation of them. It lets a beautiful place become something more than scenery.

I still want to visit the rest of Central Asia.

But the next time I create an itinerary, I hope to treat it as a proposal rather than a contract. A journey does not necessarily become better each time another destination is added. Sometimes it becomes deeper when we stop adding destinations at all.

I went to Central Asia intending to count countries.

Instead, I began counting the conversations I would never have had if I had left on time.

My itinerary became smaller.

The journey did not.

I had prepared for cold, hunger, and an unexpected night in the mountains.

What I had not prepared for was the trail disappearing.

This would be my first solo hike. Despite having hiked since I was eight, I had never gone alone before. Instead of attempting it somewhere in Indonesia—a country whose climate, terrain, and language were familiar to me—I had chosen a high-altitude mountain in Kazakhstan, with snow and ice still visible near the peaks.

Still, I believed I was prepared.

I carried an emergency kit, a tarp tent, a down sleeping bag, heat packs, an emergency blanket, and a water-filtering straw. I had downloaded the route, switched on my GPS, and brought two power banks.

More importantly, I had established limits for myself.

Reaching the lake—or any final destination—was never the ultimate goal. The goal was to return safely.

I would walk no more than twelve to fifteen kilometres in one direction: thirty kilometres round trip at most. If the path became too confusing, I would turn back. I had enough food for three days, and I had no intention of letting ambition override what I knew about my own limits.

What unsettled me was not the equipment or the distance.

It was that nobody seemed to know the place I was asking about.

Titov Lake (Озеро Титова) was supposed to lie beyond a camping area called Sunny Valley (Поляна Солнечная). Yet when I reached the upper part of Shymbulak (Шымбұлақ), I could find no sign pointing towards either of them. I asked several people, but the names did not seem familiar to anyone.

All I had was a memory from a YouTube video.

The person in the video, Adriel Ho, appeared to have followed this particular route. I had messaged him beforehand, and he had kindly shared his itinerary with me. He told me that the trail was easy to follow because the path was clear.

What I had forgotten to ask was whether there were any signs.

Apparently, there were none.

I waited near the path for some time, unsure whether taking it would be confidence or carelessness. Then I saw a family: a man walking with his daughter, who looked about ten, and his son, perhaps fourteen.

I asked whether they knew Titov Lake. Before trying to reach the lake, I explained, I wanted to walk towards Sunny Valley.

My limited Russian—and complete lack of Kazakh—made the conversation difficult. Fortunately, the son understood enough English. He pointed towards the path and assured me that I was going in the right direction.

It was already one in the afternoon.

“Three kilometres”

As I continued down the path, I began to meet more people. None of them seemed to be walking towards Sunny Valley, however. They were all returning from somewhere farther along the trail.

Each time someone passed, I greeted them and tried to confirm that I was still heading in the right direction.

Soon, I passed through Talgar Pass, where the ground was carpeted with purple and pink flowers. It was extraordinarily quiet.

Only a short distance behind me—perhaps a hundred metres away—Shymbulak Resort was still crowded with visitors. Yet here, the crowds had vanished. There were only the flowers and the steady white noise of the river.

At one point, the trail divided. I briefly followed the path beside the river before another hiker gestured that I should take the other route.

From Shymbulak, the path had first descended into the valley. Now it began climbing again along the side of the mountain. A grassy slope rose on my right. To my left, the land fell away—not into a frighteningly steep ravine, but into a wide green hollow filled with flowers.

Butterflies drifted across the trail, and bees moved busily between the blossoms. They seemed completely unbothered by my presence. As I walked through them, I could hear their humming all around me.

It felt like a party, and I was merely passing through it.

Although it was already close to two in the afternoon, the temperature did not feel particularly hot, at least compared with hiking in a tropical country. But the air was thinner and much drier than I was accustomed to.

In Indonesia, I could hike eight kilometres on around one and a half litres of water. Here, before I had even walked three kilometres, I had already consumed nearly a litre.

The dry mountain air humbled me quickly.

The trail itself remained clear, just as Adriel had promised. What I did not know was how far it continued. I had never seen a photograph of Sunny Valley, nor did I know exactly how long it should take to reach it.

So whenever I met someone, I asked.

“How much farther?”

The answer was almost always the same.

“Three kilometres. Just follow the path.”

