Mysterious Tamgaly Tas petroglyphs experience full-day private tour from Almaty

Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest metropolis, is set in the foothills of the Trans-Ili Alatau mountains. It served as the country's capital until 1997 and remains Kazakhstan's trading and cultural hub. Landmarks include the Central State Museum, displaying thousands of historic Kazakh artifacts. In the center is Panfilov Park, home to the bright-yellow towers of Zenkov Cathedral, a tsarist-era Russian Orthodox church.

The city of Nomads or the Nomad fortress on the Ili River in the city of Kapchagai near Almaty is a unique building, built specifically in 2004 for the filming of the cult film “Nomad”. Nomad’s Land sometimes referred to as the City of Nomads, is the abandoned movie set that has turned into a tourist destination on the edge of the Ili River in the Tamgaly Gorge. Originally built for the 2005 movie Nomad, hence the name, but it’s actually been used for several movies.

The Ili is a river situated in Northwestern China and Southeastern Kazakhstan. It flows from the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region to the Almaty Region in Kazakhstan. It is 1,439 kilometres long, 815 kilometres of which is in Kazakhstan.

Series of canyons featuring around 5,000 petroglyphs from the Bronze Age through the Medieval era. Petroglyphs of Tamgaly Tas – "open-air temple" with rock paintings of Tibetan iconography and inscriptions dated to the second half of the XVII century. Cave paintings were created by the Oirat and Tibetan masters with the active participation of Galdan-Huntaydzhi (Galdan-Khan Boshonto). In 1677, Galdana created the first "iconostasis" of the figure of Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara-Shadakshari in the image of a deity with four hands, sitting in a diamond pose on a Lotus throne. In the next 5 years, he and his assistants supplemented the images and Tibetan mantras of the Tamgaly-Tas rock. The Dzungarian ruler Galdan-Boshohtu Khan was a fanatically religious man with a deep knowledge of Buddhist symbolism, Tibetan painting and its techniques, and Tibetan iconographic canons.