Trip from Astana to Borovoe
I am not a native speaker, so I'm asking you to forgive my mistakes in advance.
So if you live in Astana, Borovoe is must go place. But I found some difficulties getting an information how to get there and what to see even in Russian.
It is winter, we are 4 friends and we want to spend our Saturday in a nice place.
Ok, first Borovoe has an official website, which is not much helpful since it has a lot of words written and no concrete steps and prices:
http://borovoe.kz/
Aaaaand let me describe shortly my one day trip to Borovoe from Astana. This is just one of the thousands of ways to spend a weekend, so you can just take some info that you might find useful.
The first problem to solve was how to get to Borovoe: should we use our own car or use the train? Since we didn't know where exactly we are going we decided to use the train which goes from Astana train station to Shuchinsk train station in 3 hours. You can buy tickets here:
https://epay.railways.kz
I need to note that there is no English service in the website very sadly, so to buy tickets to Borovoe you need to have a Russian speaking friend or to type Астана and Кокшетау-1 in the corresponding fields. The train that we got was number 807 train and it is very comfortable and warm one leaving in 7:23 a.m. and arriving at Borovoe at 10:24 a.m.
As you probably noticed there are plenty of taxi drivers and we asked one of them to drive us to ski and snowboarding resort Nurtau, as our friends from Astana Adventure Club in Facebook suggested us. He agreed to drive us for 2000 tenge (5.6 USD) and apparently Nurtau is 20 km from Borovoe and we even could bit the price to 1500 tenge.
The ski resort is near a highway and has apartments for 35 000 tenge per night (100 usd) with 3 rooms. But we didn't stay there and immediately rented equipment and ski lift tickets. There are young people working so you might find someone speaking English. So I rented snowboard and a ski lift which cost 6000 tenge for 2 hours (17 USD). They didn't have any helmet left though... and this was sad because...
ski lift looked something like this
which I am not used to. This was so scary to me and I was falling dozens of times before I get to the highest point. I am not a good rider so this resort was one of the challenges to accomplish, but for professionals, this place must be boring a bit, since they have only one line. Here are some photos.
After 2 hours we had snacks, tea and fries in the cafe inside the renting place. Then using Indriver app (Uber alternative) we called a taxi which agreed to drive us from Nurtau to Rixos Borovoe for 1500 tenge. And of course, I forgot my ID in the place where we rented equipment. But nevertheless, we got to Rixos and saw all posh decorations this place have, I guess all rooms have a great view from the window: lake and forest from both sides.
this is a way to Rixos
And then we were just walking around and we walk back from Rixos to Schuchinsk which is a city where Borovoe train station is located. The walk was the nice relaxing therapy in the forest. Here are some photos. We walked around 5 km and then we saw the bus station and get the bus number 1 which goes to the train station.
Then we got around 2 hours until the train, we found sushi restaurant near the train station which looked more like medieval eastern house and I guess the second name of this place is Alladin. Soups are ok, but we didn't like fried food, it was too oily.
And then we get to the same train back to Astana laughing and playing UNO. Great weekend!
And here is a video for those who had the patience to get to the end
https://youtu.be/HUfpI9O0IIg