Curated Itinerary
Western Tien-Shan: the Wild Mountains Route
Three valleys, three republics, one celestial range: Aksu-Zhabagly’s tulips, Sary-Chelek’s mirror lake and the Chatkal mountains above Tashkent.
Take this route into Google Maps
From Aksu-Zhabagly Nature Reserve to Chatkal Range, in the order we curated them.
➤ Turn on the navigator in Google MapsIt opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
This itinerary climbs into the Western Tien-Shan, the three-republic World Heritage property of 2016 where the wild ancestors of the apple and walnut still grow as forest. Three anchors, one per country: Aksu-Zhabagly, Central Asia’s oldest reserve, with its tulip meadows and snow-leopard heights; Sary-Chelek’s landslide lake ringed by fruit-and-nut woods; and the Chatkal mountains rising behind Tashkent.
The connecting thread is the range itself as a genetic library — refugium forests whose apples, pears and walnuts seeded the world’s orchards — plus the alpine fauna and petroglyph valleys above them. No road joins the three across the crests; each is its own valley expedition from its own capital.
Arrange reserve permits through local operators, travel in late spring for tulips or September for the walnut harvest, and pair any anchor with the Silk Road cities below — these are the mountains the caravans skirted.
Read the full story of this route in the CHO Magazine →
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The walk and the notes are open to everyone, right here. To take the route with you — the GPX and KML tracks for your phone — you need a CHO account, and a free one is enough. We do not sell these routes: we build them ourselves and give them to the people who read us.
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This route was built with the tools we give operators.
Guides, associations and cultural operators build their own routes here: pick the stops from the archive, add your notes, and the map, the GPX and the printable version come out on their own. Your programme gets a permanent page, your events go on the city pages people read while planning — and if you sell your route as a road-book or a virtual tour, you receive 80% of the price net of tax.
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A word from your host
Time one anchor to a harvest: Sary-Chelek in September, when villages move into the walnut woods, is agritourism older than agriculture. And eat a wild apple where it evolved — small, sharp and the ancestor of every one you have ever bought.
Getting around
Shymkent, Bishkek/Osh and Tashkent serve the three anchors respectively; reserve permits come via local operators, and horses do the real work inside. Late April–May and September are the windows.
Step by step
Aksu-Zhabagly Nature Reserve
Central Asia's oldest nature reserve, protecting the northwestern Tian Shan mountains and the Aksu river valley in southern Kazakhstan.
Sary-Chelek Nature Reserve
A UNESCO Biosphere Reserve spanning nearly 24,000 hectares across alpine Kyrgyzstan, protecting mountain ecosystems at elevations of 1,200–4,247 metres.
Chatkal Range
A 225-kilometre mountain range in the Western Tian Shan, crowned by pointed peaks exceeding 4,500 metres and anchoring the north-west border…
Download for tour navigation
🔒 The walk and the notes are open to everyone on this page. The files to take with you — the stop list as a PDF, and the GPX and KML tracks for your phone — come with a CHO account, and the free one includes them.
Walk it with the navigator on
It opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.