When you find yourself outside the city, New York State (and New Jersey too) sounds exactly like this.

Waterfalls from the weekend. Finally developed the photos :)

But you can have a blast biking around here. True, you'll inevitably have to carry your bike for part of the way because the climbs are way too steep. But you can still easily do day tours around the nearby villages for 40-50 km.

If you ask me, that's a win: the weather is definitely better, and the sun's even peeking out here and there. The wind is pretty strong though.
PS. I'm not sure how to photograph this place properly. The fields are too wide to fit in the frame to capture how it actually feels in person.

One of Kazakhstan's coolest places: Charyn Canyon. Kazakhs generally don't really care much for visiting spots like this. Right now they're bringing school groups here (and to Singing Dune). They especially like taking kids from rural areas. As for older folks, even those living nearby, a lot of them have never actually been here.

Another name for this dune is the Singing Barkhan. The sand here is incredibly fine, so when it shifts, you hear a quiet, pleasant humming sound. Plus, there's constant wind at the top that keeps changing the direction of the barkhan. The direction can be completely different in the morning versus the evening.

Two mountain ridges meet at one spot, but there's a small gap between them. And it's always windy there. Over time, sand accumulated and formed a huge dune (about 200m at its peak). And it's still growing.

The dune itself gave the park its name: Altyn-Emel — the Golden Saddle. According to legend, Genghis Khan himself came up with the name during a nearby encampment.

This is the only place in the park where tourists are brought by the busload. Although compared to US or European parks, the local crowds are pretty minimal. The park receives only about 15,000 (yes, 15 thousand) tourists per year.

The mountains here are completely sandy. But you can see really well how everything was formed.

By the way, this place used to be an ocean floor. The water left long ago, but the white color is largely due to salt. And there's a ton of quartz here, seriously.

But what makes this national park special is that it's not just steppe. There are lots of rare animals here that are on the red list (gazelles, Przewalski's horses, and snow leopards, among others).

And mountains. Colorful ones and less colorful ones. With snow and without. In some places the elevation is over 4000m. But the area itself sits at roughly 1600-2000 meters above sea level.

Because of this, by the way, it can be really difficult for local residents to relocate, especially older folks: as people age, their bodies get used to the mid-mountain elevation, and a change in altitude can be quite painful.

In dry weather, a huge long column of dust rises behind the car. That's why drivers maintain a distance of several hundred meters on such steppe roads. And if oncoming traffic suddenly appears, they slow down to let the dust settle.

This is what the roads look like in the national park.

Hard to believe, but driving at 100 km/h is actually pretty comfortable. And get this—if you slow down to 40, the road ridges are so intense that you don't want to drive at all. The faster you go, the fewer potholes there are (:

But navigation? That's a total nightmare. They don't give you any maps at the entrance. Roads change all the time: old ones get closed and they put spikes on them (!), but they almost (!!) always block off closed roads with barriers. Some intersections don't have any signs at all. If you don't know where you're going, it's easy to get lost.

The only reassuring thing is that you have to register when you enter and specify your exit time. If you don't come back by that time, they wait another day and then send out a search party.

The endless steppes of Kazakhstan.

The photo really doesn't capture how vast it actually is.

If you were to take a train from Almaty to Moscow, you'd see pretty much the same view the entire way through Kazakhstan. And that's a full day of travel (!)