Astana Hidden Gems: 9 Unusual Things to Do
Astana already gets the postcard treatment: Bayterek’s gold-tinted orb, Norman Foster’s giant tent, a mosque built to hold ten thousand people at once. This guide steps past that loop on purpose. Astana, the purpose-built capital of Kazakhstan on the Ishim River, spent 2019 to 2022 as Nur-Sultan before reverting to its current name by presidential decree; today it runs on the tenge (KZT), not rubles or dollars, and its long-delayed light rail actually opened in May 2026. Underneath the futurist skyline sits a stranger, more interesting second layer: a Soviet-relic right bank, a banya sweating out a minus-30 winter, a Gulag memorial forty minutes away, and a steppe day trip that just got a lot faster. Nine picks below, best attempted in the short, blazing summer window, in a country the US State Department currently rates Level 1, its safest travel tier.
| Essentials | Details |
|---|---|
| Days needed | 2-3 days covers the core plus a couple of these detours; add a day for Burabay |
| Best months | June-August; outside that window the outdoor picks get punishing fast |
| Daily budget | Roughly 15,000-25,000 KZT (about USD 30-50) for a budget-leaning day, more with a banya session or a museum ticket |
| Before you book | Confirm your passport’s current visa-free window before locking in the flight, not just the hotel |
Once these earn a spot on the list, the 2-day , 3-day , 4-day , 5-day , 6-day and 7-day Astana itineraries slot them in alongside the icons, day by day, off the beaten path.
Unusual things to do in Astana beyond the boulevard selfies
These nine skip the standard Nurzhol Boulevard loop, or use pieces of it differently, and focus on what actually makes Astana strange: a fresh-off-the-steppe capital wearing two very different faces depending which side of the river you’re standing on.
- Cross to the pre-2000s right bank and just walk. This was the whole city before 1997, and it still looks like it: squat Soviet-era apartment blocks, older public squares, a version of Astana with none of the left bank’s staged spectacle. It takes an hour or two, not a full day, and the contrast is the actual point, one river, two completely different decades of city-building standing across from each other. A general Astana tour on GetYourGuide sometimes covers this ground, though listings specific to the right bank are thin, so be ready to just wander on your own.
- Skip the mall food court for the Green Bazaar. Astana’s central bazaar is where produce, dried fruit, spices, dairy and meat get sold to people who actually live here, with stalls of kazy (horse sausage) and blocks of dried curd (kurt) sitting next to piles of walnuts and raisins. Bring cash; card machines are rare between stalls, and a little haggling is normal, not rude.
- Book a banya night. A proper Russian and Central Asian steam bathhouse, birch-branch venik treatment and cold plunge included, is a genuine local pastime in Astana, not a tourist add-on, and it is a legitimately smart way to spend a winter evening when it’s minus 25 outside. Basic entry runs a few thousand tenge; the venik whacking costs a bit more.
- Give the ALZHIR memorial a serious half day. About 40km from the city near Akmol village, this was the Akmola Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, the Soviet Union’s largest women’s Gulag camp, operating 1938 to 1953 and holding an estimated 18,000-plus women. The museum and memorial complex, open since 2007, includes a preserved deportation railcar and a set of memorial sculptures. It is sobering, and it should be; give it the same respect you’d give any comparable memorial elsewhere in the former USSR, reachable by taxi or a day tour.
- Order beshbarmak at a local canteen, then try kumis or shubat. Beshbarmak, boiled meat over wide hand-cut noodles eaten partly by hand, is the dish to order somewhere that isn’t a hotel restaurant; kazy and baursak fried dough round out the table. Kumis (fermented mare’s milk) and shubat (fermented camel milk) are lightly alcoholic, genuinely acquired-taste nomadic-heritage drinks worth one glass even if you don’t finish it.
- Find the Golden Man in the National Museum’s gold hall. The original suit of Saka-era gold plate armor came out of a burial mound near Almaty in 1969, but the National Museum of Kazakhstan’s gold hall in Astana holds one of the country’s best public displays of the find and the nomadic elite culture behind it, inside a history and ethnography collection billed as the largest museum in Central Asia. Confirm current admission at visitastana.kz before you go; recent figures put it somewhere in the low thousands of tenge.
- Cycle the Ishim embankment instead of walking it. The riverside promenade splitting the futurist left bank from the older right bank is flat, long and genuinely pleasant in the warm months, with boat rides running alongside it in summer. A bike covers more of it in less time than a walk, if you can track down one of the seasonal rental kiosks along the path.
- Take the new train to Burabay and actually stay the night. Pine forest, lakes and dramatic granite rock formations about 260km north, nicknamed the pearl of Kazakhstan, are now roughly a 2.5 hour ride away on a new electric train, down from the old 3.5 hour rail option. Do it as a long day trip if you must, but an overnight gets you sunrise on the lake instead of a rushed afternoon. Burabay day tours on GetYourGuide handle the logistics if you’d rather not manage the timetable yourself.
