5 legends, 1 cave on the free Club 49 adventure map
What the map holds here
Aralsk and the sea that came backLegend Aralsk was a fishing port. Then the Soviet planners turned the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya out into the desert to grow cotton, and from the 1960s the Aral Sea drained: 68,000 square kilometres in 1960, the third largest lake on... Open it on the map · Read the story
Charyn CanyonLegend The Charyn river has cut 154 km of canyon about 200 km east of Almaty, roughly 80 km of it proper gorge, and one stretch is called the Valley of Castles where erosion has left freestanding red towers with paths between them. It... Open it on the map · Read the story
Denisova Cave, SiberiaCave A limestone cave in the Altai that rewrote human ancestry. In 2008 a finger bone came out of the deposits here and the mitochondrial DNA in it did not match us or Neanderthals: it was a third kind of human, now called Denisovans,... Open it on the map
The Bermuda Triangle’s cousin: the Nazca of KazakhstanLegend In 2007 a Kazakh economist scanning satellite imagery of the northern steppe found enormous geometric earthworks, squares, crosses, rings and a swastika-like figure, some hundreds of metres across, built of low mounds and only... Open it on the map · Read the story
The Tamgaly petroglyphsLegend Tamgaly means marked place, and about 5,000 carvings across 48 separate sites in a gorge 170 km northwest of Almaty is why. They were cut over four distinct epochs, the earliest in the Bronze Age around 3,000 years ago and the... Open it on the map · Read the story
The mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed YasawiLegend Khoja Ahmed Yasawi was born in 1093 and died at Yasi in 1166, and he is the man who made Sufism speak Turkic, and he is revered from the Volga to western China. In 1389 Timur ordered a mausoleum built over the old shrine, partly... Open it on the map · Read the story
Every one of these is sourced
Each entry links to the record it came from. Access rules, permits and land status vary by country and are noted where the source states them, check locally before you go.