After walking several more kilometres without seeing anything resembling a campsite, I began to suspect that “three kilometres” was less a measurement than a form of encouragement.

Eventually, the flower-covered slopes gave way to a dense forest of tall trees. Then, through the trunks, I noticed smoke rising into the air.

Someone was resting there—and, judging from the smoke, definitely cooking.

Nearly four hours into my hike, I had finally reached a group of people.

“Hi!” I called.

They looked up and greeted me in return.

Then came an even greater surprise: for the first time since I had entered the trail, I had found people who spoke English.

The first thing they asked was where the rest of my team was.

With what I now recognise as a rather naïve smile, I answered, “Oh, I’m hiking alone.”

There were seven of them.

My answer did not impress them. Instead, their expressions immediately changed to concern.

“Where are you going?”

I opened the map on my phone and pointed to the location I had marked.

“There,” I said. “I want to camp there.”

Their concern deepened.

“There is no campsite there.”

For a moment, my stomach dropped. The afternoon was advancing, and the sun had begun disappearing behind the mountains. I was alone, and apparently I had been walking towards the wrong place.

All right, I thought. This must not be the campsite. I should turn around while I still have enough daylight.

Then, to my surprise, they told me that they were also going to Sunny Valley.

They were the first people I had met who actually recognised the name. The problem was not Sunny Valley itself. The point I had marked on my map was simply wrong.

Until then, I had assumed this did not matter very much. The trail was clear, so surely I could continue following it until I reached the campsite.

I was wrong again.

The place where they had stopped to cook was nearly the end of the visible trail. Beyond it, there was no proper path. Reaching Sunny Valley meant navigating through rocks beside the river, using the landscape itself to determine where to go.

Only then did I understand how technical the route really was.

They asked how I had even heard about the place. Sunny Valley was not part of a typical tourist trail. The people who came this far were generally experienced hikers: physically fit, properly equipped, and able to read unfamiliar terrain.

Suddenly, the lack of signs made sense.

In Indonesia, I was accustomed to mountains with registration points, base camps, checkpoints, and entrance fees. Someone usually knew that you had entered the trail.

In Kazakhstan, access felt much freer. But that freedom came with another expectation: you were responsible for understanding the terrain and taking care of yourself.

The group began discussing what to do with me. Eventually, they asked whether I wanted to join them.

Every hiker understands an unwritten rule: when you join someone else’s team, you should not become their burden. They had planned their route, calculated their supplies, and packed food for themselves. I could follow them for safety, but I still needed to provide for my own needs.

I told them that I would walk with them for as long as I could keep up. If I reached my limit, I would turn back.

They assured me that Sunny Valley was no longer very far away.

That was excellent news. Only minutes earlier, I had resigned myself to returning alone. Now, unexpectedly, seven strangers were offering to let me travel with them.

So I joined the group.

Beyond the visible trail

They had been completely right about the route.

Shortly after we left the cooking spot, the path disappeared. We moved instead across uneven rocks beside the river.

Occasionally, I noticed small piles of stones balanced on top of one another. These cairns had been placed by previous hikers to indicate the approximate direction. But they were small and widely spaced. Unless you paid close attention, they were easy to miss.

Then the remaining light disappeared behind the mountains, and the temperature changed almost immediately. A cold breeze moved through the valley. I stopped to add more layers, trying to preserve my body heat.

Darkness came before we reached the campsite.

We were still crossing the rocky area when Sasha—short for Alexander—began to struggle with fatigue. He was one of the oldest members of the group, perhaps in his sixties, and worked as a filmmaker. His backpack carried not only his hiking supplies but also the equipment he needed to document the route.

The group had already travelled a considerable distance as part of a longer project. By then, Sasha was exhausted.

Continuing through the rocks in darkness was becoming unsafe.

Omir, a retired soldier and seemingly the strongest and most experienced person among us, decided to move ahead alone. He would search for somewhere we could stop for the night. If he found a suitable place, he would light a fire so the rest of us could locate him.

“What happens if he doesn’t find one?” I asked.

There were two other possibilities.

Someone could continue to Sunny Valley, where an emergency shelter reportedly had a phone signal, and try to arrange a helicopter rescue.

Otherwise, we would have to spend the night somewhere in the open.