- Visit Nur Alem for how strange its afterlife is. The giant glass sphere, the world’s largest spherical building at roughly 80m across, was built as the centerpiece pavilion of EXPO 2017’s Future Energy theme; it now runs as a standalone future-energy museum sitting on what used to be a whole international fairground, with some visitors reporting uneven interior access since the expo wrapped. Check current hours before building a schedule around it, and take a slow look at the empty space around the sphere while you’re there. It’s an entire world’s fair reduced to one building.
Is it Astana or Nur-Sultan?
It’s Astana, not Nur-Sultan. The city carried that name from 1998, briefly became Nur-Sultan in March 2019 to honor outgoing president Nursultan Nazarbayev, then reverted to Astana when a presidential decree took effect on 19 September 2022. Any source still defaulting to Nur-Sultan as the current name is several years out of date.
One genuine wrinkle: the airport is still commonly listed as Nursultan Nazarbayev International Airport in aviation databases even though the city itself reverted, so the NQZ code is the cleaner thing to search when booking flights. And Astana is not Almaty, a separate, older, mountain-backed city about 950km south that used to be the capital until 1997/98; the right-bank contrast above happens entirely within Astana and has nothing to do with Almaty’s own old town.
Getting around Astana’s odd corners
Astana’s light rail, delayed for years, actually opened in May 2026: a driverless, automated line running about 22.4km across 18 stations, connecting the airport to the main districts for roughly 200 KZT a ride, operating approximately 6am to 11pm. It’s genuinely useful for reaching the right bank and back without a taxi. Outside the LRT, Yandex Go is the default ride-hailing app, cheap and far less hassle than street taxis; city buses exist too, but route information leans heavily on Kazakh and Russian. The left-bank boulevard core is walkable in summer; for roughly half the year, taxi or LRT between stops is the smarter move, since standing outside for long stretches in an Astana winter is genuinely risky, not just unpleasant.
What Astana’s weirdness costs, in tenge not rubles
The currency is the Kazakhstani tenge (KZT), a floating currency with no peg to the dollar and nothing to do with Russian rubles. Cards work fine at hotels, restaurants and malls in the capital itself; carry cash for the Green Bazaar, the banya, and day trips to Burabay or ALZHIR, where card machines get unreliable fast. ATMs are common in the center. Tipping around 10% at restaurants is a reasonable, appreciated norm; check the bill first in case a service charge is already added.
Entry rules, safety and the stuff most guides skip
Most Western passports, including US, UK, Canadian, Australian and EU/EEA nationals, get 30 days visa-free per visit, capped at 90 days within any rolling 180-day period. A newer QazETA electronic travel authorization pilot exists for visa-free visitors, but its mandatory-or-optional status was still unsettled at the time of writing, so check the live rules at egov.kz before you book flights. Hotel registration, once a traveler’s own paperwork job, is now largely automatic at entry, with hotels handling the rest behind the scenes.
Kazakhstan currently sits at US State Department Level 1 , Exercise Normal Precautions, its lowest, safest tier; Astana itself is calm, and the January 2022 unrest some older sources reference was concentrated in Almaty and western Kazakhstan, not here. Worth knowing plainly before you go, without a lecture either direction: same-sex activity has been legal since 1998, but same-sex unions aren’t recognized, there are no anti-discrimination protections, and a law restricting public promotion of non-traditional relationships took effect around January 2026. It’s a discretion-required destination rather than a dangerous one for an ordinary sightseeing trip.
Where to stay near Astana’s stranger side
Base yourself in the left-bank government quarter for easy LRT access to most of the icons, or pick something closer to the river if the right-bank wandering and the bazaar are the priority; either way you’re rarely more than a short ride from anything on this list. Check current Astana rates on Booking.com before you commit to a neighborhood, since new construction keeps shifting what counts as well located.
When is the best time to visit Astana?
Summer, specifically June through August, when highs run roughly 25-30C and the right-bank walk, the embankment ride and the Burabay trip all actually work as planned. Winter, December through February, is a genuinely different, harsher trip, with routine cold snaps to -30C or worse and sharp wind off the open steppe, one of the harshest capital-city climates anywhere. It’s a legitimate, specialized trip for anyone who specifically wants the extreme cold and the banya-and-ice-sculpture version of the city, but build a first visit around summer instead.
Is Astana worth a detour if you’ve already done the icons?
Yes, if the standard Bayterek-and-Khan-Shatyr loop left you wanting the version of the city that isn’t built for photographs. The right bank, the bazaar, the banya and ALZHIR all show a different, older, more lived-in Astana sitting a few minutes from the futurist skyline, and Burabay adds a genuine change of scenery once the city itself is covered. It’s not a repeat-visit destination for everyone, but for anyone who found the left bank a little too polished, this is where the actual city shows up. Confirm hours and admission at kazakhstan.travel or visitastana.kz before building a tight day around any single stop, since a handful of these details move around.