A riverside walk along the Syr Darya, one of the two great rivers of Central Asia. This river appears in Kazakh folk tales and epic poetry, and walking its banks gives you a sense of the geography that shaped this part of the world — an improbable green corridor threading through vast semidesert.
The promenade itself is pleasant for an evening stroll. From here you can see how the river manages to persist through hundreds of kilometres of sand without drying up, fed by snowmelt from the Tian Shan mountains far to the east. The city has invested in some landscaping along the bank near the city centre. It's nothing fancy, but on a spring evening when the surrounding steppe is blooming with wild tulips, the setting is memorable.