Neither option was reassuring. The ground around us consisted almost entirely of exposed rock, with very few flat or sheltered places. Setting up an ordinary tent would already have been difficult. Setting up my tarp tent, which depended on suitable ground and secure anchor points, would have been even harder.

Eventually, Omir found a place where we could stop.

It was exposed, with little protection from the wind, but under the circumstances, it was good enough. More importantly, there was enough space for us to rest.

As expected, setting up my tarp tent on the rocky ground was difficult. Several people helped me, especially Omir. One of the lightweight pegs bent under the pressure, so he tied the guyline around a large rock instead.

It was not an elegant setup, but the tent stood.

By then, it was around ten at night. I was cold and exhausted, and my only concern was getting inside and falling asleep as quickly as possible.

Sasha, meanwhile, was placed beside the fire. He lay on his back while the others wrapped him in a reflective emergency blanket. The sheet was too short for his tall body, covering him only from around his neck to his feet.

The wind kept lifting its edges, so we placed rocks carefully around the blanket to hold it down.

Once the immediate situation was under control, the group began a serious discussion. They spoke in Kazakh, so I could not understand what was being said. Only Sarra and Temir spoke English comfortably.

Eventually, I asked what they were discussing.

It was about Sasha—and about the project that had brought them onto this route.

They had a deadline. Their journey needed to be completed, documented, and turned into a report. If the whole group abandoned the route and returned, they might not finish the project as planned.

But Sasha was clearly too exhausted to continue.

After listening to the explanation, I interrupted with what seemed like a practical solution.

“Why don’t I go back with Sasha tomorrow morning?”

Everyone looked at me.

“I have GPS,” I continued. “I can follow the exact route we walked today. And honestly, I did not expect the trail to be this technical. My supplies may also become limited if I continue. It might be better for both of us to return.”

To me, it seemed like a way to help.

They had taken me into their group when I was alone and heading towards the wrong place. Now Sasha needed to return, while the others still needed to reach Sunny Valley and complete their project.

Safety had always mattered more to me than reaching a destination. I knew that continuing farther into unfamiliar terrain could push me beyond my limits.

Returning with Sasha appeared to solve both problems: he would not have to go back alone, and the rest of the team could continue towards their goal.

It was, in my mind, a way of giving something back.

Their response was immediate.

“What? No.”

They were almost horrified.

“You have never been here before either.”

My GPS could retrace our general direction, but it could not necessarily show us the safest route across every rock or river passage.

Temir offered a compromise. He would accompany us the following morning until we reached the section where the visible trail began again. Once he knew we were safely on the path, he would turn around and rejoin the others.

Even that did not seem ideal. It would require him to cover a considerable distance in both directions and temporarily separate from the group.

But I understood the principle behind it.

They had come as a team, and a team did not simply leave one of its members behind.

We did not settle every detail that night. But we agreed on one thing: Sasha and I would begin the return journey as early as possible.

Before I went to sleep, someone asked again whether I understood any Russian or Kazakh.

I did not.

Still, everyone seemed to think we would manage. I had a translation app on my phone, after all.

At that point, none of us knew how unreliable that solution would become.

Sasha and I became a team

The sky began to brighten at around three the following morning. By four, I had packed my belongings and was ready to leave.

It was only in the daylight that I could properly see what Omir and the others had constructed the night before.

My tent looked terrible.

Not unsafe, exactly. It was still standing. But with its lines stretched awkwardly towards large rocks and its shape distorted by the uneven ground, it looked less like a tent than something that had survived a minor natural disaster.

Still, it had done its job. I had slept, my equipment was packed, and I was ready to return.

By morning, Sasha’s condition had improved. Temir ultimately decided not to accompany us. He believed I could navigate the route, and Sasha was feeling strong enough to walk.

I made sure my phone was fully charged and checked that I could access the GPS record from the previous day.

Before leaving, I said goodbye to the others. We promised to send them a message as soon as we reached safety. They also said that once everyone had returned, we would meet again for lunch.

Then the group continued towards Sunny Valley, while Sasha and I turned back.

And just like that, we became a team.

There was only one problem.

Sasha did not speak English at all, and I spoke neither Russian nor Kazakh.

The return journey was somehow even funnier than the day before.

We communicated almost entirely through gestures. Thanks to Duolingo, the only Russian words I could recall with confidence were krasivo—beautiful—and moloko—milk.

