Almaty to Petropavlovsk

We arrived in Almaty airport at 5:30am or so and after navigating ourselves through immigration (pretty painless) and collecting our bags (which all showed up…yeah!) we headed up to departures to figure out how to get on our domestic flight to Petropavlovsk. Luckily we had someone meeting us to give us our tickets and walk us through the process or we would have been doing a lot of hand waving trying to get the information from the airport staff who for the most part spoke no English.

The Almaty airport isn’t very big and reminds me a lot of some of the airports I’ve been in in India (Chennai for example). It is basic and of course you won’t find a Starbucks or Borders anywhere. What you will find is a currency exchange kiosk (149 Teng to the dollar at the moment), a small store where you can get juice, etc. and a coffee shop which we didn’t bother trying although it looked just fine. There are also the normal tourist kiosks where you can buy locally made gifts and what looked like a small pharmacy and a cell phone store (they weren’t open when we were there).

Domestic flights leave on the opposite end of the terminal from international flights and the process by which you check it was a bit convoluted. First you wait out in the main terminal for your flight to come up on the board. When it comes up, the check in line that you need to use is also listed and you can pass through a ticket check line to get into the actual check-in area. They won’t let you through until your flight comes up so if you have a long layover like we did you need to set up camp in the main terminal.

Once your flight comes up you can make your way to the check in counter that is listed on the board. In our case we were flying SCAT Airlines so that was the counter we needed to find. I was hoping that SCAT actually flew jets but no such luck. The flight to Petropavlovsk was on a 30 seat, Soviet era turbo-prop. So our carry-on luggage needed to be a maximum of 5kg which of course several of the bags exceeded. That meant that we needed to pay some more because we had too much baggage and that needed to be done via another kiosk back at the ticket check line. So back we went to pay and luckily I had converted some cash as their credit card machine was out of order.

The flight was uneventful (thankfully) but long. I had forgotten how much I hate flying turbo-props and three and a half hours on one was not what any of us needed after 30+ hours of travel. But we survived and arrived at a very small, very simple airport in Petropavlovsk.

The terminal was so small that they really didn’t have a luggage carousel. So we headed into the main hall and waited for our bags to be brought out one at a time by a bunch of guys who wanted 100 Teng (about 70 cents) per bag for the service. We met our translator and driver in the terminal and loaded up for a trip to the hotel.