Kazakhstan Travel Guide by Bradt - Explore Central Asia's Hidden Gems | Perfect for Adventure Travel & Cultural Exploration

The Bradt Kazakshstan book is a nice travel guide. I purchased this book from Amazon before going to Astana for a couple weeks in June 2017, during EXPO 2017. It was a useful companion for this English-speaking visitor to the Kazakh and Russian-speaking country. Although Kazakhstan is geographically very large but not highly visited by US/Western Europeans, this book was a great reference and starting point. It covers a lot about culture, history, and cities/regions for more localized travel.Kazakhstan is changing right in front of our eyes. It just had its 25th anniversary of independency. Astana (formerly named Akmola and Tselinograd) is their capital city of less than 20 years but the amount of urban development in the last few years is amazing, which means that anything on paper is going to get out of date quickly. Two examples of attractions not listed in the Bradt guide are the Astana Opera House, a beautiful venue completed in 2013; and the National Museum of Kazakhstan, completed in 2014, which is worth the visit. Of course most travelers will still find the popular sightseeing locations via smartphone and travel websites. I'd recommend pairing the two, but whereas sites will help find your next meal or bed, the book gives a lot of perspective of the culture, history, people, and country.If you're on a one-time short business trip you might consider this book if you have time to do a little bit of sightseeing because Kazakhstan is likely to be different from anywhere you've visited in Europe or East Asia, but you could probably do without it. However, for a longer trip or if you have some flexibility in your schedule or have ability to travel to more than one city, this should be a good guide for you.As of 2017, I'd add a few recommendations:Buy a local SIM card for your phone, which is cheap and helps you with web, carshare apps, maps, etc.. Our visitor deal was 5GB/week for ~$1.20. 4G coverage in Astana was OK and ended up much better than the US SIM cards we brought.Install a good translation app (for Russian, which was pretty universal, and Kazakh, which I used infrequently), and a Cyrillic (Russian alphabet) keyboard to help communicate with the Kazakhs you will meet. You can get by with an offline translate app but the online and speech-transcribed one worked even better. Translation to Kazakh doesn't work as well. Learning the Cyrillic alphabet phonetically is also a big plus. Finally, transliterations Kazakh, Russian, and English are imperfect on paper and web alike so have some patience.Read up on practicalities like travel visas and money conversion. The visa policy has changed for some countries. Though changing US dollars turned out to be easy, the exchange rates (wildly different from when the book was published) and the closed tenge currency mean that a tip in the book like "US dollars should be from notes issued after 2000, and free from tears or blemishes" could save you some time finding a bank that will change your money.Summary:Nice travel guide from a small set of options for English speakers; covers a lot of details.Country/cultural info, plus practical travel tips (money, language, religion, customs, etc.)Food, drink, hotel listings are incomplete.City maps are limited in scope (but to be fair, even web/app maps have thin listings for English speakers).This review is for the September 2015 reprint of November 2011 Second Edition. 15.25 oz / 432 g.