Neither was particularly useful for navigating a mountain.

Everything else was expressed through pointing, facial expressions, and increasingly elaborate movements of our hands. When neither of us understood, we usually laughed.

It was frustrating, of course, but it also kept the mood light.

I walked in front because I had the GPS record and could retrace the route we had taken. Sasha followed behind as we made our way back across the rocks, searching for the small cairns that marked the direction.

Eventually, we reached the place where we had first met the group. The rocks ended, the trail became visible again, and from there, at least, we only needed to follow it.

Sasha seemed relieved. He gestured his thanks, pointed to himself, and began breathing dramatically.

“Hah. Hah. Hah.”

He was trying to tell me that he became tired easily.

Then he gestured for me to continue without him. He would be all right, he seemed to say. He was moving too slowly.

To make his point, he imitated a snail with his hand.

But by then, I was exhausted too.

I was also a snail.

I shook my head and tried to explain that we were a team. I brought my two hands together, clasping them as though they were holding each other. Then I pointed towards the trail ahead and repeated the gesture.

We would go up together.

Eventually, he understood and agreed.

From then on, we moved mostly through gestures and silence. When Sasha became tired, I stopped. When I became tired, he waited for me.

Without being able to explain much to each other, we established our own rhythm.

We continued like that until the buildings of Shymbulak finally came back into view.

Then my phone found a signal.

It began vibrating almost immediately.

Messages arrived one after another. There were missed calls from Ruslan, my friend in Kazakhstan.

There were also calls from 112, the emergency number.

It was already around five in the afternoon. Sasha and I had been walking for approximately thirteen hours since leaving the campsite at four that morning.

The signal was strong enough to receive messages but not strong enough for me to respond properly. I could see that people were trying to reach me, but I could not tell them I was safe.

Only when we reached the crowded area of Shymbulak could I finally send a message to the group chat with Ruslan and Lyosha.

“Guys, I’m safe.”

Almost immediately, my phone rang.

My friends had reported me missing.

From their perspective, my silence made no sense. Based on my original plan, I should have returned by Saturday morning. They knew I had gone towards Titov Lake, but they did not know that I had met another group, spent the night in the mountains, and then taken thirteen hours to walk back with Sasha.

They had already contacted emergency services. If they still had not heard from me by six that evening, a rescue team was preparing to begin searching.

I had returned with only an hour to spare.

I was deeply grateful that my friends had taken my silence seriously instead of assuming that I had simply lost reception or changed my plans. This time, I was safe. But in a worse version of the story, I really could have been missing—and their decision to raise the alarm might have made all the difference.

I explained what had happened, and Ruslan informed 112 that I had returned safely.

Despite everything, the story had ended well.

Sasha and I continued down to Medeu and caught the bus. Before reaching my stop, I typed a final message into the translation app.

Thank you. I will get off here.

We said goodbye in the same limited language with which we had crossed the mountain: a few translated words, gestures, and expressions that somehow contained more than either of us could properly say.

I also messaged the rest of the hiking group to tell them that we had returned.

But that was not the end of our acquaintance.

Later, I asked Sarra if she wanted to meet. She was close to my age, and during the short time we had spoken, I had thought she seemed remarkably cool. She is also a photographer.

Through her, I began learning more about the seven people I had met by accident.

Among them were a writer and lecturer, a filmmaker, a military veteran, and a botanist. They had arrived on the same trail from lives I would probably never have encountered through sightseeing alone.

I had set out that day looking for Titov Lake.

I never reached it.

Instead, I returned with the beginning of several friendships.

I had landed in Almaty the day before, and almost immediately found myself inside a supermarket, buying supplies. My body was still adjusting after the flight, but my mind had already moved to the mountains.

The next day, I wanted to go to Titov Lake.

I had seen it on YouTube. It looked quiet and beautiful, the kind of place that made me feel I had to see it with my own eyes. But there was very little information about how to get there. I could not find the lake clearly on the map, so I searched through whatever I could find. A few short videos, scattered comments, and fragments of routes from people who had gone before.

It was closer to a collection of clues than a guide.

Still, I knew one thing. I had to go to Medeu first.

From there, cable cars could take people higher into the mountains. So the next morning, I took a bus to the first entry point.

