The ultimate Saturday morning in Almaty

Get to Medeu early. Drive if you have a car; a taxi is what most visitors end up doing and it is not expensive. Buses 12 and 21 go to the same place, the 21 from the Central Stadium. The page on the gorge has the rest of it, including the fact that the famous rink is a building site until 2027.

You can park at Medeu. What you cannot do is drive on up to Shymbulak — that stretch is restricted to private traffic until 30 November — which is why this morning walks rather than drives from here.

Take the 842 steps above the rink. Everybody stops on them; that is not a fitness test. At the top, keep walking up the road to Gorelnik. With that stretch shut to cars, you are walking a mountain road with no traffic on it, which is the one upside of the closure.

Breakfast or tea at Apa Katya, on the terrace. This is the point of the whole first half: you climb, you sit down at altitude, and the view is doing the work while you eat. The route is written up properly, with the rest of the walking, on the hikes page.

If you would rather not climb before eating, there is a Vanilla at Medeu itself. The breakfasts are steady and cheap and you eat them in mountain air — treat it as the stop that holds you until the city, rather than the meal of the morning. Note that the branch written up on that card is the Konaev one in the centre, not this one — same chain, different room.

Come back into town and go to Voronka on Zheltoksan. They do specials at the weekend that they do not do the rest of the week, which is the whole reason this morning comes back down the mountain instead of staying up it. Coffee with them, and take your time — the window room is built for sitting.

From there the centre does the rest. Go through the skate park at Kurmangazy and Baiseitova, then down to the Nedelka fountain by the opera — the stepped cascade under the iron arches. The opera house behind it went up between 1936 and 1941 and is on the architecture walk, if you want to know what you are looking at.

Aperol at Korkem, which is a concept store with a cafe in it: you drink surrounded by embroidered cushions, felt and folded textiles. It doubles as the best souvenir stop in the centre, so this is where you buy the thing you take home.

Two ways to finish. UnaPasta, which is on the food page with the rest of what this city eats, or Aurora Cafe, where the menu holds no surprises and the summer terrace is a good one — which after a morning of steps and walking is the point rather than a criticism. Mind the pin, though: a search turns up Aurora Space a couple of doors away first, and that is a different place.

This is one morning. The full three days — what to do with the rest of them, in the same order-of-the-day form — is being written. Coming soon.