Kok Tobe

There are two ways up and they cost very different amounts. Take the cable car. The minibus is cheaper and runs later, and it is the right answer if you are counting tenge or coming down at one in the morning — but the ride over the rooftops is half of what you came for, and a road is just a road. Prices and hours below are the operator's own, read on 11 September 2026. Their price list and timetable carry no date of their own, so check them again before you go rather than trusting this page's figures on a day that matters.

From the station on Dostyk Avenue, a six-minute ride over the rooftops. 6,000 ₸ one way, 10,000 ₸ return for an adult; 3,000 ₸ and 5,000 ₸ for a child between six and twelve.

The hours are not the same every day, and Tuesday is the one that catches people: Tuesday it does not start until 13:00. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday it runs 10:00 to 23:00, Tuesday 13:00 to 23:00, and Friday to Sunday and holidays 10:00 to midnight.

Cheaper, and nobody mentions it. From Omarova Street it is 2,000 ₸ one way and 3,000 ₸ return; from Dostyk, 3,000 ₸ and 4,000 ₸. It also runs far later than the cable car — 10:00 to 01:00 Monday to Thursday, and to 02:00 from Friday to Sunday.

City buses 95, 99 and 130 go to the Omarova end, but none of them climbs the hill: you change to the minibus there. That routing comes from a travel guide rather than from the operator or the transit authority, so treat the bus numbers as a starting point and check them in your map app.

There is also a walking route up, the Road of Health, from the Omarova side. The park's own notice closed it for a month from 25 May 2026, and I could find nothing dated since that says it reopened — a guide from July describes it as walkable, which is not the same as the park saying so. Do not plan on walking up without checking first.

Observation decks over the city and the mountains, a ferris wheel and other rides, a small zoo, and the restaurants Abay and Inzhu. Entry to the park itself is free — you are paying for the way up and then for whatever you do once you are there.

On the two restaurants I am not going to send you either way. Nothing up here is worth planning a meal around, and nothing up here will ruin your evening: if you have the time and you are hungry while you are standing there, eat. That is the whole of my opinion on it.

There is also a bronze bench with the Beatles on it: John sits playing the guitar, Paul, Ringo and George stand around him. Eduard Kazaryan made it and it went up in 2007, the first monument anywhere to put all four of them in one piece. Speakers play their songs at it around the clock, and you can sit down on the bench yourself, which is what everybody does.

You cannot go up the television tower. It is the landmark the whole hill is known for and it is closed to visitors; you can stand next to it and that is all. Every view you have seen from Kok Tobe was taken from the park's decks, not from the tower.

Go late in the afternoon. Arrive before the sun drops, stay while the lights come on across the grid below, and take the late cable car or the much later minibus back down.

The Dostyk cable car station is a walk from the top of the Soviet modernism trail, and the gorge road to Medeu and Shymbulak starts from the same side of the city — that is the other cable car, the serious one, and it goes to 3,200 metres.