It was a busy Friday. Maybe it was summer vacation, because the place was full of people. Families, friends, couples, groups of visitors. They were looking at flowers, taking photos, sitting in cafés, and watching bees move from one flower to another.

But I noticed something.

Almost no one looked like they were preparing for a long walk.

No one seemed to be carrying a serious backpack. No one looked like they were planning to disappear into the mountains for hours, let alone stay there overnight.

That was the first problem.

I bought the cable car ticket anyway.

In my backpack, I had around eight kilograms of supplies. Food, three liters of water, hiking gear, an ultralight tarp tent, and two trekking poles.

When I entered the cable car, I had to share it with other passengers. The cabin could fit around eight people, and I ended up sitting with a group of women who looked to be in their sixties. They seemed like friends.

Then I became aware of myself through their eyes.

I must have looked strange there. Too much like a tourist, but maybe also not entirely like one. My face, perhaps, looked somewhat familiar to them and unfamiliar at the same time. Close enough to invite curiosity, different enough to raise questions.

One of the women said something rather loudly in Kazakh. I could not understand most of it, but I caught one word: “tourist.”

I think they were trying to figure me out.

For a moment, the air inside the cable car felt quiet in a specific way. It was the quietness of strangers sharing a small space, waiting to see who would speak first.

Then one of them turned to me and asked,

“You tourist?”

I smiled.

“Yes,” I said.

After I said yes, the questions began.

Where are you from? Where are you going? Are you alone?

Their English was limited, and my Kazakh and Russian were almost nonexistent. They spoke Kazakh and Russian so naturally with each other that I could only catch fragments (I did learn from Duolingo but in reality, it’s so hard to catch their phrase in real time). English might have existed as a foreign language subject for some students, but it was not the kind of language that lived around them every day.

Fortunately, before I came to Kazakhstan, a Kazakh friend had told me to download a translation app. It only had Russian translation, but it was enough.

So we talked through an app.

Slowly at first. Then with more confidence. Then with laughter.

They asked where I came from. I told them Indonesia. They seemed surprised that I had flown so far, almost twelve hours, and that I had come alone. To them, I think I looked very young. Maybe too young to be carrying a big backpack into the mountains by myself.

They asked where I was going.

I typed into the translator that I wanted to go to Titov Lake and stay overnight there.

They looked at each other. They did not seem to know the place.

Somehow, that made me smile. I understood it. Not everyone knows every beautiful place in their own country. Even in Indonesia, there are mountains, waterfalls, islands, and small villages that I have never heard of. Beauty can be very close to us and still remain unknown.

They kept saying I was brave.

Maybe they meant it as a compliment. Maybe they were also a little worried. But there was no judgment in their faces. Only curiosity, warmth, and a kind of fondness that appeared very quickly, as if they had decided within a few minutes that I should be taken care of.

They told me their names. One of them was Karligash. They told me where they came from, what they were doing there, and why they had come to the resort that day. I do not remember every detail now, but I remember the feeling clearly. The small cabin of the cable car, the mountains outside, the translation app between us, and the strange happiness of being understood without really sharing a language.

That was one of the most beautiful things.

We could laugh with very few words.

At one point, Karligash spoke into the translator. The phone translated it for me.

“You are beautiful.”

I laughed and typed back, “It is because your beauty is radiating to me.”

When the translation appeared, they read it together and suddenly burst into laughter. Not polite nor small laughter, but the kind that fills a room. The cable car, which had felt slightly awkward only minutes before, became warm. They hugged me. I laughed too, partly because the sentence was silly, partly because they understood the joke, and partly because I felt something open between us.

Before we arrived at the first checkpoint of the resort, they had already started giving me food. Apples. Kazakh snacks. Small things from their bags, offered so naturally that refusing felt almost impossible.

When we reached the station, they invited me to join them at a café. They wanted to sit, drink something, and enjoy the place.

But I was supposed to continue to the mountain.

In my head, I calculated the time. If I stayed too long, I might not reach the lake before dark.

But something in me paused.

I looked at them, and they looked so happy that I was there. I do not know how to explain it except that, in that moment, the plan felt less important than the invitation.

So I followed them.

We walked together around the resort. The wind was strong, and one of the women had difficulty walking, so I gave her one of my trekking poles. I helped them take photos. They posed together, laughing, holding each other’s arms. I had brought my own tripod, so we tried to take a picture with all of us in it.

