Is this project connected to the park administration?

No. charyn.kz is an independent travel guide. This project is not the official resource of the Charyn State National Natural Park (RSI) and is not affiliated with it or with any government body of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Then why do you have the domain charyn.kz?

The domain expired and was bought at a public auction of released domain names. That is a lawful transaction: the right to a domain name arises from the fact of its registration. We call the site by its address and nowhere claim a connection to the park.

Do you sell tours or tickets?

No. We sell neither tours, nor entrance tickets, nor visiting permits. Park entry is paid only at the checkpoint.

How do you make money?

Through affiliate links to booking services and advertising placements. Affiliate status is disclosed wherever such links appear.

I found a mistake. What should I do?

Write to us. We will check it, correct it and put a new verification date on the page. Being told about an error in the figures is worth more to us than polite silence.

About this project — charyn.kz

charyn.kz is an independent travel guide to the wild places of Kazakhstan. We do not sell tours and we are not connected to the park administration.

charyn.kz is an independent travel guide to the wild places of Kazakhstan. We collect practical information — routes, prices, timetables, seasons — and next to every figure we state the date it was last checked.

This project is not the official resource of the Charyn State National Natural Park (RSI), is not affiliated with it, and is not connected to any government body of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Information on specially protected natural areas is published by the Forestry and Wildlife Committee of the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Kazakhstan.

Why this site exists

Information about wild Kazakhstan online is in poor shape, and equally so in all three languages.

The websites that protected areas run themselves go years without updates or disappear altogether. Foreign travel blogs are written from a single trip five years ago: prices have changed since then, roads have been rebuilt, visitor rules rewritten. Tour agencies release information sparingly, because their job is to sell a package rather than help you get there on your own.

The result is that someone who simply wants a weekend trip to Charyn spends an evening reconciling contradictory figures from a dozen browser tabs. We are building a site that answers their questions the first time.

Illustration Engraving: a naturalist’s field desk by an open window onto steppe and mountains, closed notebooks, pressed flowers, rock samples, a compass, a magnifier and binoculars

Three principles

A date on every figure

Every page with prices, timetables and rules carries a “Verified: month year” mark and a link to the source. When data goes out of date, we flag it rather than leave it hanging.

It sounds dull, but this is exactly where most guides break down. The entry fee to Charyn is pegged to the Monthly Calculation Index and changes automatically every January, which means any article without a stated year is wrong within a few months of publication.

We do not sell tours

We have no tour product of our own. That is why we can write that two people with a car are better off driving themselves than booking an excursion, that July in the canyon is hard going because of the heat, and that a long trail is not worth attempting with small children.

We earn through affiliate links and advertising, and we say so openly. Where a link is an affiliate link, it is marked.

Three languages, three texts

The Kazakh, Russian and English versions are not translations of one article. Readers have different questions: one needs the bus timetable from the regional centre, another the state of the road for their own car, a third whether they need a visa and whether their card will work. What the three versions share is the verified facts.

What you will not find here

Payment for park entry. We neither take nor act as an intermediary for payments for visiting protected areas. Entry is paid only at the checkpoint.
Park documents. There are not and will not be any “procurement”, “tenders” or “management” sections here: that is the business of a state institution, not of an independent publication.
Invented personal experience. If we have not checked something on the ground, we say so.
Generated photographs of real places. A photograph of a place is always a real photograph of that place. People plan a trip by the picture, and slipping them a landscape that does not exist would be dishonest.

Legal status

The domain charyn.kz was acquired at a public auction of released domain names. It had previously been used by the park administration; the registration was not renewed, and the domain was released in the ordinary way.

The right to a domain name arises from the fact of its registration. No automatic link exists between a domain and an institution that once used it, and we claim no such link.

“Charyn” appears throughout this site as the name of a geographic feature: the river, the canyon, the tract. That is descriptive use of a toponym (a place name), not a designation of services.

Feedback

If you have found an inaccuracy, have fresher data or have been there recently, write to us. Especially valuable are:

changed prices and opening hours
the condition of roads and trails
what has actually been built and what is closed
photographs with the date they were taken

We check, make the correction and update the verification date on the page. We use materials sent to us only with the author’s permission and with credit.

→ How we verify data