Why I Started ArnaJol — And What It Took to Get Here

It Started With One Impossible Request

October 2022. A friend of the family needed a guide. One week in Kazakhstan, a list of places that made every tour operator in Almaty go quiet: the petroglyphs of the southeast, the ALZHIR memorial museum outside Astana, Korgalzhyn Nature Reserve, the Botai archaeological settlement in central Kazakhstan, open-pit coal mining at Ekibastuz, the Kumai archaeological complex, Lake Kobeituz, and — the one that ended most conversations before they started — the nuclear test site near Semei.

Not a wish list. A real itinerary, with a real deadline.

No operator could put it together in time. Too many moving parts, too many places off the standard menu, too much logistical groundwork required for the Polygon alone — dosimeter readings, route planning, safety protocols. I put it together in a week. We did the trip. It worked.

I didn't think of it as a business then. It was just a problem I happened to be able to solve.

The Name Means Something

Arna jol — in Kazakh, a natural path. Not a road built over the landscape. A way that already existed, that the land itself made.

That's not an accident of naming. It's the operating principle.

We don't force our way through places. We work with what's there — the terrain, the season, the weather, the pace the landscape sets. We travel light. We leave no trace. The goal isn't to conquer a place or collect it. It's to move through it with enough care that it stays exactly as we found it.

The ultrarunning is part of this. When you've covered enough ground on foot — real ground, steppe and canyon and mountain — you develop a different relationship with landscape than someone who arrives by road and leaves by road. You learn what it costs and what it gives. You stop treating it as a backdrop.

The vegetarianism is part of this too. For me, it's the same logic as the light footprint and the ultrarunning — a personal choice to take less, move lighter, stay consistent with the landscape I'm asking others to respect. It's not a rule I bring to the trip. ArnaJol welcomes everyone regardless of what they eat. What we do get told consistently, and it still surprises me slightly, is that guests who've never thought twice about a meat-free meal find themselves genuinely converted by what comes out of a camp kitchen in the middle of a canyon. Not converted to vegetarianism — just to the idea that it can taste like this.

Four Years of Quiet Proof

Between 2022 and 2026 there was no marketing. No listings, no pitch deck, no strategy. Just requests — word of mouth from people who'd been on trips and told someone else.

What came in during those four years was a reasonable cross-section of everything Kazakhstan can actually offer:

• Petroglyph discovery expeditions into the southeast, tracking ancient carvings that most Kazakhstanis have never seen
• Astrophotography trips to places genuinely dark enough to matter, with side explorations of celestial observation systems dating back two to three thousand years
• Multi-day hikes to mountain lakes that don't appear on tourist maps
• Less-known canyons — swimming in the cold mountain rivers that carved them
• High-elevation summer pastures, the kind of landscape that hasn't changed in centuries
• Bootcamps for people entirely new to the outdoors — teaching them, from scratch, how to be comfortable in the wilderness

None of it was planned as a product range. All of it was requested, assembled, and delivered. The demand shaped the offering, not the other way around.

By April 2026 there was enough of it — enough organic proof, enough feedback from foreign visitors who'd seen parts of Kazakhstan they didn't expect to find — that the question changed. It was no longer can this work? It was why aren't you doing this properly?

So I started doing it properly.

What ArnaJol Actually Is

Born here. Left at 19. For twenty years across the United States, Singapore, and Malaysia I looked for one thing — a local with a genuine connection to their country, someone to show me the places few find and take me on a real adventure. Not a guide with a microphone and a route memorised from a laminated card. Someone who actually knew the country — the unmarked roads, the real history, the places that don't appear in any brochure because nobody thought to put them there.

That person was hard to find. Too slow to arrange, or too expensive, or simply not there.

When I came back to Almaty, I came back with that gap still unresolved. And I started to realise I was standing in it.

So here in Kazakhstan, I built ArnaJol — to be what I'd spent twenty years looking for, and to show you the Kazakhstan less known.

Every group is private — your group, no strangers added. Every itinerary is built around where you actually want to go, not around what's easy to sell. Every trip is guided by someone who has spent years running ultras across this landscape and knows, firsthand, what the steppe looks like at kilometre 60 when the light goes flat — and why it's still worth it.

Kazakhstan Less Known

The places on that 2022 itinerary — the Polygon, Botai, Kobeituz, Korgalzhyn — most people visiting Kazakhstan never hear of them. Most tour operators aren't set up to go there. That's not a criticism; it's just the reality of how the industry is built. Standard routes exist for good reasons.

ArnaJol exists for the other reasons.

Closer to Almaty, the same logic applies — the petroglyphs of Bayan-Zhurek, an overnight in the Temirlik canyon, the alpine quiet of Kolsai, or something bespoke built around where you actually want to go.

If you've already done the Silk Road circuit and you're looking for what comes after, or if you've never been to Central Asia and want to start somewhere most visitors never reach — that's the conversation worth having.

— Anton, Almaty's 2nd best guide