But the wind was too strong.

The tripod fell.

We laughed again. In the end, we asked a stranger to take the photo for us.

I spent some time with them without really noticing how much time had passed. Then I checked the clock and realized it was already noon.

I told them I had to go.

They understood. They asked where I would go after Almaty, and I told them I would stay in the city for a while before moving to Astana. One of them said she lived there. So we exchanged contacts, and they told me to let them know when I arrived.

Then I left them and continued toward Titov Lake.

A small fast-forward.

I did not know it yet inside the cable car, but this meeting was not going to end in the mountains. It would follow me to another city.

Astana

A few weeks later, I arrived in Astana.

But the story did not restart there. It had continued quietly after the day we met in Almaty.

After I returned from the mountain, Karligash had texted me to ask if I had come back safely. She also sent me a voice note. I did not understand what she said at first. I think it was in Russian, so I sent it to my friend and asked for help.

My friend told me that Karligash was wishing me well. She was happy to have met me, and she hoped everything would go smoothly for me.

It was such a simple message, but it stayed with me.

Later, she asked when I would come to Astana. I told her the date, though at that time it still felt like a plan in the future. Then, when the day finally came, she followed up again.

“Are you going today?”

I told her yes. I was really going that day.

At first, visiting her was not part of my plan. I had already booked an Airbnb in Astana, close to my company’s branch office, because I needed to work the next day. Karligash lived in the northern part of the city, almost an hour away from where I was supposed to stay.

Still, I thought, why not?

So I took a taxi to her place.

When I arrived, she was already waiting for me in front of the gate. The apartment area was dense and busy, with many buildings standing close to each other. I remember stepping out of the car with my bags, still a little unsure whether I was arriving as a guest, a stranger, or something in between.

But she greeted me as if I had always been expected.

She helped me with my things, and together we walked into the apartment complex. Then we went up to her home.

The apartment was busy when I entered.

There was a table full of food. Beshbarmak, the signature dish, sat at the center, surrounded by many small plates and condiments. Everything looked warm, generous, and carefully prepared.

I was happy, of course. But I was also afraid.

I have a small stomach. I do not eat a lot, and suddenly I became nervous that I would disappoint them. There is a strange pressure when someone welcomes you with food. You want to receive it properly. You want to show gratitude, but your stomach has its own limits.

The language barrier was still there, but at home, the signal was better. The translation app worked more smoothly. Not long after, one of Karligash’s nieces came in. She was almost my age, and she spoke good English.

Suddenly, the room became easier.

We did not have to pass every sentence through the phone. We could ask, answer, laugh, and explain things with less waiting in between. They asked about my family, my background, my work, where I came from, and how long I would stay in Kazakhstan.

Then, somewhere in the middle of that conversation, I learned that Karligash was almost the same age as my father.

My father had passed away.

I did not expect that sentence to affect me so much. It was not new information. It was not something I usually cried about in front of people. But sitting there, in a stranger’s apartment in Astana, surrounded by food and women who had welcomed me as if I were already familiar, something inside me softened too quickly.

For a moment, I became quiet.

Then I cried.

Karligash came closer. She did not need a perfect translation to understand. Maybe grief has its own body language. Maybe missing someone is something people can recognize without explanation.

I tried to tell them that it had been a long time since I had been welcomed like that.

I did not know how to say it properly, even with translation. It was not only the food. It was not only the fact that Karligash had checked whether I returned safely from the mountain. It was the feeling of being expected in a place where I was supposed to be a stranger.

I had come to Kazakhstan thinking mostly about mountains, routes, and places I wanted to see. I did not expect to sit in someone’s apartment in Astana, eating beside people I had met by chance in a cable car, trying to explain my family through another person’s translation.

I kept thinking, do I deserve this?

No one in the room made me feel that I did not. The question came from somewhere else. Maybe from the strangeness of receiving something I did not earn. Maybe from the shock of being cared for in a place where I expected only to pass through.

What were the odds of meeting them in that cable car?

Sometimes life feels random until kindness gives it shape.

I thought travel was mostly about movement. A lake, a mountain, a city, a route on a map. But maybe travel is also this: a stranger interrupts your plan, and suddenly the place is no longer only a place.

In that room, I was not only a tourist anymore.

I was a guest.

And for a few hours, in a city far from home, I was received.